ESTABLISHMENT OF “SKIN BANKS”

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26264, 8 November 1950, Page 5

ESTABLISHMENT OF “SKIN BANKS”

PROPOSAL BY DR. H. P. PICKERILL

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON. November 7.

The establishment of "skin banks’’ in preparation for possible atomic warfare has been suggested by Dr. H. P. Pickerill, of Wellington, who, with his wife, Dr. Cecily Pickerill, was until last week associated with the plastic surgery clinic which they founded at Middlemore Hospital, Auckland.

Dr. Pickerill said that in future warfare there would be thousands of burn' cases and, that nothing was being done to combat the danger. American medical houses, which were the greatest producers of penicillin and other drugs, should be persuaded to take up the idea of producing skin with their big laboratories and highly-paid scientists. Dr. Pickerill thought that human skin of a universal donor type (nonantigenic) might be cultured and grown like penicillin in speciallyequipped laboratories. It would be a great day when plastic surgeons could remove all burned, gangrenous, and poisonous tissues and immediately graft on the raw area skin that would “take” and grow there, he said.

[Dr. Pickerill was professor of dentistry and dean of the Dental Faculty at the University of Otago from 1907 to 1927. From 1919 to 1927 he was surgeon in charge of the facial and jaw department of the Dunedin Public Hospital. Among other posts he has held is that of plastic surgeon at the Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney, to which he was appointed in 1933.]