France and the early history of organ transplantation.

The different starting points and uneven emphasis of historical accounts of transplantation [1] have tended to obscure the contributions to this field of some of the grand figures of French medicine and science. Clinical transplantation activity began in France within the first few years of the twentieth century when Jaboulay in Lyon [2] and others in France and Germany performed subhuman-primate-to-human kidney heterotransplantation [3-5]. In 1936, The Russian Yu Yu Voronoy of Kiev made the first known attempt at renal allotransplantation [6]. Transplantation lay largely dormant until 1951 when Rene Kuss [7] and Charles Dubost [8] of Paris and Marceau Servelle of Strasbourg [9] carried out a series of cadaveric renal transplantations. The kidneys were removed from convict donors after their execution by guillotine. The next year the French physician Jean Hamburger, working with the urologist Louis Michon at the Hospital Necker (Paris), reported the now commonplace transplantation of a kidney from a live volunteer donor [10]. The pelvic kidney transplant procedure originally used by Kuss and refined subsequently by the French surgeons has been used hundreds of thousands of times since then including for the celebrated identical (monozygotic) twin transplantations performed by Murray (N obel Laureate 1990) and his associates [11] in Boston. Visitors flocked to France in the early 1950s to learn firsthand from this experience, including John Merrill of Boston, as Hume described in the classical account of his own clinical trials at the Peter Bent Brigham