Penis transplantation is a surgical transplant procedure in which a penis is transplanted to a patient. The penis may be an allograft from a human donor, or it may be grown artificially, though the latter has not yet been transplanted onto a human.
The first such procedure was performed in September 2006 at a military hospital in Guangzhou, China. The patient, a 44-year-old male, had sustained the loss of most of his penis in an accident. The transplanted penis came from a brain-dead 22-year-old male. Although a surgical success, the patient and his wife developed psychological trauma as a result of the procedure, and had the surgery reversed 15 days later. Following this, Jean-Michel Dubernard, who performed the world's first face transplant, wrote that the case "raises many questions and has some critics". He alluded to a double standard, writing:
I cannot imagine what would have been the reactions of the medical profession, ethics specialists, and the media if a European surgical team had performed the same operation.
An example of a critic is Piet Hoebeke, a reconstructive urologist in Belgium, who wrote a letter that raised the question of whether or not ethics committees were involved, and criticized the group for the follow-up time of only 15 days. Hoebeke asserted that successful voiding at two weeks is not predictive of long-term outcomes, and even that inadequate arterial anastomoses might not manifest themselves in this time. The hospital that performed the first transplantation later issued a set of guidelines which, among other considerations, "recommended that the procedure be restricted to individuals with severe injuries who are unwilling to undergo traditional reconstructive surgery", according to a mini-review of the ethical issues surrounding penis transplantation published in the Asian Journal of Andrology.
In December 2014, the first successful penis transplant was performed on a 21-year-old man by specialists led by urologist André van der Merwe from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.