Histories of Tissue Banking

The health of a boy who had suffered a deep burn to his lap deteriorated to such an extent that it was feared he would not survive. As a last resort, James Barrett Brown (1899–1971), a pioneering and infl uential American plastic and reconstructive surgeon, covered the wound with skin taken from the child’s mother. The grafts “took ” initially but after three weeks had been completely absorbed. Nonetheless, the child’s health recovered and the wound was much improved [1]. Mother and child were fortunate in this instance: from the mid-1930s, when surgeons began following Brown’s lead in using skin as a biologic dressing, more often than not, a mother recover-ing from surgery to remove her skin would be mourning the death of her severely burned child. Skin taken from family members was the fi rst choice in homografting1 because surgeons believed it would be better tolerated than the skin of strangers, and also because anxious relatives were more likely to agree to undergo the painful procedure. However, skin occasionally was recovered from friends especially where the patient’s burn covered a large area. Harold Gillies (1882–1960), a surgeon famous for his pioneering plastic reconstruc-tion of soldiers horribly wounded during the First World War, described how factory hands offered their skin to dress the burns of a colleague who had fallen into a vat of boiling water. As a result, as Gillies put it, the patient became “the proud possessor of a part of the legs of Lucy and Annie, and so on, all the way up his legs ” [2]. 1 1 Homograft and allograft describe a graft of tissue from another person. Autograft is a graft using the patient’s own tissue