Surgeons performed the world's first human heart transplant
On this day · 3 December 1967
In a Cape Town theatre, a daring surgeon stitched a dead woman's heart into a dying man and watched it beat again.
Late on 3 December 1967, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard and his team at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town carried out the world’s first human-to-human heart transplant. The recipient was Louis Washkansky, a 54-year-old grocer dying of heart failure. The donor was Denise Darvall, a young woman left brain-dead after a road accident the day before.
The operation itself took roughly five hours. When the new heart was warmed and shocked back into rhythm, it beat on its own, and Washkansky soon woke and spoke with his wife.
“It really amazed me that there was so much controversy, so much criticism, so much praise,” Barnard later said.
Washkansky survived 18 days before pneumonia, worsened by the drugs suppressing his immune system to stop rejection, killed him. Critics called the feat reckless, yet it proved the procedure possible. Refined immunosuppression eventually turned a desperate gamble into routine surgery, with later patients living for decades.
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