Main description:

It is like a fairy story! Or at least a beautiful epic, a truly significant page in the history of medicine, a staggering scene in which several actors come into play, both fundamentalists and clinical practitioners, eager to place all these new developments at the disposal of those suffering from ill health. Everyone is passionate about their work, be it providing new knowledge or perfecting new therapeutic methods. Man has always been fascinated by the possibility of replacing a damaged organ with a healthy one. Several attempts have been made over the centuries, and some miracles have been reported, such as those of Saint Damien and Saint Come as illustrated by Fra Angelico. The modern saga, however, started more modestly on the mouse. It is on the mouse that the first tissue group was discovered; yet the study of human tissue groups could only be carried out on a human. One human must be subjected to the thousands of tests that have enabled us to unravel the extraordinary complexity of the HLA system.

Contents:

1 Organ Transplantation: an Historical Perspective.- 2 The Biology of the Major Histocompatibility Complex.- 3 Tissue Typing, Crossmatching and the Allocation of Cadaveric Kidney Transplants.- 4 The Immunobiology of Transplant Rejection and Acceptance.- 5 Immune Tolerance.- 6 Heart Transplantation.- 7 Lung Transplantation.- 8 Kidney Transplantation.- 9 Liver Transplantation.- 10 Pancreas and Islet Transplantation.- 11 Small Bowel Transplantation: the New Frontier in Organ Transplantation.- 12 Non-heart-beating Cadaver Donors.- 13 Organ Preservation.- 14 Blood and Marrow Transplantation.- 15 Xenotransplantation: Hopes and Goals.- 16 Anesthesia for Organ Transplantation.- 17 Immunosuppressive Drugs.- 18 Malignancies in Transplantation.- 19 Infection in the Organ Transplant Patient.- 20 Ethics of Transplantation.- 21 Transplant Surgery Training.