First human heart transplant
- Date
- 3 December 1967
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa)
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
On 3 December 1967 surgeon Christiaan Barnard and a large team at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, performed the first human-to-human heart transplant, placing the heart of accident victim Denise Darvall into Louis Washkansky, a 55-year-old man dying of heart disease.
The transplanted heart functioned, and Washkansky regained consciousness, but he died of pneumonia after 18 days, his immune system weakened by the drugs used to suppress organ rejection. The operation captured global attention and demonstrated that cardiac transplantation was surgically feasible. Roughly a hundred heart transplants were attempted worldwide in 1968, though early survival rates were poor, and many surgeons paused the procedure until better immunosuppression became available. The later development of drugs such as ciclosporin in the late 1970s and 1980s greatly improved outcomes, establishing heart transplantation as an accepted treatment for end-stage heart failure. The 1967 operation remains a landmark in transplant surgery and in the medical understanding of organ rejection.
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Empires active in 3 December 1967
- Soviet Union1922 CE – 1991 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
- Dutch Empire1581 CE – 1975 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Green Revolution Transforms South Asian Agriculturec. 1966 (peak adoption mid-1960s onward)
- Apollo 11 Moon landing20 July 1969 (mission 16–24 July 1969)
- Intel Releases the 4004, the First Commercial Microprocessor1971
- Invention of the integrated circuit1958–1959
- Launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite4 October 1957
- The Apple II Launches the Personal Computer Era1977
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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