In 1869, Jacques-Louis Reverdin (1842–1929) of Switzerland performed the first skin allograft transplantation with the use of epidermal grafts, otherwise known as split thickness skin grafts. He described this technique during a meeting of the Société Impériale de Chirurgie during the same year and was hailed as a father of skin transplantation due to his work in this area.
The first successful kidney transplant performed in 1955 at the Harvard Medical School. The organ was not rejected because it came from the recipient's identical twin. General organ transplantation became possible in the 1960s with the development of drugs to suppress the rejection process.
In the late 1940s, Peter Medawar, working for the National Institute for Medical Research, performed experiments that for the first time defined the immunology of transplantation and improved the understanding of rejection.
 |
| Christiaan Neethling Barnard |
There was a successful deceased-donor lung transplant into a lung cancer sufferer in June 1963 by James Hardy in Jackson, Mississippi. The patient survived for 18 days before dying of kidney failure. In the seventeen years between 1963 and 1980 forty lung transplantations were attempted worldwide, unfortunately only two of the of the patsies survived for more than a month.
A milestone in organ transplantation was the first heart transplant, performed in Cape Town, South Africa, by Dr. Christiaan Barnard in December 1967.
Organ transplant
