Barnard, Christiaan Neethling (1922-2001), a South African surgeon, performed the first human heart transplant in history. On Dec. 3, 1967, he directed a 30-man medical team that performed the historic surgery in Cape Town, South Africa. The surgeons removed the healthy heart of a 25-year-old woman who had died after an automobile accident. They placed the heart in the chest of 55-year-old Louis Washkansky, whose own heart was damaged. Washkansky died of a lung infection 18 days later.
On Nov. 25, 1974, Barnard performed his 11th heart transplant. But in this operation, unlike earlier ones, Barnard did not remove the patient’s damaged heart. He joined the implanted donor heart to the patient’s heart, thereby providing a “double pump” for the circulatory system. This technique had never before been used with a human being, but it did not prove as useful as Barnard had hoped.
Barnard was born on Nov. 8, 1922, in Beaufort West, South Africa. He studied at the University of Cape Town Medical School and received advanced training in surgery at the University of Minnesota. He wrote books on health, medicine, and South Africa, and an autobiography, Christiaan Barnard: One Life (1970). He died on Sept. 2, 2001.
