Turning Points: Heart To Heart

My father was a missionary among the colored, or mixed-race, people of Beaufort West in an area of scrubland that is South Africa's version of Arizona. That's where I was born, and now the house where I was born is a museum. Next door is the church where my father preached, my mother played the organ and I pumped the bellows for it. Maybe that's where, subconsciously, I started getting interested in the pump, which is all the heart is, after all. I can remember as a boy when they rang a big bell in Beaufort West at 9 o'clock, and all the colored people had to leave town for the night. My father, however, would not accept any difference between white people and black or colored people. I learned that tolerance from my father, who said to me, "Son, for some people the mills of God grind slowly but surely." And here we are in Mandela's South Africa, and we've seen for ourselves the slow but sure grinding of the mills.

My mother taught me ambition. You must always be the first, she used to say. But she also tempered that with humility. I think that helped me later in life. Whatever happened to me, I always tried to find time for everybody.

I didn't dissect beetles or anything when I was a boy. There was no great event that made me go into medicine. I had an elder brother studying mechanical engineering, and I was interested in that. My parents had another child between my brother and me who died when he was three or four. I don't remember him, but my father once showed me a little biscuit with the boy's teeth marks in it. Now I look back, and I see pictures of the little boy and the terrible suffering in his face, and I realize that he died of a heart problem and that had he lived in my time, I, as a cardiac surgeon, probably could have cured him.

When my brother failed two years of his studies, the house was in mourning. He told me medicine was a better choice than engineering, and when I went to university, I vowed I'd never have to tell my parents I had failed. And I never did.

I've had a lot of lucky choices forced on me in my life. The first was going into medicine, not engineering. The second was having to leave a general practice, which I loved, because the business couldn't support three partners. The third was applying for a bursary in England and being turned down. If I'd got it, I would never have become a heart surgeon because they weren't that far advanced in heart surgery in England. The fourth was when I was studying general surgery under Professor Owen Wangensteen at the University of Minnesota. One day I was invited to lend a hand on work on a heart-lung machine. That's when I became fascinated by open-heart surgery. That's what led me back to South Africa to run my own cardiac-surgery unit, and to the 1967 heart transplant. Before that, I had applied for a job in London, and again I was turned down. If I'd got it, I wouldn't have done the heart transplant. So you see my life is full of luck.