PIONEERS:
Barnard with his patient Louis Washkansky
Dec. 3, 1967
The Brand-New Heart
By Bill Frist
I was 15
years old when Christiaan Barnard performed the first heart transplant.
I still have the Life magazine cover. My dad was a cardiologist, so the
drama carried out in the public's imagination was reinforced by my
respect for the practice of medicine and discovery. My ultimate choice
of going into surgery and then into heart surgery and then heart
transplantation I trace back to that single operation.
This procedure
reversed what had been inevitable death from heart disease, restoring
the opportunity of new life. It demonstrated the ability of an
individual working with a team to revolutionize health care. The
interesting thing is that it was the relatively inexperienced Barnard
who made history in the new field. He beat to the punch—and
undercut—more systematic and more disciplined scientists and
surgeons of the time. Dr. Norman Shumway of Stanford University (who was
my mentor) had patiently and with great rigor made a decade of
systematic research by writing papers, teaching others and working
through the challenges of the procedure. Barnard, who watched some of
these procedures being carried out when he trained in the U.S., went
back to South Africa and—with very little background and at the age
of 45—seized the moment and performed this transplant. His patient
died 18 days later, for Barnard was racing ahead of medicine's
understanding of tissue rejection. But the pioneering spirit of that
operation captured me at the time.
Frist is majority leader of the
U.S. Senate
TIME Cover
Collection: Click
here to see covers from 1967
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