It’s been 50 years since Chris Barnard gave Louis Washkansky a new heart, and here’s how it happened
Fifty years ago SA stunned the world: a surgeon in Cape Town, Christiaan Barnard, successfully transplanted the heart of a woman into the chest of a dying man. Here is a narrative, largely based on AFP reporting at the time, of the extraordinary details surrounding the first human-to-human heart transplant. Ann Washkansky could not have imagined that the traffic accident she came across on December 2 1967, would bring both life and fame to her terminally ill husband. Washkansky was driving back from visiting her husband at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town when she saw a vehicle slam into Denise Darvall, a young bank worker, as she crossed a busy road. Her body flew through the air and her head smashed into a parked car, fracturing her skull. It was soon clear Darvall was brain dead, but her heart was still beating. Louis Washkansky, 53, had been told he had only weeks left to live because of severe heart failure. He accepted without hesitation a barely imaginable proposition from...
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