The_Invention_of_Surgery

beyond a superficial skin biopsy, removal of a small cyst, or lancing of a
boil likely has permanent suture in their body. Prior to the 1950s, the
“tipping point” of the implant revolution, synthetic, non-degradable suture
was unthinkable, and today it is almost ubiquitous.
Second: what are implants made of? Implants are made of plastic,
metal, organic, biologic, and electronic material.
Organic implants are the nonliving tissues that are transplanted into a
patient’s body, most commonly in orthopedic operations for
musculoskeletal deficiencies. A common example is a patient who
receives purified, processed, and sterilized human bone graft into their
own bone defect, such as a non-healing fracture. Another example is a
young athlete receiving a cadaver (deceased human donor) hamstring into
their knee for ACL reconstruction. These grafts do not have to be tissue-
typed (donor matched) because they are not alive and do not need to be
biologically functioning. The final example is a xenograft, an implant
from another species; pig heart valves are commonly used in patients with
heart valve disease but who are not good candidates for intrinsic valve
repair or mechanical valve replacement.
Biological implants are living tissues and organs, specially procured
and processed and transported for immediate implantation. An organ
transplant, like a kidney, heart, liver, lung, pancreas, and intestine is a live,
functioning organ that is surgically implanted, with reconnection of the
blood vessels and soft-tissue connections that allows the organ to function.
Nondegradable sutures and metal clips are used to secure the organ in
place, but the centerpiece of the transplant is, of course, the organ. The
organ comes from a donor, related or unrelated, brain dead or very much
alive, who has been “matched” to the recipient, thus lowering the risk of
organ rejection or even worse, the risk of graft-versus-host disease (where
the immune cells within the transplanted organ rise up in the recipient’s
body and wage full-scale war on the host tissues).
The epitome of a biological implant is another human being. Although a
temporary (nine-month) implant, the notion that we humans can combine
biological materials (semen and ovum) in laboratory settings, and store
the fertilized byproduct in sub-freezing conditions in a large metal
cylinder, and months, or years, or even decades, later, implant the
microscopic embryo in a woman and grow another human is dizzyingly
overwhelming. It sounds like Greek melodrama, with the gods bringing