Christiaan Barnard

Christiaan Barnard was a South African cardiac surgeon who led the team that performed the first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967.

Hamilton Naki: A South African surgical assistant who contributed to experimental transplant research at Groote Schuur Hospital. Naki worked in the same transplant program, though accounts of his operating-room role have been disputed.
Heart transplantation: The surgical replacement of a failing heart with a donor heart. Barnard’s 1967 operation established the first successful human-to-human instance.
Groote Schuur Hospital: A teaching hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, where Barnard’s team performed the first human heart transplant. The transplant program and the 1967 operation were based at this hospital.
Denise Darvall: A young woman whose heart was donated after she was fatally injured in Cape Town in 1967. Darvall’s heart became the donor organ in Barnard’s first transplant.
Norman Shumway: An American cardiac surgeon whose laboratory research helped establish the techniques used in heart transplantation. Shumway’s experimental work supplied a foundation for the operation Barnard’s team performed.
Organ transplantation: The transfer of an organ from one body to another to replace impaired function. Heart transplantation applies transplant principles to an organ whose function cannot be paused.
Heart transplantation in animals: Experimental procedures in which a heart is transplanted between animals to investigate surgical feasibility and physiology. Animal experiments developed techniques that made the human operation possible.
Organ rejection: An immune response in which a recipient’s body attacks a transplanted organ as foreign tissue. Rejection remained a major limit on survival after Barnard’s pioneering operation.
Adrian Kantrowitz: An American cardiac surgeon who performed the second human heart transplant, in New York, in December 1967. Kantrowitz’s operation followed Barnard’s by weeks, as surgical teams rapidly pursued the same procedure.
Cardiopulmonary bypass: A technique that temporarily routes blood through a machine for oxygenation and circulation during heart surgery. It allowed surgeons to operate on the recipient while maintaining circulation.

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