A History of Organ Transplantation is a comprehensive and ambitious exploration of transplant surgery—which, surprisingly, is one of the longest continuous medical endeavors in history. Moreover, no other medical enterprise has had so many multiple interactions with other fields, including biology, ethics, law, government, and technology. Exploring the medical, scientific, and surgical events that led to modern transplant techniques, Hamilton argues that progress in successful transplantation required a unique combination of multiple methods, bold surgical empiricism, and major immunological insights in order for surgeons to develop an understanding of the body’s most complex and mysterious mechanisms. Surgical progress was nonlinear, sometimes reverting and sometimes significantly advancing through luck, serendipity, or helpful accidents of nature.

Introduction: Toward the Impossible -- Early Transplantation -- The Eighteenth Century -- The Reawakening -- Clinical and Academic Transplantation in Paris -- The Beginning of Organ Transplantation -- The Lost Era of Transplantation Immunology -- Anarchy in the 1920s -- Progress in the 1930s -- Understanding the Mechanism -- Experimental Organ Transplantation -- Transplantation Tolerance and Beyond -- Hopes for Radiation Tolerance -- The Emergence of Chemical Immunosuppression -- Support from Hemodialysis and Immunology in the 1960s -- Progress in the Mid-1960s -- Brain Death and the "Year of the Heart" -- The Plateau of the Early 1970s -- The Arrival of Cyclosporine -- Waiting for the Xenografts -- Conclusion: Lessons from the History of Transplantation.