Christiaan Neethling Barnard grew up in the Karoo town of Beaufort West, where his father was a minister. Studied medicine at the universities of Cape Town and Minnesota, where he made the switch from general surgery to cardiology and cardiothoracic (heart-lung) surgery. Barnard introduced open heart surgery and other pioneering surgical procedures to Groote Schuur, where he was senior cardiothoracic surgeon. Before performing a transplant on a human, he had experimented with the technique, mainly on dogs.

Washkansky, a diabetic, had incurable heart disease and faced certain death without the operation. At the time it was estimated he had an 80 per cent chance of survival. Barnard later wrote: "For a dying man it is not a difficult decision because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you would never accept such odds if there were no lion."

The donor heart came from Denise Darvall, a woman in her mid-twenties who was fatally wounded in a car crash. She died shortly after arriving at the hospital, but her heart was undamaged. The transplant operation took five hours. Washkansky died 18 days later from double pneumonia, the result of his suppressed immune system.

Barnard's second heart transplant patient, Philip Blaiberg, survived for 19 months. His fifth and sixth patients survived 13 and 24 years respectively.

Barnard stopped performing surgery in 1983 because of rheumatoid arthritis in his hands.

Previous Articles