John Hunter and His Experiments
John Hunter was an American surgeon in the 1700's. He had performed experiments with chickens in which he took a piece of it's foot and sewed it onto it's head. The foot spur, talon like growth, then formed a "pseudo-articulation joint with the skull" (Hamilton, 2012, p. 37). Meaning the spur fused to the skull and acted as if it was actually supposed to be there.
Teeth Transplants
A little later on in his career, Hunter began experiments with transplanting teeth. The teeth weren't always human so many early tooth transplants were done by giving animal teeth to humans. These proved unsuccessful so Hunter moved on to using human teeth for humans. While many of these operations proved somewhat successful, thus proving that transplants were possible, they came with unforeseen problems. The most important part of these operations were not so much the transplants, but what Hunter had discovered because of them. Hunter found that when the donor had syphilis, soon after the transplant the patient developed syphilis as well. Later on he found that patients could develop not only syphilis but tuberculosis as a result of skin grafts. Hunter concluded that diseases could be transferred through these transplants. This information would later prove extremely useful when organ transplants became more widespread.