He♥rt Of The Matter

New book celebrates one of the great achievements in South African medical history – the first heart transplant

Just over 50 years ago, on 3 December 1967, Christiaan Barnard and a team of South African medical specialists did what was considered to be impossible and performed the world’s first successful human-to-human heart transplant. Barnard’s success was preceded by decades of hard work and intensive research. But it all came together when he successfully transplanted a human heart.

Christiaan Barnard first made a name for himself in the early 1950s. At the time he had just lost his job as a rural doctor and returned to Cape Town penniless, burdened with debt and married with two young children. He applied for a job at the City Hospital for infectious diseases, an institution in Portswood Road in Green Point, a few hundred meters from what is today known as the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Waterfront.

After an interview before a board of five doctors, Christiaan went outside the office building and found a beautiful square, roughly the size of a rugby field. Arranged around the sides of the square were half a dozen barrack-like buildings, each housing patients with different infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever and meningitis.

Barnard wandered into one of the buildings and heard the sound of crying children.

‘It was no ordinary crying; this was the tragic sound of children who had been crying for a very long time.’