Heartbreaker
Fifty years ago today, Chris Barnard performed the first successful human heart transplant. He is remembered as much for his jet-set lifestyle as his exceptional contribution to medicine
As the mail ship sailed towards Cape Town on the morning of December 3 1967, a Sunday, Ann Washkansky got a phone call to say that her husband, Louis, had a new heart. Christiaan Neethling Barnard — who took massive risks performing the world’s first human heart transplant — catapulted himself and South African medicine into the spotlight with that feat 50 years ago. Susan Vosloo, Barnard’s friend and Africa’s first woman cardiothoracic surgeon, said: “He took a step that nobody else was prepared to take at the time.” By then Barnard, born in Beaufort West in 1922, had done many open-heart surgeries. He said: “The only time I realised something was different was when I looked down into the patient and saw no heart. You cannot imagine how lonely I felt at that moment.”
When the transplanted heart started beating on its own, the team were jubilant. Barnard extended a blood-soaked glove over Washkansky’s chest to shake the hand of his chief assistant, Rodney Hewitson.
“We made it! Jesus, it’s going to work!” he said to Hewitson, a brilliant surgeon who later operated with Barnard on many successful heart transplants at Groote Schuur Hospital.
Hewitson responded: “It’s early days yet.” Calm and unassuming, unlike the mercurial Barnard, he went home to his family and had a quiet Sunday.
His son John Hewitson, who performed South Africa’s first lung transplant, said: “I was 13 and it was quite common for my father to be out all night at the hospital. He said nothing about what had happened. Only on Monday at school I started hearing
The only time I realised something was different was when I looked down into the patient and saw no heart Chris Barnard On his first heart transplant operation