Transplant medicine through the years: a brief timeline

April is National Donate Life month, when people come together to raise awareness about organ donation and encourage others to register themselves as donors.  Donate Life Month is in its 11th year, but organ donation itself dates back much further. In fact, in ancient Greek, Roman and Chinese cultures there are legends of transplants performed by gods and healers, proving that the concept of organ donation is at least thousands of years old. Here’s a quick look at how organ transplantation has progressed over the years:  As early as 800 B.C., Indian healers were believed to be grafting skin—technically, the largest human organ—from one part of the body to another to repair wounds and/or burns In the 1600s, an Italian surgeon reconstructed his patients’ deformed noses and ears using skin from their arms. Sometimes he would use skin from a deceased donor, but when he did so the grafts failed. This is believed to be one of the world’s first reports of transplant rejection. The first attempt at transplanting an organ from a human deceased donor to a living patient was performed by a Ukrainian surgeon in the 1930s, but the organ rejected quickly. In 1954, doctors performed the first-ever kidney transplant, when a living donor gave a kidney to his identical twin at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In 1987, the first successful intestinal transplant was performed in Kiel, Germany. In 1995, the first living donor kidney was removed through laparoscop...
Source: Thrive, Children's Hospital Boston - Category: Pediatrics Authors: Tags: All posts hand transplant heart transplant kidney transplant Liver transplant multivisceral transplant Pediatric Transplant Center (PTC) Source Type: news