Heart that made history
IT was an operation that earned him acclaim, but the world’s first heart transplant also provoked hate mail and outspoken criticism of South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard 50 years ago.
“We did not realise that it would take the public by storm,” says Dene Friedmann, a specialist nurse on the cardiovascular team, standing in the same Cape Town operating theatre where the feat took place.
“There were people who wrote quite critical letters to Professor Barnard, horrible letters calling him ‘ the butcher’,” says Friedmann, now in her seventies. The insults rained. “I have heard of human vultures, but it is the first time I have saw one with a name on it,” said one letter dated just one month after the operation and sent from Illinois in the United States.
“You had the audacity to assume the authority of God by pretending to become the giver of life,” said another from Hong Kong.
The French magazine Paris Match summed up the ethical debate in a headline: “The battle of the heart. Do surgeons have the right?” But the scientific community welcomed the technical advance – the United States had also been seeking the accolade – and ordinary citizens sent congratulations.
Unlike today, there was no common legal definition of brain death and the surgical team did not want to be accused of removing a beating heart to give it to another human.
It was on the first floor of Groote Schuur Hospital on December 3, 1967 that Louis Washkansky received the donor heart of Denise Darvall, the 25- year- old victim of a road accident.
In the operating theatre Friedmann leaned in to assess Washkansky on the table.
“I looked into this empty chest with no heart in it. It was very scary,” she says.
In the room next door, Barnard ordered that Darvall’s ventilator be turned off. After about 12 minutes her heart stopped beating and it was quickly moved to the theatre where 53- yearold Washkansky awaited it.
“He did not want anybody to be able to say we took out a beating heart from a patient,” Friedmann says of Barnard, who died in 2001.
Coming as it did during the apartheid years race became a consideration.
The pioneering operation could in fact have been performed weeks earlier, when a coloured man’s heart became available.