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Hand Surgery in Ecuador

Located on the equator in Latin America, Ecuador has approximately 17 million inhabitants. Its history is often shared with neighbouring countries, such as Colombia or Venezuela, with whom even the colours of our flags are shared. In 1964, a team led by Dr Roberto Gilbert Elizalde in Ecuador performed what is considered the first hand transplant in the world (Febres-Cordero et al., 2018). A few days after the transplantation, the patient was transferred to a hospital in Boston; and despite a successful surgery, the transplanted hand was amputated 23 days after surgery due to the immune rejection. This historical event was overshadowed and forgotten. This case was, at that time, a demonstration of the audacity of a surgeon rather than the outcome of this surgery. After that, several surgeons in Ecuador kept the practice of hand surgery alive as a speciality. Among them were Drs Humberto Ramos and Jaime Moran, who worked in Carlos Andrade Marin Hospital and Eugenio Espejo Hospital in Quito in the 1970s and 1980s. They developed hand surgeries in the two hospitals, which are the most important public hospitals in Ecuador. Dr Alejandro Rubio, after completing his training in France, contributed especially to the treatment of plastic-surgery-related hand problems while in private practice during 1990s and 2000s.