We stumbled over an item in today's Huffington Post by Michael Yaremchuk, M.D., the chief of craniofacial surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, which pointed out something relating to plastic surgery that's actually kind of beautiful. In a piece memorializing the work of Dr. Joseph E. Murray, the Nobel Prize winning transplant pioneer who was also one of medical history's best plastic surgeons, Dr. Yaremchuk pointed out something that most people are not aware of.
There is an connection -- a shockingly ancient one -- between plastic surgery and the miracle of transplatation which has saved so many lives and which Dr. Murray kicked off with the first kidney transplant back in 1954. Dr. Yaremchuk notes that the history of transplantation began with the first attempted skin grafts in India circa 800 B.C. Obviously, this was long before the era of today's board certified plastic surgeons and successful skin grafts were a very long ways away, but the connection with transplantation continued when Dr. Murray used temporary grafts when working on badly burned U.S. soldiers during World War II.
As Dr. Yaremchuk points out, transplantation and plastic surgery remain closely aligned today, with the cutting edge work being largely in such areas as facial transplants. The truth is that it's simply not possible to draw a line between the important work of most surgeons and the supposedly superficial work of even top plastic surgeons. All of us surgeons are in the business of saving lives and improving the quality of life. Whether we're doing face lifts or kidney transplants, what we are doing is actually kind of beautiful.
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