During my early surgical training in Australia, the only grafts I learned about, apart from blood transfusion, were autografts of skin, bone and fascia, and allografts (called homografts in those days) of cornea. I was iguorant of the numerous attempts by surgeons to use allografts of skin, and of the long controversy about whether these did or did not behave like autografts. I assumed, if I thought about it at all, that autografts were used simply as a matter of convenience, except in the case of cornea where this was obviously impossible.
Therefore it came as a complete surprise when, as a prisoner of war in Singapore, I happened to read, in a copy of Rodney Honor Maingot's Postgraduate Surgery that we had managed to salvage from the medical school library after the fall of Singapore in February 1942, that skin grafts transplanted from one person to another often took ...
