America's First Face Transplant

The nation's first face transplant has revealed herself.  It's hard to look at the pictures, because the "after" still looks like what you get from one of those distortion "fun" filters in Photoshop.  But at least she'll be able to walk around without people pointing and children screaming.  And apparently, there's hope that they'll fix the damage (her husband shot her in the face with a shotgun in 2004) still further.

There's been a sort of fascinated repulsion surrounding these transplants, but severe facial disfigurement is probably the worst accident that can happen and still leave you alive.  From what I understand, for a lot of people it's a kind of living death sentence.  For whatever deep evolutionary reason, people are more horrified by facial disfigurement than anything else, except possibly severe cognitive disability.  People suffering from it have the unpleasant choice of repeatedly triggering that horror among strangers, or staying home.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/05/americas-first-face-transplant/17182/