South African surgeons completed the world's third successful penis transplant on a man who went without his member for 17 years.
The 40-year-old patient, who is unnamed for ethical reasons, lost his penis due to complications from a traditional circumcision.
Finally, on April 21 this year, his organ was restored.
However, surgeons admit there is a color discrepancy between the organ and recipient - which will be fixed with medical tattooing later this year.
The operation was performed by the same team of medical experts who performed their first successful penis transplant in December 2014.
Now after a nearly 10-hour surgery at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town, the hospital is on the map again for being the first location to successfully do the procedure twice.
Within six months of the transplant, the man is expected to regain all urinary and reproductive functions.Professor André van der Merwe, head of Stellenbosch University's urology department led the lengthy operation and said the patient was doing well.
He said: 'He is certainly one of the happiest patients we have seen in our ward. He is doing remarkably well. There are no signs of rejection and all the reconnected structures seem to be healing well.'
Van der Merwe and his team completed the first successful penis transplant on December 11, 2014, then the second was completed in Boston in May 2016.
Professor van der Merwe had spent years experimenting on cadavers to see which nerves, blood vessels and other elements had to be joined to guarantee full function.
The procedure was performed as part of a pilot study to develop a penile transplant procedure that could be performed in a typical South African hospital.
The planning and preparation for the first study started back in 2010.
After extensive research Professor van der Merwe and his surgical team decided to use techniques developed for the first facial transplant.
'There are a number of men who would benefit from this operation but the issue is a lack of donors and also a lack of funding,' he told MailOnline in March 2015, when the procedure was made public.
A follow-up operation enabled the first patient to urinate normally, without the aid of a catheter, and the doctors said his overall confidence had risen considerably since the procedure.
