Marius Barnard: The brother who scoffed at heart transplant’s fame
1927-2014
MARIUS Barnard, who has died in Hermanus at the age of 87, was having a party on Saturday night December 2 1967 and was “already well wined and dined” when he got a call from his brother, Chris, telling him to get to Groote Schuur Hospital because a donor had been found for Louis Washkansky.
By 7am the next day he was one of the most famous doctors in the world.
In his autobiography, published three years ago, he said he never understood why the world’s first heart transplant was treated as “such an epoch-making event”. It was “no great medical breakthrough” because kidney and liver transplants had already established that it was clinically feasible to perform successful human organ transplants, he said.
After initially enjoying the limelight, Marius, far more modest and low-key than the publicity-hungry Chris, soon grew tired of it. His elder brother, whom he heartily disliked while acknowledging his debt to him, “could not get enough”, he commented acerbically.
Marius, himself a cardiac specialist, admitted that cardiac surgeons in the US were better qualified to perform the first heart transplant than the South Africans led by Chris. They had done more research and had better equipment.
He never quite understood how it happened that way, but denied the accusation that the Groote Schuur team had raced to be first.
They had only one motivation, and that was to save their patient.
Marius felt too many heart transplants were carried out too quickly after the first one. Within two years there had been 159 transplants — but only 21 recipients survived beyond a few days. The Groote Schuur transplant unit had a far higher success rate than others, including those in the US, and Marius himself held the record for the longest surviving heart transplant patient. A 14-year-old boy he operated on in 1979 was still alive 32 years later.
In an interview in 1970, Marius said most transplant teams lacked the experience or expertise to do the operation, which in many cases were not necessary because of advances in coronary artery surgery, which was much safer. He suggested that patients were dying because of the spurious importance attached to heart transplants. For this reason, among many others, he thought the celebrity status conferred on the first heart transplant was a curse.
Marius Barnard was born in Beaufort West on November 3 1927, the youngest of five sons of a Dutch Reformed Church missionary. There wasn’t much money. They grew up with no running hot water and a bucket in an outhouse for a toilet. He was top of his class and head boy and won a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Cape Town, a lifelong dream.
After graduating, he practised as a family doctor in Salisbury, Rhodesia, for 10 years before specialising in cardiac surgery and joining the department at Groote Schuur, which was headed by Chris, who was five years older.
He found working under Chris “utter hell”. The only reason he didn’t leave for Durban, where a new cardiac unit was being established, was that his family were settled and happy in Cape Town. He made it clear he thought Chris’s behaviour in theatre “unacceptable” and was soon banned from assisting him. For 13 years they worked in separate theatres until Marius decided that the discord between them was harming the unit.
He left Groote Schuur Hospital in 1980, never to return.
In 1972 he agreed to address an anti-apartheid student meeting in the Cape Town city hall after being warned by the government that he would be fired from his job at Groote Schuur if he did so. He read the threatening letter out at the meeting. His international fame protected him, although he was humiliatingly rebuked by a delegation that included government leaders, Chris and the principal of UCT, Sir Richard Luyt.
In 1980 he accepted nomination as a parliamentary candidate for the safe Progressive Federal Party seat of Parktown and was elected unopposed. He was “bored to death” by parliament and quit in 1989 after a forgettable career in politics.
During the ’70s and ’80s he paid frequent visits to Romania and Poland behind the Iron Curtain, where his services as a heart surgeon were highly prized.
One of the things he was most proud of was pioneering critical illness insurance in 1983, after witnessing the devastating financial impact of serious illness on some of
Cardiac surgeons in the US were better qualified to perform the first heart transplant
his patients. He spent a lot of time travelling the country and the world, including the US, Britain and China, promoting the concept.
In 1997 he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. Two years ago, at the age of 85, he wrote a book, I Hate My Prostate, about his ultimately losing battle with the disease and to create awareness of the need for regular check-ups.
This was his “last hurrah”, he said in an interview.
He is survived by his wife of more than 60 years, Inez, and three children. — Chris Barron