Christiaan Barnard

Christiaan Barnard was a South African cardiac surgeon who performed the first successful human-to-human heart transplant in 1967, an event that drew international attention to a still-young field of transplant surgery. Born Christiaan Neethling Barnard in 1922 in Beaufort West in the Karoo region of South Africa, he was the son of a Dutch Reformed minister who served a coloured congregation, and he grew up in modest circumstances.

He studied medicine at the University of Cape Town and trained further in general and cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Minnesota, where he worked alongside the pioneering surgeon C. Walton Lillehei. Returning to South Africa, he established a cardiothoracic unit at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town and developed surgical techniques for congenital and valvular heart disease.

On 3 December 1967 he led a team that transplanted the heart of a young woman, Denise Darvall, who had been killed in a road accident, into the chest of fifty-four-year-old Louis Washkansky. Washkansky lived eighteen days before dying of pneumonia. Barnard's second transplant patient, Philip Blaiberg, lived for more than a year and a half. Barnard performed many further transplants and continued to operate until rheumatoid arthritis in his hands forced his retirement from surgery in 1983.

He wrote an autobiography titled One Life and the novel The Unwanted. He died in Paphos, Cyprus, in 2001 at the age of seventy-eight.

The name Christiaan is the Dutch and Afrikaans form of Christian, from the Latin Christianus meaning follower of Christ. He carried that Afrikaans form of the name through one of the most discussed careers in twentieth-century medicine.