That will be a marvelous kiss!

Although I have talked before about the tendency for medical priorities to be based on the "rule of rescue" rather than more cost-effective reasoning, who cannot be moved by this recent surgical success at Brigham and Women's Hospital? Excerpts from the Boston Globe story by Kay Lazar:

[A] 25-year-old Texas man suffered horrific burns in a 2008 electrical accident that obliterated his lips and most of his other features, but last week he received the nation’s first full face transplant.

“Dallas is looking forward to giving his daughter a kiss again,’’ Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, director of the Brigham’s burn unit and the plastic surgeon who led the transplant team, said in an interview after yesterday’s announcement. “It’s such a simple human function that we take for granted.’’

To modify a quote from The Princess Bride:

“Since the invention of the kiss, there have only been five kisses that were rated . . . the most pure. This one will leave them all behind.”

Indeed. Congratulations to the team!