December 3, 1967. On this day in 1967, a miracle of modern medicine took place: For the first time, a human heart was successfully transplanted into another person.
By the mid-1960s, the medical world knew that the procedure was technically possible, but it was South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard who scrubbed up and became the first to take on this dangerous procedure.
A heart transplant, or a cardiac transplant, is a surgical transplant procedure performed on patients with end-stage heart failure or severe coronary artery disease when other medical or surgical treatments have failed.
Barnard’s operation captured the world’s attention, offering hope of a breakthrough that could save thousands of lives. But it also revealed how risky open heart surgery still was.
In Barnard’s case, the transplanted heart beat steadily, but the patient succumbed to pneumonia soon after.
When surgeons at Stanford University performed the first heart transplant in the U.S. a little more than a month later, the operation was a success, but the patient’s body ultimately rejected the new heart.
By 1971, only 23 of the 166 people who’d received heart transplants were still living. Yet since the first heart transplant, doctors have refined patient selection protocols and rejection treatments to increase the procedure’s survivability — and it has worked.
In 2020, the U.S. success rate for patients living at least one year after a heart transplant was 91%.
(Courtesy: History Quiz)
