Surgeon Yurii Voronoy (1895-1961) - A pioneer in the history of clinical transplantation: In memoriam at the 75^th anniversary of the first human kidney transplantation

Objective/Aim: Today, kidney transplantation is a standard therapy for end stage kidney disease but its history and development has been a stony and challenging path. Following the pioneering experimental work done by Jaboulay and Carrel in Lyon at the beginning of the 20^th century, the Soviet surgeon, Yurii Voronoy (Kherson, Ukraine), performed the first human allograft kidney transplantation in 1933, using 6 hr anoxic kidneys from a cadaver donor to be implanted into the medial thigh. In the classic account by David Hume of the pioneer kidney transplants done in Boston, credit was given to Voronoy, as the first to perform an allograft kidney transplant in a human being. The aim of this historical overview article is to honor the work of Yurii Voronoy, whose pioneering work has its 75^th anniversary. For this work Vorony's original work, the patient's medical file and the operation-report was obtained by the archive of the Ukrainian Academy of Medical Sciences in Kiev and analyzed. In spite of his pioneering role in human kidney transplantation, the life and work of Voronoy have attracted little attention in the western hemisphere apart from one article by Hamilton et al. The original article of Voronoy's first kidney transplantation was published in a Spanish journal, but more detail of this case was given in a recent Soviet review. Our article shows that Voronoy not only was the first who performed a human kidney allotransplantation, but he also had some insight into the immunologic characteristics of graft rejection. The first human kidney allotransplant was a milestone in modern medicine. As the first to perform human kidney allotransplant, the Russian surgeon Vorony holds an honorable place in transplantation history.