1962年5月23日, Dr. Ronald A. Malt 在麻省总院做了世界上第一例断肢再植。 【Dr. Malt was 30 and the chief surgical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital on May 23, 1962, when Everett Knowles, 12, was taken into the emergency room. Everett had been hopping a freight train to go to a baseball game, but when he was thrown against a stone abutment, his right arm was ripped off cleanly at the shoulder. Until then, surgeons had been able to reattach partly severed limbs and restore function. But no one had success with limbs that had been shorn off. Dr. Malt gathered a team of 12 specialists, who went to work reattaching Everett's arm. Doctors attached the bone with a special pin. They reconnected the arteries. They grafted skin and muscle together. Then they waited to see whether the operation would take, raising their hopes when the hand regained a healthy pink color and a pulse could be felt in the wrist. None of the individual steps taken that day were new. The novelty lay in their choreography. ''What concerned me was not the technique,'' Dr. Malt told Life magazine the next year. ''I was afraid we might overlook some unseen serious injury to some other part of his body, or that because of insufficient restoration of blood supply, he'd get gas gangrene or some other infection. I was afraid, too, that we might make a psychic invalid out of him, by giving him an arm that mightn't work.'' The answer to that question would have to wait. The surgeons decided not to try to reattach the nerves in the arm the first day, suturing them and letting the arm heal. It was not until several months later that doctors spliced the four major nerve trunks. Everett also needed more surgery and extensive physical therapy.】 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/17/us/ronald-a-malt-70-is-dead-i