In 1908 he treated a newborn girl with a fatal blood disease by linking her veins to those of her father, so his healthy blood could flow into her body and save her. The French surgeon Alexis Carrell made great strides in the early 20th century: he learned sewing techniques from the woman who’d embroidered the curtains at the Paris opera house, then he practised on cigarette papers. (He was right, but only because all blood vessels lead to your heart.) He believed that the blood vessels in the third finger of your left hand led to your heart, which is why we now wear wedding rings there.

This was fitting, given the symbolic importance attached to blood ever since the Greek physician Galen of Pergamon had written about it in the 2nd century AD. Pictured: South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performing heart surgery in 1977īefore any real progress could be made on transplanting internal organs, doctors had to solve the problem of stitching together blood vessels. One flicked out patients’ troublesome molars from the back of his horse using the point of a sword, while another used just his fingers, but did so accompanied by violins and dancing girls.īritish dentist John Hunter noticed the roots of extracted teeth resembled the lizard tails he’d experimented on as a younger man, which he would pluck off to see whether new ones would grow back (they did).Ĭhristiaan Barnard carried out the world’s first heart transplant in 1967. Or at least taking them out was - indeed, in 18th-century Paris tooth drawers operated as street performers. To keep the skin alive as it ‘took’ to the face, they left it attached to the arm by a small flap, meaning that you had to spend days with the two body parts connected before the operation could be completed. The Vianeo brothers of 16th-century Italy thought there had to be a better way, so pioneered an operation where skin was taken from a patient’s arm and fashioned into a new nose. People who’d lost their own to disease or injury sometimes wore false ones attached to spectacle frames.

The first body part in play was the nose. Paul Craddock explores the origins of transplant surgery in a fascinating new book, as it's revealed scientists at University College London, think we might be a decade away from the 3D printing of entire body parts (file image)

Spare parts by paul craddock