Heart Surgeon Christiaan Barnard: Master of Hearts

"Christ, it strikes again," cries Christiaan Barnard, relieved. It is 5:52 am on Sunday, December 3, 1967. As the patient wakes up the next day, he feels much better. "What was that surgery? You promised me a new heart," says Louis Washkansky, 53. Smiling, the surgeon replies, "You have a new heart."

This transplantation was a sensation - at the Groote Schur Hospital in Cape Town, it was possible to transplant a heart for the first time. No medical achievement had previously electrified people around the world. After this triumph, everything seemed possible: Can man even permanently defeat death?

For nine years, the South African team had prepared for this unprecedented intervention. When her phone rang at 11pm on Saturday night, Dene Friedman knew: Now it's time. Her boss called the young cardiologist to the hospital. "We knew the Americans are ready," Friedman said. "But we already rehearsed it ourselves" - but only on animals. And they were all dead right now.

Cardiac Surgeon Barnard called two criteria for the risky operation: the donor must be terminally ill - and the recipient a white man. Apartheid in South Africa influenced the medical profession. "We foresaw that we would otherwise be accused of having experimented with a colored man," said Barnard in a February 1968 interview.

A medical moon landing

That weekend, the conditions were met by a tragic traffic accident. Denise Darvall, 25, wanted to buy cake in a suburban pastry shop with her mother when a drunken driver's car caught both at the pedestrian lights. The mother was dead immediately, the daughter seriously injured.

When she was declared brain dead, her father had to decide on organ donation. "I remember the birthday cake she made me with a heart in. She always gave things to other people, she would have said yes," Edward Darvall later agreed.

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At the same time, the greengrocer Louis Washkansky was threatened with death. He had already suffered three heart attacks, the transplant was his last chance. The 31-member Cape Town team started around one o'clock in the morning: they sawed through the breastbone, released the scarred heart, cooled Washkansky's body, and connected it to a heart-lung machine. Then the donor heart was cut out, the old heart removed and the new one sewn in, Washkansky reheated.

After about five hours, Denise Darvall's young, strong heart began to pump into Louis Washkansky's chest after a surge with the defibrillator. A breakthrough in the history of medicine, of a similar rank as in 1969 the moon landing for space travel.

Dene Friedman assisted Barnard on the heart-lung machine: "It was very quiet in the operating room," she told in the documentary "Hidden Heart" in 2008. At first she worked routinely - until she "looked into the open chest of this patient and there There was no heart, it was the first time that I saw a living person without a heart. "

First among many rivals

One day later, Louis Washkansky realized that he was still alive. The native Lithuanian soon recovered, was able to get up and eat steaks, as the world press followed in amazement. But then the drugs against the rejection of the new organ weakened his immune system. 18 days after the bold operation, "Washy" died of pneumonia.

Surgery succeeded, patient dead? Washkansky could not live in Christmas 1967. But Christiaan Barnard had proved for the first time that a heart transplant is possible. His next patient survived already one and a half years. Around 100 other heart transplants worldwide followed as early as 1968, and the second heart of a French patient was even 19 years old.

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The transplant was like a medical turnaround. Previously, according to the medical ethics only a stoppage of heart and breathing put an end to life. It was not until 1968 that a commission from Harvard Medical School defined people as dead when they were in an irreversible coma and the brain was already destroyed.

The surgical technique was soon considered manageable, but for many years doctors were the rejection reactions barely under control until new drugs helped and in the eighties, the operating figures rose significantly. To date, more than 100,000 hearts have been transplanted worldwide. On average, the recipients then live for a good ten years, some even over 30 years.

Internationally, in the sixties, numerous teams were preparing for heart transplants, especially in the US. She was reluctant to give her a murder charge if she had taken the beating heart from a patient. Barnard lunged forward and stabbed all medical rivals. Previously, the ambitious 45-year-old was virtually unknown, overnight he became a world star.

Talent for cheerfulness

Unlike some of his contemporaries, he saw the heart only as a "primitive pump" rather than a mystical center of life and place of the soul. "It will surprise you when I tell you that it is much easier for me to explain to you what death is than what life is," Barnard once said. For him, count "the celebration of being alive".

Barnard enjoyed it to the fullest. He grew up in a Buren community, his father was a pastor, the family did not have much money. After his spectacular breakthrough, he was swarmed around as a miracle doctor. And it cost its glory - as a world traveler in matters of the heart, not entirely of a medical nature.

In 1970, Barnard married his second wife, Barbara, an 18-year-old model. And behaved as if he were one: "He performed like an 18-year-old who won the Miss World contest," said Dirk de Villiers, a South African filmmaker and former director of Hidden Heart Friend Barnards. He wore Italian designer suits and shoes - and plunged into amusement.

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Barnard with Monaco's Princess Grace Kelly (1968): Always close to the rich and famous

Barnard traveled a lot, gave lectures and learned to appreciate the glamor, including all sorts of love affairs. He was seen water skiing and strip clubs. You could also see him on jet set parties dancing with blondes and brunettes, with beauties from Grace Kelly to Heidi Brühl to Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, whom he both came very close to.

The heart-jack from Cape Town had almost as much talent for mirth as for a surgeon. Some physicians avoided him for his playboyish life, others envied him his eloquence and dashing demeanor. High fees were always welcome to Barnard, as he openly confessed in a TV interview: "I have to say that I was probably a doctor to make a lot of money."

Controversial was his attitude to apartheid - a sensitive topic for celebrities from South Africa. There were allegations, Barnard, the arthritis increasingly difficult work, have embezzled the important role of Hamilton Naki. A black associate at the Cape Town hospital, Naki worked on surgical techniques, practiced on pigs and dogs, and claimed, after Barnard's death, that he had done a technically demanding part of the famous premiere operation itself.

Smart ambassador of apartheid?

But the story of the man, who was a genius self-taught without study to heart transplantation and was hushed up because of segregation alone: ​​she was wrong. Newspapers like The New York Times had to correct themselves. The German Stefan von Sommoggy worked together with Naki in the animal laboratory in 1982/83. "A poorly paid worker, a great man and a proud Zulu," says Sommoggy - they've become friends. "He was never an important member of the first heart transplant team, or even contributed anything to the technique."

Christian Barnaard was also held at least tactical relationship to the system of racial oppression on the Cape. "Barnard was an old man about to retire for me," says the later vascular surgeon Stefan von Sommoggy, who was in his mid 30s when he experienced Barnard. "He was highly honored in the apartheid government, had a diplomatic passport, and lived completely in government."

So he was a smart ambassador of South Africa on the state payroll? On the other hand, Barnard said at a 1969 Cape Town Chamber of Commerce reception, "There is no future for South Africa unless we take a progressive stance." His daughter Deirdre vigorously defended him - her father had always been against apartheid. "There was a special intensive care unit for blacks and blacks and one for whites," and Barnard did not want that. "He said no, there's an intensive care unit where the best nurses work and where all the patients are."

In any case, he is still a legend in his homeland: in 2004 Barnard was ranked second in a survey of the "100 largest South Africans", just behind Nelson Mandela. His own heart stopped beating on September 2, 2001. When the 78-year-old wrestled for air at a hotel pool in Cyprus, help was not given in time. But his death caused an asthma attack - no infarction, as it was called first.

A year earlier, the marriage with his third wife Karin had been divorced. In the documentary Deirdre Barnard recalls a song line and begins to cry: "'There is a piece here and there is a piece of it, the parts of my life are all around' - that was the sad ending of my father."