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The 1962 film “Hands of a Stranger” was directed by Newton Arnold. The film focuses on a brilliant pianist whose hands are destroyed in a car accident. With the consent of the pianist’s manager, the doctor performs a radical procedure, successfully transplanting a pair of hands onto the pianist. Although the subject matter of the film was thought to be an unrealistic concept, the first hand transplant done on a human being occurred two years after the film, in 1964 on a patient in Ecuador. The patient only lasted two weeks before his body started rejecting the transplanted hand. Since then there have been three successful hand transplants.
A hand transplantation is a surgical procedure in which a hand is transplanted from one human to another. The human hand weighs less than a pound and consists of twenty seven bones, twenty eight muscles, three main nerves, two main arteries, tendons, veins, and soft tissue. The hand transplant operation is performed in the following order: bone fixation, tendon repair, artery repair, and finally vein repair. The procedure usually lasts between 8-12 hours.
Hand transplant patients are required to go through intense psychological evaluation before being considered as a candidate for the procedure. Once accepted, the patient must take immunosuppressive drugs because the body’s natural immune system will try to reject the hand. The dugs cause the recipient to have a weaker immune system and suffer severely from minor illnesses. The goal of the hand transplant is to restore functional recovery to the patient with a transplanted hand. However, the surgery comes with a price. The first hand transplant to achieve prolonged success was directed by University of Louisville surgeons in cooperation with the Kleinert Hand Institute and Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. The surgeons have since performed two more hand transplants that have thus far maintained success.
