Several years later, 1871, Reverdin added a valuable method to the still incomplete art, by introducing the now well-known circular epidermal skin grafts for covering granulating surfaces. Thiersch improved this method in 1886 by showing that comparatively large pieces of skin could be transplanted. Wolfe, of Glasgow, had also been successful in utilizing fairly large skin grafts.
Krause, however, improved upon all of these methods by transplanting large flaps of skin without detaching the subcutaneous tissue, a procedure which causes more or less injury to the graft in other methods, and by his method overcoming the subsequent contraction, heretofore a bad feature when the skin-grafted area had healed.
“The results of most plastic operations have been as satisfactory as the most sanguine could hope for or the most critical expect,” says John Eric Erichsen.
Many important additions have been made in the past few years—the outcome of untiring attempt and skill. Czerny replaces part of an amputated breast with a fatty tumor taken from the region of the thigh. Glück successfully repairs a defect in the carotid artery with the aid of a piece of the jugular vein. Glück, Helferich, and others have advocated implanting muscular tissue taken from the dog into muscular deficiencies in the human, due to whatever cause.
The transplantation of a zoöneural section into a defect of a nerve in the human was successfully accomplished by Phillippeaux and Vulpian.
Glück, who later restored a sciatic nerve in a rabbit by the transplantation of the same nerve taken from a hen, went so far as to restore a 5-cm. defect of the radial nerve of a patient by the employment of a bundle of catgut fibers, fully establishing the function of the nerve within a year’s time.
Guthrie has successfully replaced the organs and limbs of animals and has actually transplanted the heads of two dogs.
The transplantation of a toe, to make up a part of a lost finger, is proposed by Nicoladoni. Van Lair hints at the possibility of removing a part or a whole organ immediately before death to repair other living organs.
Von Hippel has successfully implanted a zoöcorneal graft from a rabbit upon the human eye, and Copeland has taken the corneal graft from one human and transplanted it upon the cornea of another to overcome opacity.