BOSTON -- It made history overseas and now a very controversial medical procedure is coming to a Boston hospital.

Boston's Brigham & Women's Hospital is the first U.S. hospital approved to start performing face transplants.

The hospital said the operation is only for people who have severe facial disfiguration.

The procedure was first performed in 2005 for a French woman named Isabelle Dinoire, 38, who underwent the operation after she was mauled by her Labrador retriever dog. She received a new chin, nose and lips. The tissues were transplanted from a woman who was brain dead after committing suicide.

Only one other known face transplant has ever been performed, in China.

Now, Brigham & Women's is the first hospital in the United States to receive permission from the New England Organ Bank to perform the surgery.

The organ bank is the oldest independent organ procurement organization in the country and serves 12 transplant centers that perform all types of organ transplantation. It allocates organs for transplant regionally and nationally through the United Network for Organ Sharing's (UNOS) national network, according to its Web site.

The hospital will only consider candidates who have been severely disfigured by facial burns, trauma or skin cancer. To be eligible, they must already be kidney transplant patients because they are already on medication to prevent organ rejections.

Some critics question the procedure, saying face transplants are unethical because there can be a risk to a patient's life for an operation that is not life-saving.

The hospital will have a team in place to perform the transplants within the next few weeks, but it could be months or even years before a suitable donor and recipient are found.

The 176-year-old Brigham & Women's Hospital has many firsts in its long history. It was the first hospital to ever administer anesthesia during childbirth, in 1847, and the first polio victim was saved there using an "iron lung" in 1929. Researchers fertilized a human ovum in a test tube for the first time at the hospital in 1944 and the first successful human organ transplant, a kidney transplanted from one identical twin to another, took place there in 1954. The first heart transplant in New England was performed at BWH in 1984.