Shumway, Norman Edward (1923-2006), was an American surgeon who gained fame for his pioneering work in heart transplant operations. Shumway performed the first heart transplant on an adult patient in the United States on Jan. 6, 1968, about a month after Christiaan Barnard of South Africa performed the world’s first human heart transplant.
Shumway and his medical team developed and refined methods for heart transplant surgery by doing operations on animals. They found that the major danger in heart transplants was the body’s tendency to reject the new heart. Patients often died only days after the operation. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Shumway’s group improved the surgical techniques and established methods for measuring and treating rejection. About 80 percent of their patients who received heart transplants in the early 1980’s survived at least one year. All the patients selected to receive transplants would otherwise have died.
Shumway was born on Feb. 9, 1923, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He served on the faculty of Stanford University Medical School from 1958 to 1996. Shumway died on Feb. 10, 2006.
