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A mostly forgotten medical first on June 14, 1965

Robert Lindsey Pennell (June 1965) was involved in a freak accident on June 14, 1965 in which his hand was completely cut off at the wrist by a brush ax. The severed hand in a bucket of ice along with Pennell arrived at North Carolina Baptist Hospital where Drs. Jesse H. Meredith, James E. Averett, Jr. and Ralph Siewers performed the eight-hour surgery to re-attach the hand to Pennell's arm. (Wake Forest University, Digital Forsyth photo)

June 14th of 2025 marks the 60th anniversary of a little-known medical miracle involving one of my cousins.

Robert Lindsey Pennell, son of one my grandmother’s sisters (first cousin once removed) was from Hickory, was just shy of 25 years old and was early into serving a three-to-five year prison sentence related to a burglary.

He was imprisoned at the North Carolina state prison camp in Yadkin County, a rural area west of Winston-Salem, and was part of a prison work gang on June 14, 1965 clearing trees and brush along a right-of-way near the community of Lowgap in adjoining Surry County.

The accident

While cutting limbs from oak tree they had cut down Pennell slipped and reached out to catch himself with his left hand just as another inmate was swinging a bush ax.

The inmate chopped Pennell’s left hand off at the wrist.1

It was a clean cut.

Pennell told reporters later he had sharpened the ax himself earlier in the morning. It was the first of a string of lucky happenstances that day.

An inmate may have saved his life by creating a tourniquet with a shoestring and stick to stop the bleeding.2

Guards rushed him to the hospital in Mount Airy, a trip Pennell described as taking about 15 minutes on a winding dirt road at 90 miles an hour. (Mount Airy, the hometown of actor Andy Griffith, was in-part the inspiration for the fictional town of Mayberry in the “The Andy Griffith Show” on television in the 1960s. It was not the birthplace of medical innovations.)

“Then,” Pennell told Winston-Salem Journal reporter Arlene Edwards, “they had to send back for my hand.”3

Luckily, an inmate had picked up the hand and wrapped in a handkerchief.

Doctors in Mount Airy dressed the wound and contacted North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem (now Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center) to see if they could provide further treatment. Baptist Hospital, affiliated with the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, was and is the premier hospital for the region. It was a place pushing the boundaries of medical knowledge.

It so happened Baptist had a surgeon, Dr. Jesse H. Meredith, who had been extensively studying limb reattachment and had already reattached the leg of a man injured in a motorcycle accident. That patient died soon after from complications due to head injuries from the wreck and the limb reattachment operation was not publicized. It did serve as somewhat of a dry run for what was to come with Pennell.

A Moody’s Funeral Home ambulance took Pennell with his severed hand in a bucket of ice from Mount Airy on a “harrowing” 23-minute trip to the hospital in Winston-Salem 39 miles away. By the time he arrived around noon it had only been 90 minutes since the accident.

The hand reimplanation surgery

At Baptist, a team of three surgeons led by Meredith and including James E. Averett, Jr. and Ralph Siewers worked to reattach the hand, reconnecting as much as possible the bones, veins, tendons, nerves and skin over eight hours of surgery.

“These things require a massive amount of technical knowledge,” a surgeon involved in the operation but who did not want to be named told the Winston-Salem Journal. “A doctor is lucky to have the opportunity to perform just one of them in a lifetime.”

Just a couple days after the operation, the medical team was hopeful, estimating Pennell might regain 70 percent use of his hand.

In 1965, a surgical team headed by Dr. Jesse Meredith at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine performed what is thought to be the first successful hand/wrist re-implantation in the United States. The dramatic eight-hour operation began 90 minutes after the left hand of 26-year-old Robert Pennell was accidentally amputated at the wrist on June 14, 1965 by a single blow of a bush ax. This illustration, by George Lynch, Professor and Director of the Department of Medical Illustration, shows how the severed hand was reattached. The numbers indicate the order in which the operation was performed.
In 1965, a surgical team headed by Dr. Jesse Meredith at what was then called North Carolina Baptist Hospital performed what is thought to be the first successful hand/wrist reimplantation in the United States. This illustration, by George Lynch, Professor and Director of the Department of Medical Illustration, shows how the severed hand was reattached. The numbers indicate the order in which the operation was performed. (Digital Forsyth, is the definitive online collection of historical photographs of Forsyth County, N.C., and is a grant-funded multi-year digitization project of the Forsyth County Public Library, Old Salem Museum and Gardens, Winston-Salem State University’s C.G. O’Kelly Library, and Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library and Coy C. Carpenter Medical Library.)

Medical pioneer Jesse H. Meredith

Dr. Jesse Meredith, Professor of Surgery and Director of the Burn Unit, and Don Lysell prepare skin for use in dressing burn wounds at North Carolina Baptist Hospital. The burn unit completed its first operating year in 1980. (Wake Forest University photo, part of Digital Forsyth collection.)

Meredith, who died in 2021 at the age of 98, was a world-renown surgeon, a medical pioneer and innovator with a distinguished and storied career of more than four decades at Baptist. He is credited with starting an organ transplantation program and establishing the hospital’s first burn unit and tissue bank. He developed the first intensive care unit in North Carolina at Baptist, one of the first in the nation. He did the first kidney transplant at the hospital. At the time of Pennell’s accident, Meredith was director of the surgery research laboratory.4

He chaired the N.C. Commission for Public Health for 30 years and founded and served as the first director of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.5

Pennell told the reporter he realized if it had been another hospital, they would have just sown up his stub and that he believed Meredith was the only doctor who could have successfully performed the operation.

Historic first hand reattachment

It was the first successful hand reattachment performed in the United States.6 Limb reattachment medical knowledge and surgical techniques were in the early stages.

The world’s first human limb reimplantation had only happened in 1962 when a 12-year-old Little Leaguer’s arm was reattached by team of surgeons in Boston led by Ronald Malt after being torn off at the shoulder while trying to hop a freight train.7 Malt published a case report on the surgery two years later.

Surgeons in China led by Chen Zhongwei had reattached a severed forearm in 1963, and published the results that year.

But Pennell’s was the first successful human hand reattachment in the United States.

By July, about two weeks after the operation, the surgeons and hospital declared the operation at least a qualified success, blood was flowing through the hand and there were no indications it would have to be removed.8 There were months of recovery to come to regain use of the hand, but the operation appeared successful.

It was widely reported in regional newspapers and an article appeared in late July in TIME Magazine highlighting the operation.9

“When they asked me to sign the paper for the operation, they told me there was a slim chance it would work — but that it might not,” Pennell told Arlene Edwards, the Winston-Salem Journal reporter in an interview from his hospital bed. “The hand was off. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain so I told them to go ahead.”

With months of recovery and rehab ahead in the hospital, prison officials allowed Pennell to stay in Winston-Salem. At least one report said he worked in the cafeteria for free for some period during this time. He was doing daily and twice daily physical therapy sessions to strengthen and regain use of the hand.

By January 1966 he was lifting weights with his hand, but said he did not have good control of it and was still in some pain, sometimes a burning sensation, sometimes an ache, sometimes a feeling like when you hit your funny bone.10

While the operation did receive heavy regional press coverage and was spotlighted nationally in the TIME piece, it did not receive all of the recognition it might have from the medical community and in medical history. Meredith was set to make a presentation about the operation at a conference of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma, but was injured in a horse riding accident and could not go. He wasn’t one for boasting about his achievements, either.

The next year

In February 1966 Pennell, while continuing his therapy in Winston-Salem, was paroled from prison. In May, Gov. Dan. K. Moore commuted his sentence to time served due to the accident. By then he had moved back to Hickory.

Just weeks later, still in May, Pennell was shot in the stomach on a Friday evening at a cafe on Main Street in Hickory.11 He recovered.

But later that year, on Nov. 19, he was a passenger in a 1958 Pontiac that crashed into the living room windows of my aunt and uncle’s house on Snow Creek Road not far from where his parents lived. The driver lost control of the car in a slight curve, went through a yard, hit and uprooted a tree, ripped a utility pole guy wire from the ground, hit a 1965 Chevrolet and then the house, according to an article in the Hickory Daily Record.12

Pennell was taken to a Hickory hospital and transferred to North Carolina Baptist due to the severity of his injuries. He died Thanksgiving morning 1966.13

The burglary

The burglary that landed Pennell in prison happened in January 1965.

In court testimony, Pennell and two others admitted to being involved in the burglary of a supermarket in the Bethlehem community of Alexander County, about 10 miles from Hickory.14

A hole was knocked in the building and a heavy safe was stolen. The men blamed their actions “on being in a drunken condition,” The Hickory Daily Record account of the trial said.

According to accounts at the time of the robbery in January and from court testimony in March, the safe was loaded into a 1958 De Soto and driven to an auto garage in the Hickory area. During the trip, the weight of the safe blew out a tire on the De Soto and the gas tank began dragging on the road.15

Around 3 a.m. an acetylene torch was used to try to open the safe, but a hole had rubbed in the gas tank and a fire apparently erupted from the gas fumes. Neighbors called the fire department.

When the volunteer fire department arrived, the fire was out and the garage door was shut, but the chief demanded to see the scene of the fire. The sheriff’s department was alerted when the safe was spotted. None of the three were at the scene when deputies arrived but were apprehended.

Justice came quickly. The burglary happened in late January and by early March the three were sentenced. In three more months, Pennell would be losing his footing on a right-of-way bank on his way to making medical history.

Caption for photo at the top: Robert Lindsey Pennell was involved in a freak accident on June 14, 1965 in which his hand was completely cut off at the wrist by a brush ax. The severed hand in a bucket of ice along with Pennell arrived at North Carolina Baptist Hospital where Drs. Jesse H. Meredith, James E. Averett, Jr. and Ralph Siewers performed the eight-hour surgery to re-attach the hand to Pennell’s arm. (Wake Forest University, Digital Forsyth photo)

Footnotes

  1. “Rejoining Hand, Arm Tried Here,” Winston-Salem Journal (Winston-Salem, North Carolina) · Tue, Jun 15,
    1965 · Page 4. Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/image/935660916 ↩︎
  2. “This Month in Medical History – June: You Have to Hand It to Dr. Meredith.” DOTmed Business News, June 10, 2009. https://www.dotmed.com/news/story/9130 ↩︎
  3. “Man is thankful he took slim chance” Winston-Salem Journal, July 1, 1965 Page 8. Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/image/935671853/ ↩︎
  4. “In Memoriam: Jesse H. Meredith, MD, House Staff ’58.” Wake Forest University School of Medicine. From the Wake Forest University School of Medicine website: https://school.wakehealth.edu/about-the-school/alumni-relations/catalyst/catalyst-fall-2021/in-memoriam ↩︎
  5. “A Loss of Heart and Soul: Medical Center Mourns Passing of Jesse Meredith, MD.” Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist. From the Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist website: https://giving.wakehealth.edu/impact-of-giving/loss-of-heart-and-soul ↩︎
  6. “Reattached Severed Hand.” Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist. Accessed October 26, 2023. From the Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist website: https://www.wakehealth.edu/about-us/history/firsts/reattached-severed-hand ↩︎
  7. “May 23, 1962: Give That Kid a Hand!,” WIRED.com: https://www.wired.com/2011/05/0523surgery-reattaches-boys-arm/ ↩︎
  8. “Restored Hand Improving: Surgeons Are Enthusiastic.” Winston-Salem Journal, July 1, 1965, Pages 1, 8. Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/image/935671707/ ↩︎
  9. “Surgery: Helped by a Clean Cut,” TIME Magazine, July 23, 1965. https://time.com/archive/6636003/surgery-helped-by-a-clean-cut/ ↩︎
  10. “Reattached Hand Lifts Weights.” Winston-Salem Journal, January 30, 1966, Page 3. Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/image/935731180/ ↩︎
  11. “Shot Wound Suffered by Hickory Man,” Hickory Daily Record (Hickory, North Carolina) · Sat, May 21, 1966 ·
    Pages 1, 8. Newspaper.com: https://www.newspapers.com/image/1007964971/ ↩︎
  12. “Crash Hurts Prove Fatal,” Hickory Daily Record (Hickory, North Carolina) · Fri, Nov 25, 1966 · Pages
    1, 26. Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/image/1008149180/ ↩︎
  13. “Funeral Is Held for Man Who Made History in Hand Operation.” Winston-Salem Journal, November 28, 1966, Page 4. Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/image/936252187/ ↩︎
  14.  “3 Catawbans Sentenced In Safe Robbery.” Hickory Daily Record, March 9, 1965, Pages 1, 4. Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/image/1008118692/ ↩︎
  15.  “2 Suspects Apprehended; Authorities Seeking 3rd.” Hickory Daily Record, January 25, 1965, Pages 1, 16. Newspapers.com: https://www.newspapers.com/image/1005997896/ ↩︎

Jack Lail