Christiaan Barnard

Christiaan Neethling Barnard was a South African cardiac surgeon who captivated global attention when he performed the first human heart transplant in medical history. The son of a Dutch Reformed pastor in the arid Karoo, Barnard trained in medicine at the University of Cape Town and studied open-heart surgery at the University of Minnesota under pioneer C. Walton Lillehei.

On December 3, 1967, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, Barnard led a thirty-man surgical team through a tense nine-hour operation. He transplanted the heart of Denise Darvall, a young woman tragically declared brain-dead following an automobile accident, into Louis Washkansky, a 54-year-old grocer dying of terminal heart disease. When an electric shock restarted the donor heart inside Washkansky's chest, medical history was made. Although Washkansky succumbed to pneumonia eighteen days later due to immunosuppression, Barnard's second patient, Philip Blaiberg, survived for 19 months in good health. Barnard instantly became a global celebrity, pioneering heterotopic 'piggyback' heart transplants and advocating against apartheid.