Heart transplant

On 3 December 1967 surgeon Christiaan Barnard and his team at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town replaced the failing heart of 53-year-old Louis Washkansky with the heart of a young woman who died in a road accident. Washkansky lived 18 days before dying of pneumonia, but the operation proved that the idea could work.

Early transplant patients rarely survived long. Anti-rejection drugs developed later made the operation routine.

Context

The donor was Denise Darvall, a young woman fatally injured in a car accident. Washkansky, a grocer, had severe heart failure and diabetes. The operation took several hours, and he was given drugs to suppress his immune system, which left him open to infection.

He died of pneumonia on 21 December 1967, 18 days after surgery. The second patient, Philip Blaiberg, operated on in January 1968, lived for about 19 months, which helped persuade surgeons around the world to continue.

The surgery built on animal research and on experience from other centers. After a rush of operations in the late 1960s, many programs paused because of poor survival. Results improved decisively in the early 1980s with ciclosporin, an anti-rejection drug, and today heart transplants are an established treatment. The operation made headlines worldwide and prompted a wave of ethical debate about how death should be defined for organ donation.