Christiaan Barnard was the South African surgeon who performed the first human heart transplant. This historic operation took place on December 3, 1967. Barnard removed the healthy heart of a young woman who had been fatally wounded in an automobile accident. He transplanted her heart into the chest of Louis Washkansky, a 55-year-old man whose heart was failing. Washkansky lived for 18 days with the transplanted heart.
Although Washkansky died of pneumonía soon after the transplant, the operation was considered a success—Washkansky's new heart beat strongly until the end. Barnard performed his second heart transplant operation a month after the first one. This time, the recipient of the transplanted heart lived for 18 months. Barnard continued doing transplant operations with critically ill patients. His innovative surgical procedures included another first. In 1974, he transplanted a second heart in a human being. The hearts were linked together, forming a kind of double pump to circulate blood throughout the body.
Christiaan Barnard was born on November 8, 1922, in a small town called Beaufort West, South Africa. His father was a minister and the family was quite poor. Barnard's mother had high expectations of her children and urged them to work hard and strive to be the best in their classes. Barnard studied hard and was admitted to medical school in Cape Town, South Africa. He received advanced training in heart surgery at the University of Minnesota in the United States. It was in 1958 that Barnard returned to South Africa and introduced the revolutionary new technique of operating directly on the heart—the procedure called open-heart surgery.
Barnard retired as a surgeon in 1983. The effects of chronic arthritis eventually made it difficult for him to operate.
