How We Learned to Keep Organs Alive Outside the Body: A Horrible History

March 11, 2020

(The Conversation) – Successful organ donation is a fairly recent phenomenon, still only decades old. The first successful kidney transplant was performed by a group of surgeons led by Dr Joseph Murray in Boston in 1954 between the identical Herrick twins – the recipient lived for eight years. But the story does not really begin there. As a concept, transplantation of body parts can be seen as early at the third century, with the Arabian physicians Cosmos and Damien depicted in several famous paintings “successfully” transplanting an entire leg.