This laboratory is world-renowned for its advances in microsurgical technique, as well as for its educational commitment to teaching microsurgery to generations of hand and orthopedic surgeons. These techniques underpin the clinical applications of hand and facial transplants. Dr. Brandon Wilhelmi is the laboratory director and Dr. Gusatvo Perez-Adabia microsurgery course director.

The lab was founded in 1975 by Dr. Robert Acland after he accepted an offer to set up a microsurgery teaching laboratory at the Kleinert-Kutz Hand Center in Louisville, Kentucky. The center had been founded by Harold E. Kleinert, a pioneering surgeon who was the first to use microsurgery to treat hand injuries, and his partner and fellow hand surgeon Joseph E. Kutz. Kleinert had also established the Christine M. Kleinert Fellowship in Hand Surgery in 1960 to give surgical residents more experience with hand surgery. He realized that the fellowship needed to improve its teaching of microsurgery, and invited Acland to set up a teaching laboratory at the suggestion of Graham Lister, a plastic surgeon who had joined Kleinert's practice and who had trained with Acland at Canniesburn Hospital.

Acland played a key role in the founding of the University of Louisville’s fresh tissue dissection laboratory in 1981. A retired surgeon, Herbert Wald, asked Acland and two other surgeons, Harold Kleinert and Gordon Tobin, to help pay for a large walk-in refrigerator for unembalmed cadaver preservation. While it was immediately useful, Tobin thought that it resembled a dungeon cell, located as it was in the basement of a University of Louisville medical building. Acland was appointed director of the fresh tissue laboratory in 1983 upon Dr. Wald's full retirement, and under his leadership the laboratory was substantially expanded and improved. As director, Acland began to transition away from teaching microsurgery in favor of teaching anatomy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Acland)

Please visit this website for more information about the microsurgery teaching course.