Abstract
Face transplants have attracted global media and public attention since the 1990s. The first recipient, Isabelle Dinoire, found herself at the centre of a dramatic episode of surgical innovation after her transplant was announced in November 2005. Subsequently 47 transplants have been conducted worldwide (including two retransplants) up to August 2020, and these have been accompanied by extensive news coverage. Hundreds of papers on the medical, physical, psychological, and ethical implications of the procedure have been published in the scientific literature, disproportionate to the incidence of the procedure. Face transplants have also featured in films, television, and fiction, indicating an appetite for interrogating the social and interpersonal implications of facial difference. However, the history of facial transplantation has largely been unexplored.This article provides the first international history of the global development and implementation of facial transplantation. Using published medical literature, media coverage, and oral history interviews with key participants as source material, it situates the experimental transplant in national, institutional, and professional contexts. It argues that charting the history of face transplants over a 30 year period from initial discussions in 1991 to the present provides a valuable case study through which to consider surgical cultures and discourses of medical innovation in the twenty-first century.
Highlights
Face transplants have been relatively neglected in the histories of medicine and surgery.[1]
Most approaches to face transplants are concerned with the evolution of skill, recorded clinical outcomes, and future research direction, rather than these broad themes, there is a growing and important body of sociological and philosophical work that sits alongside clinically-informed psycho-social investigation.[2]
An international history helps to understand the specific circumstances of the emergence of face transplants in surgical practice, and offers a case study of how personal and institutional ambition, social structures, and media intervention influence biomedical innovations
Summary
Face transplants have been relatively neglected in the histories of medicine and surgery.[1]. This article is the first to provide an international overview of nearly thirty years of the development and practice of facial transplantation, and it does so primarily through existing documentary sources, supplemented by oral history interviews It sets out the historical evolution of face transplants, establishing key milestones and themes and focusing on their emergence as an innovation in the treatment of patients with severe facial differences. Oral and written testimonies collected from surgical teams, recipients, and other stakeholders supplement these sources The latter are used only where the documentary is lacking; they will form the basis of future publications on specific episodes and aspects of face transplant history. In a third of cases, recipients have been anonymous, as in Finland, France, Belgium, and Russia, and two examples of transplant in the USA In these instances, we are entirely dependent on published biomedical information, presented from the point of view of the surgical team. “An Open Proposal for Clinical Composite Tissue Allotransplantation,” Transplantation Proceedings 30 (1998): 2692–2696
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