Christiaan Barnard
1922 – 2001 · South Africa
Known for: South African surgeon who performed the world's first human heart transplant
“He showed that a human heart could pass from one life into another.”
Biography
Christiaan Barnard grew up in Beaufort West, a dry town in the Cape Province, where his father served as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church among mixed race congregations and the family lived on very little. One of his brothers, Abraham, was a blue baby who died at the age of three of a heart defect, a loss that stayed with him. He matriculated in 1940, took his medical degree at the University of Cape Town in 1945, and after an internship at Groote Schuur Hospital worked as a country doctor in Ceres. Returning to Cape Town, he earned a doctorate with a dissertation on tuberculous meningitis and began the animal experiments that would make his name in surgery.
Working with dogs, Barnard traced the infant condition of intestinal atresia to an inadequate blood supply in the womb, reproduced it experimentally, and showed that the diseased segment had to be removed rather than simply rejoined. The technique saved ten babies in Cape Town and was taken up by surgeons in Britain and the United States. In December 1955 he travelled to the University of Minnesota, where he encountered the heart lung machine and transferred to the open heart service of Walt Lillehei; he returned to South Africa in 1958 to head experimental surgery at Groote Schuur. On 3 December 1967 he led the team that transplanted the heart of Denise Darvall, killed in a road accident, into Louis Washkansky, a fifty four year old grocer. Washkansky woke, spoke with his wife and lived eighteen days before dying of pneumonia brought on by the drugs that suppressed his immune system.
The operation made Barnard famous overnight and opened a field that other surgeons had been approaching for years. His second patient, Philip Blaiberg, went home from hospital and lived a year and a half; results improved as immune suppression came to be better understood. Rheumatoid arthritis in his hands ended his operating career, and he retired as head of cardiothoracic surgery in Cape Town in 1983. Not all of his later ventures were well judged: in 1986 he lent his name to an expensive skin cream sold against ageing, whose American approval was withdrawn soon afterwards. He founded the Christiaan Barnard Foundation for disadvantaged children and died on 2 September 2001, aged seventy eight, after an asthma attack.