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Denise darvall

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Louis Washkansky

South African recipient of the first human heart transplant (1912–1967)

Louis Joshua Washkansky (12 April 1912[1] – 21 December 1967) was a South African man who was the recipient of the world's first human-to-human heart transplant, and the first patient to regain consciousness following the operation.[2] Washkansky lived for 18 days and was able to speak with his wife and reporters.[3][4][5]

Washkansky was the second human recipient of a heart transplant overall, in that James Hardy had done a transplant in 1964 in which Boyd Rush received a chimpanzee's heart, although the patient in that case only survived an hour and did not regain consciousness.[6][7]

Biography

Washkansky was a Lithuanian Jew, the youngest of the four children of Abe Washkansky and his wife, Chana Yentel Kemelgor. In 1912, when Washkansky was three months old, his father emigrated to South Africa without his family and started a business as a produce merchant. As a result of World War I and its aftermath,

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First human heart transplant

On December 3, 1967, 53-year-old Louis Washkansky receives the first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.

Washkansky, a South African grocer dying from chronic heart disease, received the transplant from Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old woman who was fatally injured in a car accident. Surgeon Christiaan Barnard, who trained at the University of Cape Town and in the United States, performed the revolutionary medical operation. The technique Barnard employed had been initially developed by a group of American researchers in the 1950s. American surgeon Norman Shumway achieved the first successful heart transplant, in a dog, at Stanford University in California in 1958.

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After Washkansky’s surgery, he was given drugs to suppress his immune system and keep his body from rejecting the heart. These drugs also left him susceptible to sickness, however, and 18 days later he died from double pneumonia. Despite the setback, Washkansky’s new h

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Louis Washkansky

Of Lithuanian Jewish extraction, Louis Washkansky came to South Africa aged 9, and became a grocer in Cape Town’s Greenpoint area. Washkansky saw active service in WW2 in East and North Africa and Italy. His wife Ann, he met and married after the war.

He was keen on soccer, swimming and weightlifting and lived an active life until his first heart attack. In 1965 a third and very severe heart attack left him suffering from congestive cardiac failure. The effects of this were huge cardiac swelling, irregular heartbeat, extreme shortness of breath, a heart incapable of maintaining normal output so that his body slowly starved of food and oxygen. His death became imminent, and a donor, Denise Darvall was located.

The operation itself, performed by Professor Chris Barnard and a team of 30 was a surgical success. Unfortunately, immuno-suppressant drugs aimed at preventing the body’s natural rejection of the ‘foreign’ material of his new heart, compromised his capacity to resist infection. After gaining consciousness and strength post-operatively, he was able to tal

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