Professor Russell Strong: Meet the revolutionary surgeon the MJA compared with Josef Mengele
Liver transplantation in the dark days of the early 1980s.
“I was abused and told that what I was going to do was a new cannibalism,” surgeon Professor Russell Strong recalls.
“I was told it was bordering on obscenity, that it would produce stunted dwarfs and that they would never live a normal life.”
Professor Strong is talking about liver transplantation back in what would now be considered the dark days of the early 1980s.
The procedure had only just lost its status as an experimental treatment — when only 25% of recipients lived for more than 12 months.
