Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine.

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Corthorne. From Lamb's blood transfused into human veins to tooth replacements and new

noses crafted from forearm skin. The story of transplant surgery is full of surprises. I spoke to Paul Craddock,

the author of a new book on the subject, Spare Parts, to find out more. Please be aware that our

conversation includes details of some fairly grisly medical procedures and also references to animal

cruelty. So, spare parts offers a surprising

history of transplant surgery and I think it's fair to say that some of the stories in this book

are indeed very surprising. So how far back can we trace this story? How far back does a practice

of transplanting go?

Well, first, thanks for having me, Ellie. It's lovely to be on. Well, that was the first

major surprise for me, actually, was how far back transplant surgery goes. Because we think about it

as a 20th century invention. We think about it in terms of

maybe a race to transplant the human heart, Christian Bernard, in the 1960s, 1967. And that's a very,

very strong narrative. And it's strong for, well, for many reasons. One, it's, it's one of those really

arresting post-war stories of very intelligent macho men, which is sort of going out of

fashion now, thankfully. But also it's because in the 60s, that was the time when surgeons and doctors and hospitals themselves started to get savvy about

media and started to curate their own image.

So when you first come to the subject of transplant, your views about it is sort of culturally preset, as it were.

Organ transplants go back, you can say, to the turn of the 20th century.

And I'm sure we'll talk about that in a bit.

But if you think about transplant surgery as a transaction between bodies,

or a transaction even between two places on the same body, then you can take it back as far as

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