Virginia Blackburn

IN THIS newspaper yesterday my colleague Ann Widdecombe mentioned the huge number of changes that have taken place in her lifetime, among them heart transplants. This reminded me of an occasion a few years ago when I met the distinguished American heart surgeon (and now television star) Dr Mehmet Oz. It was one of the most fascinating chats I’ve had in years and the gist of it was this. “The heart is coiled like a serpent, waiting to jump out at you,” Oz began (you can see why he became a television star) before telling me all about the pioneering work carried out in the early half of the 20th century by doctors who realised that they would be able to operate on a heart if they could find some way of keeping the blood circulating around the body.

One of the early ways of achieving this was by using two people: the patient and a volunteer. The two would be linked up and the volunteer’s blood would be used to keep the patient alive, except of course that this was so dangerous it often didn’t and both patient and volunteer would die, leaving the doctor with a 200 per cent fatality rate.

Oz met some of these pioneering surgeons when he was a young man and they told him that the worst of it came when both died and yet the doctor had to go on to perform the same operation on someone else the next day. The volunteer, incidentally, was almost invariably the patient’s mother because no one else would undertake such a risk.

Heart transplant surgery has developed beyond those surgeons’ wildest dreams since then and there are now issues those men would never even have thought of. One is this. Oz told me HEARTFELT: The dashing surgeon Dr Oz THERE are some professions which, rightly or wrongly, have a somewhat naff reputation and estate agency is one of them. Well, every estate agent in the country, especially the male ones, can wake up today hugging themselves with glee. Angelina Jolie is dating one of their number. Now if Brad could just hook up with an actuary, joy would be unconfined.