ABSTRACT
The first attempt at tendon grafting was at the end of the nineteenth century. The exact dating has been made more difficult by the confusion surrounding the term tendon transplant, which should be used only to describe a tendon graft, although it was used inaccurately to signify a tendon transfer. In 1881 Heuck, a German surgeon, repaired an extensor pollicis longus using a tendon graft. In 1886, at the Surgical Society of Paris, Peyrot reported a case of ‘transplantation in man of the tendon of a dog’ to replace the flexor tendons of a middle finger. One year later (1887) at a meeting of the same society Monod reported a case in which a 5-cm tendon graft taken from the Achilles tendon of a rabbit was used to repair the extensor pollicis longus. Robson (1889) took a tendon from an injured digit to fashion an extensor graft on the same hand.
