When and where was the first heart transplant, and who performed it?
The heart was a major prize for transplant surgeons. But, as well as rejection issues the heart deteriorates within minutes of death so any operation would have to be performed at great speed. The development of the heart-lung machine was also needed. Lung pioneer James Hardy attempted a human heart transplant in 1964, but a premature failure of the recipient’s heart caught Hardy with no human donor, he used a chimpanzee heart which failed very quickly. The first success was achieved in December 1967 by Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town, Louis Washkansky survived for eighteen days amid what many saw as a distasteful publicity circus. The media interest prompted a spate of heart transplants. Over a hundred were performed in 1968-69, but almost all the patients died within sixty days. As mentioned, it was the advent of cyclosporine that altered transplants from research surgery to live-saving treatment. In 1968 surgical pioneer Denton Cooley performed seventeen transplants including the fi
