#06 Science in History
3rd December 1967
It’s 1967 and in Cape Town, South Africa, Louis Washkansky becomes the first recipient of a human heart. The 54-year-old grocer’s diseased heart was replaced with a healthy heart from 25-year-old Denise Darvall.
Denise and her mother had been crossing a road when a car driven by a drunk driver ran into them. Denise was declared brain dead on arriving at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town (her mother had died instantly).
Dr Christiaan Barnard and a team of surgeons, including his brother Marcus, made history in the early hours of Sunday 3 December. After a gruelling 5-hour operation, they had succeeded in performing the world's first human-to-human heart transplant.
Washkansky passed away on 31st December - nearly three weeks after his operation. Washkansky succumbed to double pneumonia acquired because of a compromised immune system following a course of immunosuppressant medication.
Up till now, over 50,000 heart transplants have been performed across the world since Barnard's procedure - over 30,000 of them in the United States.
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