Surgeons Save Patient's Severed Ear By Grafting It to Her Foot in World-First Procedure

To save a woman's ear, doctors first attached it to her foot. In a world-first procedure, surgeons in China have successfully reattached a patient's completely severed ear after keeping it alive for months by grafting it onto her own foot, according to a Monday report from medical news platform Med-J.

A Devastating Accident

The patient suffered life-threatening injuries in a workplace accident this past April. According to Qiu Shenqiang, deputy director of the microsurgery unit at Shandong Provincial Hospital in Jinan, heavy machinery had torn her scalp, neck, and facial skin into multiple fragments. Her ear was “completely severed along with the scalp.”

The hospital's reconstructive microsurgery team immediately attempted to repair the damage, but standard methods failed. The severe damage to the scalp's tissue and vascular network meant there was no viable place to reattach the ear.

An Unconventional Lifeline

Facing a dead end, the surgical team opted for a radical solution: they grafted the ear onto the patient's foot. This unconventional move used the rich blood supply in her foot as a temporary incubator, providing the necessary circulation to keep the ear's delicate tissues alive while her scalp healed.

The strategy worked. After several months, once the patient's head injuries had sufficiently recovered, the surgeons performed a second operation to transfer the ear from her foot back to its proper place, successfully completing the reconstruction.