A MAN WHO was the first in Britain to receive a plastic heart has been allowed to leave hospital.

Forty-year-old Matthew Green would not have survived with the surgery, which left him with an artificial heart powered by a backpack reports the Independent.

Green, who’s a research scientist, is the first person in Britain to receive the full artificial heart which allows him to move around without the need to be plugged in to a machine in a hospital, according to the Telegraph.

He underwent the surgery in June. The batteries in the backpack need to be changed every three hours and the heart is expected to last up to three years.

So, what other marvellous and incredible medical firsts have there been?…

1. Earlier this year the world’s first laboratory-grown windpipe was successfully transplanted into an African man in Stockholm. The trachea was grown from the patient’s stem cells. Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene had been told that he would die from tracheal cancer.

2. In 2008 Thomas Beatie became the first man in the world to give birth. Beatie was born a woman but underwent surgery to have his breasts removed and began taking male hormones. He retained female sex organs and gave birth to a baby girl in 2008.

Thomas Beatie, his wife Nancy and daughter Susan Juliette. Pic: AP Photo/Hermann J. Knippertz

3. In 1967 the first human-to-human heart transplant was performed by South African surgeon Christian Barnard. The heart of a young woman was transplanted into into the body of a Cape Town grocer. The man survived for 18 days before dying of pneumonia. Another of Barnard’s patients, Dorothy Fisher, survived for 24 years after receiving a new heart.

4. New Zealand-born Clint Hallam was the first person to receive a hand transplant in 1998 after he lost his own right hand in an accident with a circular saw. However in 2001 he asked doctors to remove the hand, saying there was no feeling in it. In 2009 Jeff Kepner became the first ever recipient of a double hand transplant.

5. In 2005 surgeons in France said they had completed the first ever partial face transplant on Isabelle Donoire, after she was mauled by a dog.

Isabelle Dinoire pictured in 2006. Pic: AP Photo/Michel Spingler

6. On 25th July 1978, the world’s first test tube baby was born. Louise Brown’s mother has blocked fallopian tubes so an embryo was implanted in her womb by a pioneering consultant. Brown gave birth to a baby of her owm – a boy – in 2006.

7. The first human eye transplant was reportedly carried out in Houston, Texas in 1969 when 54-year-old John Madden, who was legally blind, was given some of the eye of another man who had died of a brain tumour. However the donor eye was not preserved enough to make it viable.