--- title: "Scientists Graft Human Ear Onto Foot" description: "A surgical team in China successfully grafted a human patient's ear to their foot in a remarkable medical intervention." date: "2025-12-31" modified: "2025-12-31" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/health-medicine/scientists-graft-human-ear-foot" categories: - "Developments" - "Health & Medicine" --- # Scientists Graft Human Ear Onto Foot ![A surgical team in China successfully grafted a human patient's ear to their foot in a remarkable medical intervention.]() *Shandong Provincial Hospital* In a bizarre first, the [*South China Morning Post* reports](), doctors in China have surgically grafted a patient's severed ear to her foot. The patient, a woman identified by their surname Sun, suffered a horrific workplace accident involving heavy machinery which tore off a large part of her scalp and her ear with it, according to Qiu Shenqiang, deputy director of the microsurgery unit at Shandong Provincial Hospital in Jinan. The damage to her scalp and vascular network was so severe that restoring the ear at the time was impossible, so the procedure was performed to save the patient's aural orifice so it could be reattached to her head later. The scalp, neck, and face had been torn and "split into multiple fragments, Qiu said, via *SCMP*, while the ear had been "completely severed along with the scalp." The team tried to immediately repair it, but they came up against a grim medical reality: the skull needed more time — months, at least — to heal. You can't simply put a body part on ice for that long, so the surgical team opted for a radical approach: save the ear by attaching it to somewhere else on the body. Per *SCMP,* Qiu said they chose the foot because the arteries and veins there are compatible with those found in the ear. The foot's skin and soft tissue are also similarly thin to the head's. The choice made sense in theory, but it was still a risk. Attaching a body part to a different site to preserve it, known as a heterotopic graft, is not uncommon during procedures like [organ transplants](). But doing this with an ear and foot had no precedent in medical history. Nonetheless, Qiu's team pulled it off. The initial grafting took ten hours, during which the surgeons meticulously connected the complex web of delicate veins. But complications arose five days later, when the ear turned purplish black as its connecting veins struggled to send blood back to the heart, causing the blood to pool. Over the next five days, the team rescued the ear with manual bloodletting, a labor intensive process that required almost five hundred individual interventions. Once the ear was stabilized, the team gradually restored the patient's scalp. Five months on from the accident, the scalp and neck had healed enough, and the team returned the ear to its proper place. The procedure was performed in October. The patient has now been discharged from the hospital, with her face and tissue function largely recovered, *SCMP* reported. **More** **medical news:** [*People Jabbing Themselves With Black Market "GLP-3" Drugs*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()