This Day, That Year

Item from Feb 7, 1987, in China Daily: A pair of Siamese twins born to a rural family in North China’s Hebei province has grown into healthy baby girls, nine months after they were separated from each other in an operation conducted by Doctor Wu Dianhua. …

The medical cure in China has developed rapidly over the years. Doctors, with the aid of new technologies, have performed surgeries that have drawn global attention.

In 2006, a partial face transplant was successfully performed on a man from Yunnan province who had been mauled by a bear. It was a first for China and only the second time the operation had been performed worldwide.

Guo Shuzhong, who works for the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, was the surgeon responsible for this milestone. To date, the surgery has been performed 39 times worldwide, mostly in the United States and France.

But in a recent interview with China Daily, Guo said that he has been waiting years to help a second patient but cannot find a donor. He said unwillingness among families to donate a loved one’s face after death is potentially holding back progress in the field.

At the moment, he is busy tending to a patient waiting for an ear transplant. In two or three months, the “engineered” ear, now growing on the patient’s arm, will be transplanted to his head, he said.

Doctors earlier buried a skin expander in the patient’s right forearm and regularly injected water to expand the skin in the first phase.