The Graft: How a Pioneering Operation Sparked the Modern Age of Organ Transplants

In a community hospital in suburban Chicago run by Catholic nuns, surgeons performed an operation never done in the world before. The team at the Little Company of Mary Hospital led by Richard Lawler transplanted a kidney in 1950 from a just-deceased woman into the abdominal cavity of a 44-year-old woman.

Critics in the medical community called the operation irresponsible because immunosuppressant drugs that prevent the rejection of a transplanted organ had yet to be developed. Some Catholi...