1922 - 2001

Christiaan Barnard made medical history when, in 1967 he performed the first human to human transplant. His approach to the human heart changed this area of medical procedures forever and for Barnard himself, he achieved lifelong renown.

He was born on November 8th, 1922, the son of a poor Afrikaner preacher and his wife, in Beaufort West, a town on South Africa's Great Karroo plateau. He had a brother who died of heart failure and for the rest of his life he was convinced that he could have been able to help him had he not died as an infant. He walked five miles every day in order to study at the University of Cape Town and he did his internship and residency at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town before becoming a family physician in Ceres, Western Cape.

In 1951 he returned to Cape Town to work at two hospitals and complete his Masters, which he attained in 1953. From 1956 he attended the University of Minnesota to study general surgery and while in Minneapolis he became interested in cardiology after helping researchers working on a heart and lung machine. This made him decide to switch from general surgery to cardiology and heart-lung surgery as his speciality instead.

In 1958 he became a cardiothoracic surgeon at the Groote Schuur Hospital, where he established the hospital's first heart unit and introduced heart surgery and other pioneering surgical procedures. He also lectured at the University of Cape Town and in 1961 was appointed head of cardiothoracic surgery at the University.

Over the years Barnard experimented with animal heart transplantations, mostly with dogs and following the first successful kidney transplant in 1954, in 1959 Barnard performed the first kidney transplant in South Africa.

In 1967 while Barnard was senior cardiothoracic surgeon at the Groote Schuur Hospital, he had a patient suffering from diabetes and an incurable heart disease. Louis Washkansky had two choices; he could either wait for certain death or risk transplant surgery with an 80 percent chance of success. He chose the surgery. Barnard stated later: - 'For a dying man it is not a difficult decision because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you would never accept such odds if there were no lion.'

The heart used for the transplant came from a young woman, Denise Darvall, in her mid-20s, who was fatally injured in a motor accident in December 1967. She had the same blood type as Washkansky and died shortly after arriving at the hospital, but her heart was still healthy. On December 3rd, 1967, in a nine-hour operation, using a thirty-person team, Barnard successfully replaced Washkansky's heart with a healthy heart. He knew it was a success when he first applied the electrodes and it resumed beating. In his excitement at his achievement, Barnard telephoned his head doctor in the middle of the night to give him the news, but the doctor was unimpressed, believing that the transplant was on an ape. When he realized the truth that the transplant was on a human being, he fired him, but eventually Barnard managed to explain that the patient was alive.

Washkansky only lived for 18 days more, he died of double pneumonia as a result of his suppressed immune system, however in a new field of life-extending surgery this was a milestone and medical history was made. Christiaan Barnard stated later: - 'On Saturday I was a surgeon in South Africa, very little known. On Monday, I was world-renowned.' He was surprised at the publicity and the excitement the operation had generated and explained that he had not even informed the hospital superintendent what they were doing.

In January 1968 he performed another heart transplant and this time his patient survived for nineteen months. Although, even now, life is only prolonged by an average of two years in transplant cases, Barnard believed that the operations were worth the cost. His second transplant patient told a journalist that that he found the operation worth it when he came out of anesthesia – 'I saw I could breathe freely. Life was different, life was better.'

Barnard held the view that Doctors often make the mistake of thinking their job is to prolong life. In his opinion, this was wrong, he believed that their job is to give a better quality of life and he even advocated passive euthanasia in terminal cases, admitting that he had followed this practice himself in severe cases, including his own mother.

'What society does not accept euthanasia? I cannot believe a God, a God of love and compassion would allow that. I would not preach the practice of death, but there is a place for that too. In some cases death is often better treatment.'

He did not mind using pain-killing drugs, which might reduce lifespan and did not condemn doctors who injected lethal substances into terminally ill patients. However he was against abortion and a dedicated antiapartheid activist, creating turmoil in 1968 when he transplanted the heart of a mixed-race man into a white dentist. He was a controversial figure, constantly clashing with the South African authorities over issues of apartheid and his views on euthanasia.

Barnard's second great achievement came about almost by accident. In 1974 he performed a heart transplant on a man which failed and he died. The man's son was waiting outside the operating theatre and when he was told that the replacement heart had failed, he wanted to know why Barnard had not replaced his father's original heart. At the time, Barnard gave some explanation to ease the young man's grief, but later that night he began to ask himself the same question. Why didn't he put the old heart back or, in fact, was it necessary to remove it at all?

So, the idea of the 'double pump' was born and on November 25th, 1974, he once again surprised the world by placing a second heart in a patient without removing the first one. He reasoned that if the new one was rejected, the old one could keep the person going for some time.

Barnard was successful, very handsome and relatively young during his early successes, being only in his mid-forties. He was extremely popular wherever he went, and the media loved him. He was received by the Pope in Rome, entertained by President Johnson in America and had many female admirers, including those in the world of entertainment. He spent as much time in nightclubs as he did in the operating theatre and thoroughly enjoyed his popularity.

He continued to perform heart transplants as well as pioneering new techniques, including artificial valves and using animal hearts for emergency treatment in 1977. Between 1967 and 1973 he performed ten orthotropic transplants and between 1975 and 1983 Barnard, or his group, performed forty-eight heterotrophic transplants.

He had been troubled by rheumatoid arthritis since he was young and in 1983, due to the advancing stiffness in his hands he was forced into retirement from surgery. He went to live on his 32,000-acre sheep farm and game reserve in the Karroo region where he grew up, reintroducing wildebeest springbok.

In 1986, he caused irreparable damage to his reputation when he agreed to promote an alleged anti-ageing cream Glycel. He received a great deal of money for his endorsement of the product, but the Food and Drug Administration withdrew it from the US market the following year.

He was more successful with his literary efforts, writing a cardiology text and other scientific books, a sensational autobiography and several novels, the last of which was a thriller 'The Donor', dealing with the transplant of a pig's heart into a human. He never stopped working and in later life spent much of his time at the Baptist Medical Centre in Oklahoma where he tried to find a way to slow down the ageing process – unsuccessfully.

Barnard was married three times; his first wife was a nurse, Alleta Louw, whom he met when he was a doctor in Ceres. She helped support him while he was developing his career as a surgeon and they had one son, Andre, who reputedly died from an overdose at the age of 31. They were divorced after 21 years in 1969 and he married his second wife, Barbara Zoellner the following year. They were divorced in 1982 and he married again in 1988 to Karin Setzkorn, divorcing once more in 2000. He had five children spanning 32 years, including Andre, three more sons and one daughter.

Soon after his retirement, the heart unit at the Groote Schuur hospital ran into financial difficulties and there was the possibility that it would have to close down. He assisted the hospital in setting up a museum there.

Christiaan Barnard was a man of energy and conviction, which at times, made him appear too sure of himself and he certainly had a healthy ego. However, these were the qualities that ensured a dramatic breakthrough in a prohibitively complicated field of medicine. He believed that 'the individual is the brain, not the heart' and that 'the heart has always been an organ without any mystique attached to it - merely a primitive pump'.

When asked if he had any regrets about his life he said that there were two; that he had tarnished his reputation by endorsing the anti-ageing cream, and not fighting harder against South Africa's policy of apartheid 'I opposed it whenever I could, but I didn't stick my neck out'. Other than that, he said he had no complaints about the ups and downs of his life,
"When I die, I can say, 'Thank you God, I have had a great opportunity in life' ".

Dr. Christiaan Barnard died of an acute asthma attack on September 2nd, 2001, whilst on holiday in Paphos, Cyprus. He was 78.

Dr Christiaan Barnard