Hair Transplant Surgery History
The first attempts at surgical hair restoration of hair loss was recorded in 1822 by J. Dieffenbach. During his inaugural thesis, he described animal investigations in allo and auto-transplantation of hair, skin and features. As early as 1930, a Japanese surgeon Sasagwa reported hair follicle transplantation, then by 1939, Okuda, a Japanese dermatologist, described the correction of alopecia of the scalp, eyebrows and mustache areas using small cylindrical punches to remove the donor tissue and smaller ones for recipient hair. Japanese physicians were successfully grafting and harvesting multiple and single hairs into other areas of the body including face, scalp and pubic regions. The reports of these procedures were documented in Japanese, but due to the emergence of World War II, the historical hair movement was still not revealed to the public.
However, Norman Orentreich, a New York dermatologist reported hair-bearing scalp autografts from the same person, successfully transplanted from the back of the head to the balding front and top in 1959. One of the focal points of hair transplantation surgery is that donor dominance is the central functional principal. Basically, if the hair follicles are harvested from the scalp and then transplanted into the balding areas, the donor hair characteristics will be dominant.
With this procedure, the concept of ‘donor dominance’ was introduced and the research and evolution of hair restoration surgery had begun.
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