ORGAN DONATION
Evolution of transplants
The desire of human for improving their health and appearence has been in their minds since the existence of life. The first approaching was made by the Persian, Greek and the Egipcians civilitations. They used organs from animals, such as pigs, because of their religions. This technique is called `xenotransplantation`. Furthermore, in some religions organ transplants also have their role. For example, it is said that the Hindu god Ganesha has an elefant head which was placed by the god Shiva.
Some years later, Christianity changed this ideologies into miracles. During the middle age, they made a little improvement looking at the organ transplant. In 1597, Gaspar de Tagliacocci publiqued a treatise about the nasal autotransplant that is used nowadays.
The most important improvements took place in the 20th century, they came when they found the vascular stich (Alexis Carrel), after this, from 1900 to 1915 the first organ transplants in animals were carried out , they took the kidney from a dog to another. In 1906, Mathieu Jaboulay made the fist organ transplant in a human, which consisted on introducing a kidney grift of a pig in a 50 years old woman. The experiment was a desaster, but the scientistics were more motivated to do more transplants and in 1910, Unger (a surgery teacher) confirmed that he had made more than 100 transplants between different dogs races (kidney, thyroid, heart...). After that, he received the Medicine and Physiology Nobel award in 1912.
During the next decades, a lot of scientists made a lot of experiments with organs, and in 1933 Voronoy made the first kidney organ transplant of two humans who had different types of blood, so finally the receptor died after 48 hours. In 1952, René Kuss was a very important surgeon who improved the kidney transplantation (this is which is used nowadays). In 1954 Murray, Merril and Harrison made the first transplant with a survivor. In the next years they follow making transplants, but in 1967 Crhistiaan Barnard made the first cardiac transplant. The most important improvements in transplants weren't made long time ago. At the end of the 70s kidney transplants were very dangerous procedures, a hugh amount of people died after doing them. The same happened with cardiac and hepatic transplants.
