A Human Heart and a Pioneer.
“Only a fool is content with what they’ve done.” [1]
In the early morning hours of 3 December 1967, history was in the making as the first-ever human-to-human heart transplant was performed, by Christiaan Barnard and a team of 30 staff members. The patient Washkansky survived the operation and lived for 18 days, having succumbed to pneumonia possibly due to the immunosuppressive drugs he was taking to suppress rejection of the new heart as a foreign protein. Thereafter, Dr. Barnard’s second transplant patient was able to lead an active life for 19 months, and his 5th and 6th patients lived for 13 & 24 years respectively. Additionally, Dr. Barnard introduced the operation of heterotopic heart transplantation in which the donor heart acts as an auxiliary pump, which was groundbreaking in that era of medical research.
During one of the first-ever interviews with Dr. Barnard in his native Afrikaans language, he was asked whether he felt content or proud of his achievements, to which he said “I learned not to be content easily. I took music as a subject at school, and my teacher was a Blind man Mr. Nel. I was never a brilliant pianist, but I did my best where I could. One day I played a musical piece for my teacher and he said I had played well. So I told him that I continuously practiced the musical piece, but I never felt content with my performance” to which his music teacher replied, “ Chris, only a fool is content with himself” [1]. These are words that Dr. Barnard remembered well as a kind of mantra that “only a fool is content with what they’ve done” [1]. This mindset made him someone who believed that “It is hard to get to the top in life, and it’s even harder to stay there, so one must always try to go further and further and to do more and more” [1].
Dr. Barnard’s courage to carry out the first human heart transplant is why he is known as a pioneer in heart surgery. During his years of research, he wrote 14 books and 235 scholarly articles. Research in heart transplantation and related fields has come a long way since 1967, and in the last 20 years, the number of scholarly articles has continued to grow. (As seen below)
Over 23.7 thousand scholarly papers about heart transplantation have been published over the past 20 years (2002–2022), of which a peak of 1,943 articles was published in 2021. (As seen below)
Due to extraordinary research done by exceptional researchers, we are now able to access scholarly articles with a broad spectrum of information in any field of interest. If you are interested in learning more about the human heart and heart transplants here are some of the recent impactful scholarly articles from scinapse.io:
1) An early investigation of outcomes with the new 2018 donor heart allocation system in the United States.
2) The International Thoracic Organ Transplant Registry of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation: Thirty-sixth adult heart transplantation report — 2019; focus theme:
3) Donor and recipient size match OPTN/SRTR 2018 Annual Data Report: Heart.
References:
[1] Huisgenoot. Louis Wessels. January 1968.
