What would you say is the most important organ inside your body? Your heart? Your brain? In ancient Greece it was the liver: not only the source of all emotion, but a pathway to the divine. Today we have a slightly different understanding of the liver’s function, but all the same it is an organ that can shut down the whole body when it fails. Preserving the liver is a tricky thing – no known methods of repairing the damage exist. Usually in patients where the liver stops functioning, transplantation is the only option.

On this day, February 12, in 1970, the first such transplant in Canada took place. A three-month old boy, whose identity was withheld from the press, was given a liver from a 14 month-old girl who had died from a heart stoppage.

Liver transplants were still considered experimental in 1970, despite becoming feasible since the mid 1960s. Part of the reason came from the enormous complexity of detaching and re-attaching the liver to the many small blood vessels that supply it. Another complication came from the possibility of the host body rejecting the foreign organ — a problem solved today by immunosuppressive drugs, which were just then beginning their development.