the first human heart transplant happened on 3 december 1967.
the first human heart transplant happened on 3 december 1967.
when did the first human heart transplant happen?
3 december 1967
the heart was a major prize for transplant surgeons. but over and above rejection issues, the heart deteriorates within minutes of death, so any operation would have to be performed at great speed. the development of the heart-lung machine was also needed. lung pioneer james hardy was prepared to attempt a human heart transplant in 1964, but when a premature failure of comatose boyd rush's heart caught hardy with no human donor, he used a chimpanzee heart, which beat in his patient's chest for approximately one hour and then failed. the first partial success was achieved on 3 december 1967, when christiaan barnard of cape town, south africa, performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant with patient louis washkansky as the recipient. washkansky survived for eighteen days amid what many saw as a distasteful publicity circus. the media interest prompted a spate of heart transplants. over a hundred were performed in 1968–1969, but almost all the people died within 60 days. barnard's second patient, philip blaiberg, lived for 19 months.
organ transplantation
in what turned out to be a four-way race between south african cardiac surgeon dr. christiaan barnard and americans norman shumway and richard lower, kantrowitz prepared for a potential human heart transplant by transplanting hearts in 411 dogs over a five-year period together with members of his surgical team. on june 29, 1966, by which time kantrowitz had completed the necessary technical research, one of his patients was an 18-day-old infant who very much needed a new heart. he and his team had located an anecephalic baby whose parents agreed to let her be the donor. due to disagreements with senior staffers howard joos and harry weiss, kantrowitz was forced to wait until cardiac death (instead of the more modern use of brain death) to retrieve the donor heart, which was found to be useless. according to the "every second counts: the race to transplant the first human heart" (2006), kantrowitz did not know at the time that the donor parents in oregon both expected and wanted their baby's heart to be taken before it stopped beating (anecephalic babies typically live 24 to 48 hours). barnard performed the first human-to-human heart transplant with an adult donor and recipient on december 3, 1967 at groote schuur hospital in cape town, south africa.
adrian kantrowitz