Exploring the many faces of Dr Chris Barnard
Professor Chris Barnard was multifaceted, writes Beverley Roos-Muller
CHRIS Barnard was easily the most beautiful man I have ever seen. The black-andwhite photos taken after his first heart transplant in Cape Town in 1967 do not do him justice. He had striking green eyes, golden skin and sculpted features, and that beauty added to his immense celebrity. Yet it would also cause him, and others, heartbreak.
There was a time when he was easily one of the most recognisable men on the planet. Yet, 50 years on, many of the young people I speak to barely remember him apart from some dim memory of him being the first surgeon to transplant a beating heart. It was a bold, brave and momentous event. The reason it had taken so long was not that there were no other skilled surgeons in the world, but that there was no heart surgeon with Barnard’s drive and willingness to take calculated risks. These qualities, together with his great skill, made it possible for him to make medical history.
Theatre sister Tollie Lambrechts remembers the moment when Barnard placed his hands inside Louis Washkansky’s chest and lifted out his old, diseased heart before replacing it with the donor heart of a young woman. Denise Darvall had been fatally wounded in a traffic accident. “The cavity left behind was enormous,” Lambrechts said. “This was something few people had ever seen, a person without a heart, being kept alive by a machine only eight steps away.”
Barnard had an excellent surgical and support team, including his brother Marius, but he was unquestionably the captain of this world-first event.
I recall how, as a young journalist, I travelled to Cape Town by train the morning after that momentous day in December 1967 and saw out of the window huge headlines shouting about the world’s first heart transplant. I later met several of his surviving patients, including Dr Philip Blaiberg and the longest survivor, Dorothy Fischer, who lived for 13 years with her new heart.
Importantly, what is sometimes overlooked in all the hullabaloo about his celebrity status is just how good a scientist he was. It is a shame that he and the other (American) heart transplant surgeons who soon followed him were not awarded the Nobel Prize, especially as Barnard’s transplant patients had by far the greatest survival records.
Yet the work the “man with the golden hands” (ironically, they were to become crippled with arthritis) was most proud of was not his first heart transplant but the hundreds of hours he poured into saving children’s lives, operating all day and then often spending night after night at a child’s bedside.
His colleagues recalled that this often meant the difference between life and death for those children.
He was born into a family that was not only poor but outcast; his father ministered to the coloured community in Beaufort West and earned only a quarter of the salary of the dominee of a white congregation. He and his brothers were mocked and ostracised as children, and he grew up repulsed by colour segregation and discrimination, which made his relationship with the apartheid government, keen to cash in on this prized South African, deeply uneasy and even acrimonious. His first and subsequent marriages broke down at least in part over his fame and his wild attractiveness to women. Perhaps his most remembered affair was with the beautiful actress Gina Lollobrigida, but she was far from the only one. Yet he would die, asthmatic and alone, in 2001 while on holiday.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first transplant, author JamesBrent Styan has produced a highly readable and informative book about one of the most remarkable men this country has produced. Once Professor Chris Barnard was a household name all over the world, and he should be remembered. This book will help refresh his place in history. Heartbreaker is available in English and Afrikaans.