Dr Christiaan Barnard had
experimented for several years with animal heart transplants, with more than 50
dogs receiving transplanted hearts. With the availability of new breakthroughs
introduced by several pioneers, amongst them Norman Shumway, several
surgical teams were in a position to prepare for a human heart transplant.
Barnard had a patient willing to undergo the procedure, but as with other
surgeons, he needed a suitable donor.
He performed the world's first
human heart transplant operation on 3 December 1967, in an operation assisted
by his brother, Marius
Barnard; the operation lasted nine hours and used a team of thirty
people. The patient, Louis
Washkansky, was a 54-year-old grocer, suffering from diabetes and incurable heart disease. Barnard
later wrote, "For a dying man it is not a difficult decision because he
knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with
crocodiles, you will leap into the water, convinced you have a chance to swim
to the other side." The donor heart came from a young woman, Denise Darvall, who had
been rendered brain damaged in an accident on 2 December 1967, while crossing a
street in Cape Town.
Washkansky survived the operation
and lived for 18 days. However, he succumbed to pneumonia as he was taking Immunosuppressive
drugs. Though the first patient with the heart of another human being
survived for only a little more than two weeks, Barnard had passed a milestone
in a new field of life-extending surgery.
Research courtesy of Wikipedia
Images courtesy of Wikimedia under the Commons Agreement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Christiaan_Barnard.jpg
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