It might seem stranger than a FedEx from the grave, but it is just as true. In a move likely to add to the horror film genre that has given us Body Parts, Frankenstein and The Eye, the Cleveland Clinic announced today that it had replaced the face of one woman with the face of another woman who had died three weeks ago. Would you consider donating your face for someone else to use? Here is the history of the face transplant from The New York Times:
In November 2005, a team in Amiens, France, performed the first partial face transplant. The recipient, Isabelle Dinoire, then 38, was seriously disfigured when her Labrador retriever mauled her. The surgeons grafted a nose, lips and chin from a donor who had been declared brain dead.
In a published report in December 2007, Ms. Dinoire’s doctors said she was satisfied with the aesthetic result. She has spoken in a news conference.
In 2006, Chinese doctors did a partial face transplant on a farmer who lost much of the right side of his face in a bear attack.
In 2007, a French team performed the third partial facial transplant, on a 29-year-old man. His face had been disfigured by neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder of the nervous system that causes tumors to grow in tissues around nerves.
The revision history of the “Face transplant” Wikipedia article has only recently started to heat up.
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