Christiaan Barnard . He was a South African cardiologist and surgeon, especially remembered for successfully performing the first heart transplant .
Summary
[ hide ]
- 1 Biographical synthesis
- 1 Career
- 1.1 First transplant
- 1.2 Second transplant
- 2 Withdrawal
- 3 Death
- 1 Career
- 2 Sources
Biographical synthesis
He was born on 8 of November of 1922 in the town of Beaufort West, South Africa. The father had a low income but, given his social position as a member of the church and the privileges that his office granted him, he was able to attend renowned private schools in his hometown and later studied medicine at the University of Cape Town, where he graduated from 1953 .
Race
He started his career as a general surgeon at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town , where his older brother Marius was head of the transplant team. By 1955 he was awarded a scholarship to enter the American University of Minnesota , where in 1958 he obtained the title of a doctor specializing in cardiology.
In these years as students he stood out as an outstanding student of the prestigious doctor Owen H. Wangesteen , who introduced him to cardiovascular science, while Dr. Shumway familiarized him with the technique of heart transplants in animals, so, on his return from The United States began practicing for several years with dogs. In 1962 he was appointed chief of thoracic surgery at the Groote Schuur hospital, where he had previously practiced.
First transplant
The 3 of December of 1967 , news that gathered all the teletypes astonished the world: a South African doctor had performed the first heart transplant a human being. The recipient was Louis Washkansky, a merchant, a big and optimistic man of fifty-six years, evicted by an irreversible heart problem, which was associated with acute diabetes. The donor, Dénise Darvall, a young twenty-five-year-old office worker hit by her mother with a car. This operation, carried out by a team of twenty surgeons under the direction of Barnard, lasted six hours. Upon awakening, Washkansky stated that he felt much better with the new heart. Doctor and patient were catapulted to fame, although eighteen days later, on the morning of December 21 , the patient died of pneumonia. After this milestone in the history of medicine, honors and distinctions of all kinds began to rain on Barnard, making him the most popular character of the moment. He launched into worldly life and was photographed with the most famous actresses of the time.
Second transplant
The second transplant was performed on January 2 , 1968 . This time the recipient was Dr. Philip Blaiberg , and the donor, the mulatto Clive Haupt. A black man’s heart beat for 563 days in the body of a white. From that moment, in the midst of a controversy that never ceased regarding the bioethics of such interventions (is he dead who does not breathe but his heart beats?), Patients were gaining life expectancies, thanks to immunosuppressive drugs such as the ciclosperina . In 1970 he divorced his first wife, Louwtjie, who had given him two children: André, who would commit suicide in 1984.because of the separation of his parents (according to the diagnosis of his psychiatrist and the appreciation of his own parent), and Deirdre. That same year, he married the wealthy nineteen-year-old heiress Barbara Zoellner, the daughter of the German billionaire Frederick Zoellner , based in Johannesburg and known as the “King of Steel.” In 1974 , for the first time in the world, he performed a double heart transplant, which consisted of adding a healthier heart to another patient to help him fulfill the functions of the one he already had. But his experiments in the operating room would sooner or later end in failure. A year later, when his fame began to decline, he visited Spainto present his book Tension, and to his new wife (who had given him two children, Frederick and Christian), in order not to lose an iota of popularity in the Mediterranean basin, where he was most flattered. However, in 1979 , he refused to participate in a human head transplant operation because he found the idea impractical and “probably immoral.” With this affirmation he safeguarded his honor.
Retirement
By 1983 , after working in a hospital in the United States , he definitely abandoned the practice of surgery, but despite the ailments, the loss of prestige among his colleagues and the loss of popularity, he tried to break new ground. Until then, she had performed around 140 transplants, including the one from the heart of a mandrel to a 25-year-old patient who died within a few hours.
From 1987 onward, he devoted himself to medical research and led four teams at the Max Planck Institute and the University of Heidelberg , both in Germany , a third at the University of Oklahoma , in the United States , and, finally, another in Switzerland . These teams carried out studies aimed at discovering the causes of the aging of organisms and the biological factors present in the fetus and that disappear when the fetus is born. Together with coordinating these teams, he took care of his huge sheep farm near Cape Town , where, in addition, he tried to reintroduce wild animals that originally occupied those places.
He published his autobiography in 1993 , The Second Life, where in addition to talking about his professional career, he explained in detail his idylls with famous women. In her travels and conferences she insisted on what was her obsession in her last days: instilling in society the need for organ donation.
Death
On September 2 of the 2001 he died in Cyprus at seventy-eight years old, a victim of an asthma attack, not a heart attack as the press published within hours of the death. That same year, the implantation in an American patient of the Abiocor artificial heart as a permanent organ was a milestone that somewhat dwarfed Barnard’s feat in 1967 .
