Christiaan Barnard

Our society has become secularized.

Over a hundred years ago, in the Western world, most societies were Christian, and there was a consensus of what was ethical and what was not ethical.

There's been a loss of authority and lack of societal consensus on morals.

So now we need ethics and the universities to answer these questions, which were before answered by, say, the Church, 'cause it was a mo-- homogenous society.

They could do what they want.

Doctors could experiment.

Well, you had Christian societies, so the Christians really...

It was the church who, uh, regulated things.

But I came to South Africa in 1967 to study psychiatry.

And that was the year that Chris Barnett did the open heart operation.

So everybody wanted to become a doctor.

And instead of having 100 applications to the beach, they had 700.

Before that, various forms of manual resuscitation had been attempted for centuries, with varying degrees of success and some approaches that seem strange by modern standards.

Heart transplantation, the process of replacing a failing heart with a healthy donor heart, was first performed by Christian Barnard in Cape Town, South Africa, on December 3rd, 1967.

The operation made headlines around the world.

Barnard became an instant celebrity, photographed with movie stars and interviewed on every major television network.

Marlene also remembering the birth of the Rosenkiewicz sextuplets in 1974.

She says my niece was born at around about the same time as was Dr. Chris Barnard's son, she writes.

Marlene, that's a bit of trivia.

I didn't know.

And we won for best presentation.

And the judge who awarded us this, um, award was none other than Dr. Christian Barnard, who, who was one of the leaders of the, uh, heart transplant.

And so I, I knew Judy very well, and I read the o- we read the other day in the newspaper that, uh, she had-- She was a little bit older than I am.

She was, like, in her early eighties at the time.

There's a strong possibility that Philip Blyberg, a Cape Town dentist, will undergo a heart transplant operation soon.

The operation will be performed by Professor Chris Barnard and the team of doctors who did the world's first heart transplant operation a few weeks ago.

An extremely reliable source reported that a suitable donor has been found, but he said a religious problem still has to be worked out before the donor's family will consent to give his heart to Blyberg.

The entire transplant team has been put on the alert.

While this particular surgery was unsuccessful due to an unexpected congenital defect in the patient's heart, four years later, on November 9, 1955, Dr. Russell M. Nelson performed the first successful open-heart procedure at Salt Lake General Hospital in Utah.

Then, a decade later, on December 3, 1967, South African surgeon Dr. Christian Bernard used similar equipment to perform history's first successful human-to-human heart transplant at Grootschur Hospital, Cape Town, transplanting the heart of a 25-year-old car accident victim, Denise Darville, into 55-year-old congestive heart failure patient, Louis Washkansky.

While Washkansky altered died 18 days later of pneumonia brought on by anti-rejection drugs, today this once-experimental procedure is commonplace, with around 5,000 heart transplants being performed every single year.

The development of heart-lung machines, mechanical ventilators, and heart and lung transplant procedures greatly complicated the definition of death.

Think about the late 1960s.

In 1967, Christian Barnard performs the world's first successful human to human heart transplant.

An

incredible medical breakthrough.