THE woman who received the world’s first partial face transplant this week is eating, drinking and talking and is happy with her new features, her surgeons said yesterday.

When Isabelle Dinoire woke up 24 hours after the pioneering operation, she touched the skin that had been grafted around her nose, mouth and chin, looked at herself in a mirror and said: “Merci”, according to Bernard Devauchelle, who led the medical team.

Professor Devauchelle, head of the Department of Maxillofacial Surgery at Amiens University Hospital in northern France, told a press conference that the results had exceeded his expectations.

“She does not look as though she had a graft,” he said. “She just looks as though she has a wound.” Matching the skin colour and texture of the donor and recipient had also “surpassed our hopes”, the surgeon added.

Mme Dinoire, 38, a divorced mother of two teenage girls from Valenciennes, was severely disfigured in an attack by her labrador dog in May. It left her unable to talk, chew or drink. The dog, called Tania, was later put down, against the woman’s wishes.

“She doesn’t blame the dog,” Dr Sylvie Testelin, one of her surgeons, said. “The dog liked her. He tried to wake her up, or whatever. It was no more than an accident.”

Yesterday her daughter Lucie, 17, said that the attack came after her mother tried to commit suicide.

This cast doubt on a key aspect of the medical dossier: that the woman had the necessary psychological strength to cope with both a new face and a high-profile role in a surgical breakthrough.

The daughter’s account, though, was denied by Jean-Michel Dubernard, head of the Department of Transplantation Surgery at Lyons University Hospital, who is overseeing the postoperational treatment.

He said that Mme Dinoire had had an argument with her daughter, who had stormed out of the house to spend the night with her grandmother. “The woman was angry and took a sleeping pill to help her to sleep,” Professor Dubernard said.

“She did not try to commit suicide. She woke in the night and trod on her dog. That is how she was attacked.”

Mme Dinoire was transferred from Amiens to Professor Dubernard’s department in Lyons after the operation and was “well, psychologically and physically”, he said.

Professor Devauchelle said that the graft could not yet be declared a success as the woman faced a lifelong risk that her body would reject the new face.

Professor Dubernard, who carried out the world’s first hand transplant in 1988, brushed aside any ethical questions surrounding the face graft.He said: “The thinkers will have a lot to say about this, but my philosophy is very simple. We are doctors and we had a patient who was severely disfigured, who had difficulty talking and who dropped most of her food when she tried to eat because she had no lips.

“We had the chance to improve her appearance and to improve her quality of life, and the minute I saw her I had no hesitation about going ahead.”

A report from the Royal College of Surgeons in 2003 said that face transplants raised complex psychological and ethical issues. Nichola Rumsey, research director at the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England in Bristol, said: “People who believe that a face transplant is the only way they can achieve a decent quality of life are wrong. Research has shown there is no link between the degree of disfigurement and quality of life.”

Professor Dubernard rejected suggestions that his team had rushed to win the race to carry out a face transplant. “Do you really think that Professor Devauchelle was running frantically around Amiens looking for a suitable case and that all I wanted was to be first? No,” he said. “We were not interested in pulling off a coup. We were interested in our patient and in all the other people to whom this will offer hope.”

Just after midnight on Monday nine doctors began an operation to remove facial skin and tissue from a woman pronounced brain-dead at Lille University Hospital. Fifteen minutes later, in Amiens, eight surgeons, accompanied by nurses and anaesthetists, started preparing Mme Dinoire to receive the graft.

At 5am the operation in Lille was completed and the tissue transferred to Amiens. Professor Devauchelle’s team worked until 4pm to complete the graft.

“They did a sumptuous job,” Professor Dubernard said. “They were working on nerves the size of greenbean strings.”