First heart transplant: Dec. 3 1967

Health a Central
A 45-year-old South African surgeon who is a relative unknown in the world of cardiology begins an operation that will transform the treatment of heart disease and make him into an international celebrity.

Shortly after midnight, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, heading a team of 20 doctors, removes the heart from the body of a young woman named Denise Darvall--who had been hit by a car--and places it into a 53-year-old grocer, Louis Washkansky, who was dying of heart disease.

Barnard would later say that he wasn't sure the surgery was successful until five hours later, when he electrically shocked the transplanted heart and it started beating. Washkansky was soon able to speak and even walk a bit, but died only 18 days after the operation when he developed double pneumonia--a consequence of having his immune system suppressed so that his body wouldn't reject the new organ.

A month later, Barnard repeated the procedure on a 58-year-old dentist named Philip Blaiberg, giving him the heart of a young black man, Clive Haupt, who had died of a stroke--a very controversial decision in racially segregated South Africa, Blaiberg was kept in a sealed suite of hospital rooms for more than two months and was not given steroids--treatment that had weakened Washkansky. He managed to live for 19 months.
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