World’s First Skin Graft

Walter Yeo, the first person to receive plastic surgery, before (left) and after (right) skin graft surgery performed by Sir Harold Delf Gillies in 1917. The pictures of Walter’s face before the surgery are blurry and hard to come by. In the tragic accident he was recorded as having lost both his upper and lower eyelids. The surgery was some of the first to use a skin graft from an unaffected area of the body and paved the way for a sudden rash of improvements in this field.