On the third of December, nineteen sixty-seven, Christiaan Barnard performed the first human-to-human heart transplant at in Cape Town. The donor was a twenty-five-year-old woman fatally injured in a car accident. The recipient was Lewis Washkansky, a fifty-three-year-old grocer dying of chronic heart disease. How long did he live?
Eighteen days, and the heart was not what failed. Lung infection and pneumonia took Washkansky’s life, while the transplanted heart continued to function normally until he died. That split is the whole early history of the field: the surgery worked and the immune system, suppressed enough to accept the organ, left the patient open to everything else.
Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant on another human being on the third of December, nineteen sixty-seven, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. He had studied medicine at the University of Cape Town and pursued further heart training in the United States.
The techniques were not his own. Barnard employed transplantation methods initially developed by American researchers in the nineteen fifties. The key precedent belongs to , who achieved the first successful heart transplant in a dog at Stanford in nineteen fifty-eight.
The operation moved a heart from a twenty-five-year-old woman fatally injured in a car accident into Lewis Washkansky, a fifty-three-year-old South African grocer dying from chronic heart disease. Washkansky lived eighteen days. Lung infection and pneumonia killed him, and his new heart went on functioning normally until he died.
Over the next twenty-five years, improved drugs such as dramatically reduced by suppressing the immune system, and survival rates rose with them. Surgeons have now carried out more than thirty thousand heart transplants in the United States and more than fifty thousand worldwide. The remaining constraint is supply: more than eighty thousand people in the United States await transplants, nearly four thousand of them a heart.
wat. The new heart kept beating for eighteen days and was still beating properly when everything around it gave out.
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Surgeons have since carried out more than thirty thousand heart transplants in the United States and more than fifty thousand worldwide, which makes eighteen days the starting point of a routine procedure.
How do we know?
The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, run under the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, marked the anniversary with an account of the operation and what followed it.
What is still unknown
A short anniversary notice from a transplant network. It records the operation and the survival figures without addressing the controversy that surrounded this particular case.
Learn something?
Where to next
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