The bizarre history of medical transplants from Indian kings to stem cells
ABCWhen Jennifer Sutton visited a London museum in 2007, she came face-to-face with an unlikely object on display: her own heart. Fit for Indian kings Dr Craddock, who is an honorary senior research associate at UCL's division of surgery and a visiting lecturer at Imperial College London, says the history of transplant surgery stretches back millennia. Same thing with a duel … And also syphilis, it was a particularly horrible disease at that time, which would rot the nose off," he says The skin grafting procedure would involve taking the skin of a patient's arm and attaching it to their face, or as Dr Craddock puts it, "you'd end up walking around with your bicep area grafted to your own nose." "In France, you had a doctor called Jean-Baptiste Denys, and he used lamb's blood to 'cure' madness in people, because lambs are innocent and sweet, there's the Lamb of God, and all that sort of stuff," Dr Craddock says. "Those two procedures — the blood typing and operations on blood vessels — they're traditionally seen as the start of transplant surgery," Dr Craddock says.
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