ANIMAL GRAFTS AND REGENERATIONS. Q447 
conceived the idea of applying over such wounds a shred 
of healthy skin, taken from the injured subject himself or 
from some other person. The first attempts were under- 
taken in 1869, in the Paris hospitals, and were crowned 
with full success. Numerous experiments were at once 
made. Gosselin, Guyon, Ollier, Duplay, Hergott, and 
others, in France, obtained very satisfactory results. Eng- 
lish, Russian, and German practitioners did not hesitate to 
contribute their share of confirmatory observations, and we 
may be allowed to say that at this day epidermic grafting 
has taken a definite place in surgical practice. This does 
not prevent the admission that it presents difficulties of 
more than one kind. This application of shreds of foreign 
substance to the denuded surface of a wound requires ex- 
treme delicacy of attention on the part of the surgeon 
who proposes to effect it. In the first place, an attempt to 
cover the entire wound by one single grafting would not 
succeed; several slips of very small dimensions must be 
applied, the progress of cicatrization must be watched day 
by day, the strips that fail to adhere replaced, etc. Usual- 
ly the graft is complete at the end of twenty-four hours. 
At that time the transferred part forms one body with the 
wound, by the intervention of cells produced in the inter- 
-space between them. It thus follows that cicatrization is 
completed very rapidly. The scar is firmer and more pliant 
than the ordinary ones, and does not exhibit, as they do, 
any disposition to contract.’ 
The name given to this process, “ epidermic graft,” is 
not quite precise. In reality, the strips used in such a 
case are not composed of epidermis alone; to procure 
them, the epidermis is detached in connection with the thin 
1 Grafts on men have been made not only of human skin but of skin 
borrowed from animals also. Dubreuil has lately performed some curi- 
ous experiments on this subject. He has grafted Guinea-pig’s skin upon 
a man, 
