The first human-to-human heart transplant was in 1967

The world’s first human-to-human heart transplant was performed in Cape Town on the night of 2–3 December 1967, when Christiaan Barnard’s team at Groote Schuur Hospital gave Louis Washkansky, a 53-year-old man with severe heart disease, the heart of Denise Darvall, a young woman who had suffered a fatal brain injury when she was hit by a car.

Washkansky was far from an ideal recipient by today’s standards: diabetic, a smoker and suffering from peripheral vascular disease. He lived 18 days before dying of pneumonia, his defences lowered by the drugs used to prevent rejection.

“It really amazed me that there was so much controversy, so much criticism, so much praise, so much excitement about the operation,” Barnard later said.

Yet Cape Town was not the first place a heart was transplanted into a person: on 23 January 1964, James Hardy at the University of Mississippi Medical Center put a chimpanzee heart into the chest of a dying man, and it beat for 90 minutes before it stopped. The author of the medical paper describing the Cape Town operation credited the Mississippi team with proving that heart transplantation was feasible. Barnard’s claim is narrower and secure: the first transplant of a human heart into a human.

What came next was a boom and a bust. Barnard’s second patient, dentist Philip Blaiberg, operated on in January 1968, became the first heart recipient to leave hospital and lived 19 months. Surgeons worldwide performed more than 100 transplants in 1968, but most early attempts failed, and only a few centres persisted through the 1970s. The anti-rejection drug cyclosporine later revived the field.

Today the operation is routine. The United States alone performed a record 4,636 heart transplants in 2024, and about 80% of adult recipients are alive five years later.