Jérôme Hamon, the first man in the world who, in 2018, underwent a second face transplant, after a lifetime of suffering between one surgery and another, has died in France at the age of 49. The first dates back to 2010, following a genetic disease that had deformed his face, neurofibromatosis type 1. Eight years later, the rejection and the new transplant, an experiment never attempted before and which made him the first in the world to having lived with three different faces. He was “exhausted”, in the words of his doctor, who wanted to testify to the newspaper Le Telegramme “Jérôme’s strength, it was I who asked him how he managed to resist”.
Rejection and facial deformation
The 2018 transplant was carried out by Professor Laurent Lantieri’s team at the “Georges Pompidou” hospital in Paris. The same surgeon had already performed the first transplant, also a world first, in 2010 at the “Henri Mondor” hospital. In that case, the transplant was a success, as he himself recounted in a book published in April 2015. But in the same year, for a banal cold, he was treated with an antibiotic incompatible with the immunosuppressants that were essential for him to live and l The following year he began to show signs of rejection and his face became deformed. A year later, the decision to try the transplant again, given that the face undergoing rejection showed signs of necrosis. While waiting for the operation, Hamon spent two months “faceless” in intensive care at the hospital, waiting for a compatible donor. In the end, the donor who managed to save him was a 22-year-old young man who died hundreds of kilometers from Paris.
