At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard transplanted the heart of a young accident victim, Denise Darvall, into 54-year-old grocer Louis Washkansky. Though Washkansky survived only 18 days, succumbing to pneumonia from immunosuppressive drugs, the operation proved heart transplantation was technically feasible and launched an entirely new era of cardiac surgery.
The operation lasted about nine hours and involved a team of thirty medical staff working through the night, racing against the clock once Denise Darvall, a young woman fatally injured in a car accident, was declared brain dead. Barnard had trained partly in the United States and drew heavily on techniques developed by American researchers, but seized the opportunity to perform the first transplant himself, propelling South Africa briefly to the forefront of global medicine.
Washkansky awoke from the surgery able to speak and even joke with his doctors, astonishing the world's press, who descended on Cape Town in droves. His death eighteen days later from a lung infection—a consequence of the very immunosuppressant drugs needed to prevent organ rejection—illustrated the central problem that would occupy transplant medicine for the next two decades: the body's immune system was as much an enemy as the disease being treated. Barnard's second transplant patient, operated on weeks later, would go on to live for nineteen months, and the techniques pioneered in Cape Town became the foundation of modern organ transplantation.