Photo by Tiiu Sild in Wikipedia public domain.
Back in 1967 it has never been done before, not on a human being. The surgeon was a pastor's son. Two members of his family had died of heart problems. He experimented on helping dogs, a technique later used in helping humans.
He worked in this hospital. His first experiment on transplanting a human heart only gave the patient a few more days of life. However, the next patient lived longer, and one of the subsequent patients lived for many years.
What do you see? Reproductions of the operating theatre, the bedroom of the girl who died in a road accident and an account of the conversation when the surgeon got permission from her father to transplant her heart to save someone else.
The debate worldwide on whether brain activity or physical reaction to pain or stimulus such as icy water or heartbeat means the person is alive.
One technique used was to keep the old heart and the new heart both operating until the new one was deemed a success and ready to take over along. His success inspired other operations around the world.
Photo by Tiiu Sild in Wikipedia.
The museum is inside the hospital where he performed the operation. Original items were able to be recovered, after they had been sold off, because hospital items were give individual identifying numbers like a car number plate. So in many cases you see on display not just an identical design of item item to the one used, but the actual item.
From Wikiquote:
- Last year a Dutch animal breeding centre sent me two chimpanzees as a gift. I killed one and cut its heart out. The other wept bitterly and was inconsolable. The sad chimp has long since happily mated again and lives with lots of other animals on a pleasant game farm near Villiersdorp. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures, but the memory of that weeping chimp has remained with me. It was taken for granted, of course, that he was weeping for his mate but I've since had some thoughts on the subject which made me wonder whether perhaps he was weeping for the human race. The idea is not as silly as it sounds. In our doings there is much to weep over and even a chimpanzee would never behave in some of the contradictory ways we think of as normal.
- The Best Medicine (Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers, 1979), p. 38.
- Suffering isn't ennobling, recovery is.
- New York Times, April 28, 1985; as quoted in A Speaker's Treasury of Quotations by Michael C. Thomsett and Linda Rose Thomsett (McFarland, 2009), p. 111.
https://www.amazon.com/Every-Second-Counts-Transplant-First/
- The prime goal is to alleviate suffering, and not to prolong life. And if your treatment does not alleviate suffering, but only prolongs life, that treatment should be stopped.
Barnard was also active politically. So lots of interest here. Why is this important? It matters to 2,500 people a year in the USA alone who have heart transplants, plus many more, about 4,000 a year, worldwide.
Cape Town has wonderful hotels, ancient and modern. Whilst in South Africa I visited Mandela's house in Soweto, a safari park, a Jewish museum with the story of how Mandela was hidden and helped by Jewish well-wishers who bought a farm to hide him. I also enjoyed, a wine trail with lunch at a vineyard. You may wish to visit Cape Town, Johannesburg and the Pretoria.
Further reading
Christiaan Barnard wrote two autobiographies. His first book, One Life, was published in 1969 (ISBN 0245599525) and sold copies worldwide. Some of the proceeds were used to set up the Chris Barnard Fund for research into heart disease and heart transplants in Cape Town.[68] His second autobiography, The Second Life, was published in 1993, eight years before his death (ISBN 0947461388).
You can look inside a book about it:
https://www.amazon.com/Every-Second-Counts-Transplant-First/
The name of the hospital, Groote Schuur is Afrikaans (African version of Dutch) meaning great or large barn.
Useful Websites
HEART MUSEUM
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190410-cape-towns-inspiring-medical-marvel
http://himetop.wikidot.com/heart-museum-in-groote-schuur-hospital
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Barnard
SOUTH AFRICA
https://www.southafrica.net/gl/en/
CAPE TOWN
https://heartofcapetown.co.za/
https://www.visitacity.com/en/cape-town
http://www.virtualsouthafrica.travel/
AIRLINES
South African Airways
https://www.flysaa.com/
Award-winning Singapore Airlines
singaporeair.com
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.
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