HEART TRANSPLANTATION.


Barnard, Christiaan. A Human Cardiac Transplant: An Interim Report of a Successful Operation Performed at Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town [In:] In South African Medical Journal, Volume 41, Number 48, December 30, 1967]. Cape Town: December 1967. 4to (273 x 214 mm). pp 1271-1274. Original publisher's wrappers. INSCRIBED AND SIGNED BY NORMAN SHUMWAY.WITH: Barnard, C.N. The Present Status of Heart Transplantation. 4to. 5, [1] pp. Offprint from the S.A. Medical Journal, 1975. SIGNED BY BARNARD.AN IMPORTANT ASSOCIATION COPY of the rare special heart transplantation issue of the South African Medical Journal in which all aspects of the first human heart transplant are described in detail, inscribed on the front cover to Bruce Fye from Norman Shumway, the "father of heart transplantation" (Cooper). Christiaan Barnard and his team operated on Louis Washkansky on December 3, 1967. He survived for eighteen days. This special issue, published less than a month after the operation and just nine days after Washkansky's death, includes articles (most of which deal with this case) on the experimental background of human heart transplantation, issues relating to the selection of a donor, the preoperative assessment of the recipient, tissue typing tests, the anesthetist's view (with a chronology of the operation), the interim report on the case, and the provisional autopsy report on the first human to undergo a heart transplant. Cardiac surgeon and historian David Cooper writes, "Norman Shumway is recognized as the 'father' of heart transplantation. Although James Hardy and Christiaan Barnard performed this operation in patients before Shumway, it was largely through his previous experimental studies that the feasibility of the operation became accepted. His group perfected the operative technique and demonstrated that the immunosuppressive drugs available at the time could prolong graft survival and reverse an acute rejection episode ... In the eyes of many Americans, including many of Shumway's supporters and protégés, Chris Barnard had 'jumped the gun' when he performed the first transplant in a patient. The implication was that if Barnard had been a decent and honorable man, he would have left it to Shumway, who had done so much of the background experimental work ... Chris Barnard, who led the surgical team that stunned the world by performing the first human-to-human heart transplant in December 1967, literally became famous overnight. The daring operation captured the public's attention as no other before or since" (David K. C. Cooper, Open Heart: The Surgeons Who Revolutionized Medicine, 2010).