Skin Grafts
Possibly the earliest form of transplants that took place were skin grafts. A skin graft is when skin is taken from a donor and sewn onto the patient. Original skin grafts would often use cadaver skin, live human skin, and even various animal skins. Most grafts, if not all, failed. A surgeon named Gaspare Tagliacozzi announced that the reason skin grafts would never work was because the skins were not compatible and the patient's body would always reject the new skin (Hamilton, 2012, pp. 18-19). This statement had more truth to it than Tagliacozzi had known. Several centuries later tissue typing was discovered and widely used in transplant surgeries. Similar to blood types, if donor and recipient tissue types do not match, then the recipient's immune system will reject the new tissue which in most cases will lead to death.