Christiaan Barnard

Christiaan Neethling Barnard was a cardiac surgeon, famous for performing the world's first successful human-to-human heart transplant.

Christiaan Neethling Barnard was born in the small town of Beaufort West, in the Western Cape, South Africa, on November 8, 1922. Son of a church pastor, one of his four brothers died from heart disease at the age of five, which probably had an influence in Chris' choice of profession.

In 1946 he graduated (MB, ChB) from the University of Cape Town. This was followed by his internship at the Groote Schuur Hospital.
He then served as a family physician in the Western Cape until 1951. He then moved back to Cape Town and worked at the City Hospital as a Senior Resident Medical Officer, and in the Department of Medicine at the Groote Schuur Hospital as a Registrar.
In 1953, he received the degree of Master of Medicine (MMed) from the University of Cape Town, and in the same year he was awarded a MD (Doctor of Medicine) degree from the same university for a dissertation on tuberculous meningitis. He was then appointed Registrar (resident) in the Department of Surgery, at the Groote Schuur Hospital.
In 1956, he received a scholarship for a two-year postgraduate training in cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. In 1958 he received a Master of Science in Surgery.

Following the first successful kidney transplant in 1953, in the United States, Barnard performed the first kidney transplant in South Africa in 1959. Barnard experimented for several years with animal heart transplants. More than 50 dogs received transplanted hearts, but typically died shortly afterward. With the availability of new breakthroughs introduced by several pioneers, amongst them Norman Shumway, several surgical teams were in a position to prepare for a human heart transplant. Barnard had a patient willing to undergo the procedure, but as with other surgeons, he needed a suitable donor.

Barnard performed the world's first human heart transplant operation on 3 December 1967, in an operation assisted by his brother, Marius Barnard, lasting nine hours and using a team of thirty people. The patient, Louis Wahkansky, was a 55 year old grocer, suffering from diabetes and an incurable heart disease.
The donor heart came from a young woman, Denise Darvall, who had been killed in a 2 December 1967 road accident while crossing a street in Cape Town. After securing permission from Darvall's father to use her heart, Barnard performed the transplant.

Washkansky survived the operation and lived for eighteen(18) days. However, he succumbed to pneumonia induced by the immunosuppressive drugs he was taking.

Barnard became an international superstar overnight and was celebrated around the world for his daring accomplishment. He was later to be also the first to perform a heterotopic heart transplant, an operation that he himself devised.
Barnard continued to perform heart transplants. A transplant operation was conducted on 2 January 1968, and the patient, Philip Blaiberg, survived for 19 months. Mrs Dorothy Fisher was given a new heart in 1969 and became Barnard's longest surviving patient. She lived for 24 years after the transplant.
He was also the first surgeon to attempt xenograft transplantation in a human patient, while attempting to save the life of a young girl unable to leave artificial life support after a second aortic valve replacement. He was later accused of wrongdoing by her parents.

He was loved by his patients throughout the world, hundreds of whom were treated free of charge, and hated by many others who were jealous of his instant success. He was accused by some colleagues in the profession of "stealing" the idea and the opportunity to perform the first heart transplant. Often considered a spoiled and arrogant personality, he was also regarded as kind and considerate by others.

Barnard was an outspoken opponent of South Africa's laws of apartheid, and was not afraid to criticize his nation's government, although he had to temper his remarks to some extent in order to travel abroad.
Rather than leaving his homeland, he used his fame in order to campaign for a change in the law. After Denise Darvall provided the means for the very first heart transplant, Barnard transplanted her kidney into a 10 year old mixed race boy. The donor for the second heart transplant was also of mixed race.
Christian's brother, Dr. Marius Barnard, went into politics, and was elected to the legislature on an anti-apartheid platform. However, he later claimed that the reason he never won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was probably because he was a "white South African".

In 1983, because of the rheumatoid arthritis that affected his hands and thus prevented him from operating, he retired as Head of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery in Cape Town. He then spent two years as the Scientist-In-Residence at the Oklahoma Transplantation Institute in the USA and acted as consultant for other institutions.

He divided the remainder of his years between Austria, where he established the Chris Barnard Foundation, dedicated to helping underprivileged children throughout the world, and his game-farm in Beaufort West, in South Africa. He wrote a cardiology text, and several novels, including a thriller about organ transplantation. Earlier, he had penned his autobiography, One Life, which sold worldwide and whose royalties he generously donated to the Chris Barnard Fund, for the support of research in heart disease and organ transplantation in Cape Town. Twenty years later, he traced his subsequent life in The Second Life.

Chris Barnard died in Cyprus, where he was on holiday, on 2 September 2001, shortly before he was to complete 79 years of life. An autopsy revealed his death to be caused by an acute asthma attack.