Spare Parts: The Story of Medicine Through the History of Transplant Surgery

The kidney bloomed, going from a miserable grey to many shades of vital red as blood rushed through its newly connected vessels. An organ that could seconds ago have been mistaken for discarded offal was now filled with life, resurrected and visibly claimed by a new body. This was my first time watching a kidney transplant.

I’d met the kind-eyed patient twenty minutes before he went under and watched as three scrubbed-up figures draped his body with green sheets. He disappeared under these by degrees like the Cheshire Cat fading into the landscape. But instead of a smile, we were left with a disembodied abdomen. As anonymous figures placed the last of the drapes, an auxiliary burst in with a trolley, pushing it up against the wall between a switched-off respirator and a rack of gleaming metal instruments. It was the donor kidney, lying on a bed of ice, monochrome and well trimmed with fat. Much like its intended recipient under the drapes, its life had been suspended. It resembled a calf’s kidney past its sell-by date – an impression at odds with its true value. The desperately ill Mr Bhatti had received it as a gift from his brother, who was now recovering on a ward elsewhere in the hospital.

The two surgeons and their assistants stood either side of the abdomen, absorbed in the business of making their way through layers of skin, fat and muscle. Surgeons prefer diathermy for this job nowadays, burning rather than slicing the parts asunder. There is less bleeding this way but, until they break through into the cavity, the scorched flesh fills the operating theatre with the aroma of a Sunday barbecue. Once they’d finished severing the final bits of sinew, the pace slowed as the surgical team prepared the inner landscape of the abdomen, identifying, teasing out and labelling arteries, veins and the ureter. During these hours of intense concentration, my attention was drawn to the ‘new’ organ lying almost forlornly on its trolley. As time went by, blood leached out of it, its bed of ice slowly reddening.

I’d half expected the insistent beep of a heart monitor and steady hiss of a respirator to fill the room with urgency, but the machines keeping Mr Bhatti alive were silent. Crocs shuffled on the polished floor as one of the surgeons made his way over to the kidney and lifted it from its bed. He brushed away the flakes of red ice with the back of a gloved finger. Holding it aloft and cupping it in his hands, he then brought it to the operating table, where four more hands were ready to receive and stitch it in. A pause. The lead surgeon invited me up to the table to peer inside the cavity, hands behind my back so I wouldn’t touch anything. Amongst the red anatomy, this lifeless grey mass looked diminished, limp and out of place. Three vessels connected it to the rest of the body, with tiny clamps temporarily stopping the flows of blood and urine. Before my eyes, the surgeon removed these devices and in a matter of seconds the kidney turned from grey to pink, then almost red. It seemed as if life itself had cascaded from one man’s body into another’s.

Everything about this experience suggested that transplantation was a decidedly modern concern. The theatre was crowded with complex machines, sophisticated instruments and digital displays. Chemical smells accompanied the aroma of burning human flesh. The procedure was a sterile, well-choreographed affair. But transplant surgery is far from an exclusively modern phenomenon, with a surprisingly long and rich history that stretches back as far as the Pyramids.

This story begins with the seemingly unremarkable skin graft – the first operation to move a body part from one place to another. Skin grafts would later become integral to working out the biological mechanism for tissue rejection, but they also are ancient transplants in their own right. The earliest reference to this kind of transfer was a skin-graft technique recorded in ancient India, mentioned in the Sushruta Samhita. This sacred book – an Ayurvedic text from the sixth century BC that also instructs surgeons on how to perform cataract surgery and what would later be called a caesarean section – explains how to take the skin from a person’s forehead and shape it into a replacement for a lost nose. It’s the earliest technical description of a transplant, and since the Samhita is a record of the surgery its writers considered to be already traditional, the technique itself is likely to be far older. There’s a note at the end of the description, too, hinting at its pedigree: only those who could master skin grafting were considered sufficiently skilled to treat a king.

Although surgeons almost certainly performed rudimentary skin grafts for millennia, records of any transplants are sketchy to non-existent before the sixteenth century. But long before this, they featured in myths. Some of these provide an insight into the continued relevance and cultural significance of transplants, and would even come to influence the way many people viewed real-life transplant surgery in the centuries to come. In 1680, for instance, Chinese writer Pu Songling recorded the story ‘Judge Lu’, which follows the blossoming friendship between a brave but stupid man called Zhu Erh-Tan and the eponymous judge of the underworld. One day Zhu’s friends convinced him to steal a likeness of the judge from the local temple. He got drunk, tottered off to the temple and stumbled back with the judge’s full-size image, complete with green face and red beard. Before returning it, the drunken Zhu slurred an invitation for Judge Lu to join him for a glass of wine. No response. But the next night, there was a knock at his door. Zhu opened it to find the judge, risen from the underworld, standing before him. He immediately apologized for taking liberties with his image, fully expecting to lose his head for his insolence. Laughing off the misunderstanding, the judge reassured Zhu he’d come only to take him up on his offer of a drink.

After this, the odd pair got together every few days and became drinking companions. One day, Zhu went off to sleep, leaving the judge to drink alone. From deep in his slumber Zhu felt a stabbing pain in his chest and woke to find the judge sitting at the edge of his bed. His friend’s hands were immersed in his chest, his fingers prodding around to find his heart. Though Zhu was terrified, Lu meant no harm. He was in fact performing an innocent heart transplant. Knowing his friend was stupid, and feeling sorry for him, he’d brought him a gift from the netherworld: a new heart – a clever one to replace the old stupid one, which he slapped onto the table as he tugged it out of Zhu’s chest. Thanks to this new heart, Zhu was no longer stupid, and he became a great writer.

But the story doesn’t end there. Zhu was naturally thankful for his transplant and asked whether the judge might similarly help his wife with her problem. Her figure was ‘not bad’, Zhu explained, but her face was ghastly. Might it be possible to switch her ugly head for a pretty one? Such a transplant would not threaten his wife’s personality; the change would be merely cosmetic (in China at that time the ‘person’ supposedly resided in the heart – hence Zhu’s need for a new heart to cure his stupidity). The judge agreed and went off to wherever he got his body parts in the nether-world, picked out the most beautiful head he could find and returned with it tucked under his arm.

Kneeling at Zhu’s wife’s bedside, Lu gave Zhu the new head to hold while he drew a steel blade from his boot. The judge cut through the woman’s neck as she slept. Her head fell behind her pillow and the judge suggested Zhu get rid of it as he took the pretty replacement from his arms. To complete the transplant, he lined the head up to the neck and pressed it down to make it stick. When Zhu’s wife woke, she felt a strange sensation around her neck. Fingering it while looking in the mirror, she was surprised to find a red seam and an unfamiliar face.¹

Spare Parts tells the story of transplants from the sixteenth century onwards. The sixteenth century marks a time both when myths about transplantation were openly ridiculed and real-life transplants re-emerged in Italy. In his novel Pantagruel, the French writer and doctor François Rabelais lampooned mystical transplant stories with one of his own creation. He tells the story of Episthemon, who was found dead with his bloody head between his arms. The surgeon, Panurge, said ‘weep not one drop more, for he being yet all hot, I will make him as sound as ever he was’. And, with that, he grabbed the bloody head and stuffed his codpiece into its mouth – giving the pseudo medical explanation ‘that the air might not enter into it’ – while he cleaned the neck with white wine, then lined up the head and sewed it on. Episthemon started to breathe again, ‘opened his eyes, yawned, sneezed, and afterwards let out a great fart’.²

When skin grafting began in Renaissance Italy in the form of nose jobs, it seemed to have lost the regal status it had enjoyed in ancient India. In Italy, skin grafting had evolved as a peasant’s operation, linked culturally and technically to the farmer’s procedure of plant grafting, and the few surgeons who performed it kept their techniques secret. An indiscreet renegade surgeon, popular with the masses, would soon change this and skin grafts would become more widely practised by the end of the sixteenth century, but to begin with the medical establishment had no concept of surgical transplantation. Even Andreas Vesalius, the most famous and well-respected anatomist of the time, thought replacement noses were crafted from muscles (which would have been impossible).

Only a few decades after the re-emergence of skin grafting, and after a great deal of experimentation, the English physician William Harvey came to the conclusion that the heart behaves like a pump, forcing the blood around the body in a circuit. It took only a few short decades more for doctors and scientists in England and France to use this idea to pioneer another kind of transplant: the blood transfusion. By accepting the theory of circulation, these early pioneers attempted to connect two bodies as if they were coupling machines. Thanks to some persistent, old-world medical ideas, these early experiments were informed by myths and legends and included transfusions between animals and humans. Though these were ultimately unsuccessful (at least by our standards), blood transfusions would – like skin grafts – eventually become essential to the development of organ transplantation by contributing to our understanding of the mechanisms that make bodies compatible or incompatible with one another. And it was in these early modern days of the seventeenth century that scientists started to form the first notion of blood types.

The idea that the body was constructed of ‘parts’ suggested that all kinds of compatibilities might exist, and in the eighteenth century this sparked the first market in body parts for transplantation. As consumer culture gathered momentum, dentists went out hunting for teeth, extracting them from corpses, buying them by the barrel from battlefields (‘Waterloo Teeth’). They also cajoled them from poor children to transplant directly into the mouths of the rich. And by the nineteenth century, the physiological mechanism that supposedly made the tooth transplant work had reignited hopes of successful blood transfusions – between two humans this time. It was in these dark years of Regency London that transplantation first found a clear, recognizable purpose: from here on, transplants would (mostly) be carried out to save human lives.

Even when it finally became conceivable to transplant internal organs in the very first years of the twentieth century, there were more surprises. The technique surgeons use to stitch organs into bodies today was informed by the unacknowledged work of the seamstress and lacemaker Marie-Anne Leroudier. Later in the century Willem Kolff, a Dutch doctor and inventor, created an artificial kidney from a tangle of sausage skins, an enamel bath and parts scavenged from shot-down German aircraft. His later machines that bypassed the heart and lungs would also make it possible for people like Christiaan Barnard to at last transplant a human heart. Further technical advances enabled surgeons to transplant even more complex structures, such as faces and arms, and bioengineers and stem-cell scientists have successfully grown human heart tissue on the collagen scaffold of a spinach leaf.

While organ transplants are clearly a significant chapter in the story of transplantation, in this book I see them as part of a much longer history and wider cultural context. In the last seventy years or so, technology has enabled us to transplant organs, but transplants per se have been widespread for at least 500 years and are underpinned by 5,000 years of culture without which modern transplants like the one I witnessed at London’s Royal Free Hospital would be inconceivable.

In widening the scope of the transplant narrative, I hope also to show that the story of transplantation is not merely one of technical progress leading to mastery but a primarily human journey. The story of transplants is about something closer to our hearts than pumps and valves; it’s about how we understand our bodies, and about our relationships with one another and with ourselves. Raw information on these procedures is abundant – the doctors and scientists who worked on transplants didn’t keep their thoughts to themselves, and the artists, playwrights and writers who described them didn’t leave their brushes and pens idle. With such a rich set of sources as well as various academic reports, this isn’t just a matter of the odd ghoulish curiosity, but a detailed history that amplifies the big questions we all ask about ourselves: when you think about what it actually means to move bits of body around, transplantation becomes a far bigger issue than accounts of impressive technology and highly talented medical professionals. Looked at this way, transplant surgery becomes nothing less than an intuitive meditation on our sense of personal identity, a perhaps unwitting fumble towards understanding what it means to be human, alive and an individual. It is with this very question of human and individual identity that the history begins in Renaissance Italy.