A curious vogue noted in Atul Gawande's article, Desperate Measures: Francis Moore remade modern surgery. But he couldn't live with the consequences (The New Yorker, May 5, 2003):
"The taking of body parts from one being for another had a long and unsavory history. In the eighteenth century, for example, a British surgeon demonstrated that human teeth could be transplanted, and this became briefly popular in England. But it proved a disaster. Teeth were stolen from corpses and purchased from the poor for the gums of the gap-toothed wealthy. And though the transplanted teeth sometimes took, they also brought with them infections, including syphilis, that spread unhindered through people's jaws. In France just before the First World War, two attempts at kidney transplantation failed. Then, between the wars, there was a vogue for testicular transplants, which were thought to produce sexual "rejuvenation." In Partis between 1921 and 1926, a Russian surgeon named Serge Boronoff transplanted wedges of monkey testis into close to a thousand men..."
And so on. Surely there are some feature films in all this?