Christiaan Barnard Quotes
It is infinitely better to transplant a heart than to bury it to be devoured by worms.
Cooper, David K. C. Christiaan Barnard: The Surgeon Who Dared. Fonthill Media, 2017.
He had just published a paper for the American Association for the Advancement of Science reporting on his development of techniques to transplant arteries from one animal to another. This was the beginning of transplantation. However, immediately he envisioned the possibility of transplanting all organs in humans including the heart. It would take half a century for Dr. Christian Barnard to actually transplant a heart, but the idea was not novel. It had been a goal since Flexner made this quotation.
Christiaan Neethling Barnard was a South African cardiac surgeon who performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant operation. On 3 December 1967, Barnard transplanted the heart of accident-victim Denise Darvall into the chest of 54-year-old Louis Washkansky, with Washkansky regaining full consciousness and being able to easily talk with his wife, before dying 18 days later of pneumonia, largely brought on by the anti-rejection drugs that suppressed his immune system. Barnard had told Mr. and Mrs. Washkansky that the operation had an 80% chance of success, an assessment which has been criticised as misleading. Barnard's second transplant patient, Philip Blaiberg, whose operation was performed at the beginning of 1968, lived for a year and a half and was able to go home from the hospital.
