who did the first heart transplant

The first successful human-to-human heart transplant was performed by South African cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard on 3 December 1967 in Cape Town, South Africa.

Quick Scoop

• The operation took place at Groote Schuur Hospital, where Barnard transplanted the heart of a young woman, Denise Darvall, into 54-year-old patient Louis Washkansky.

• Washkansky survived for 18 days after surgery, ultimately dying from pneumonia related to the heavy immune-suppressing drugs used to prevent rejection, but the transplanted heart itself functioned well.

• This surgery is widely regarded as the first successful human-to-human heart transplant and triggered a wave of heart transplant attempts worldwide in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

A small historical twist

• Before Barnard, surgeon James Hardy in Mississippi performed the first heart transplant of any kind in 1964, using a chimpanzee heart in a human (a xenotransplant); the patient survived under two hours.

• Because Hardy’s case used an animal heart and was not long-term successful, Barnard’s 1967 operation is the one usually meant when people ask “who did the first heart transplant.”

TL;DR: Christiaan Barnard is credited with performing the first successful human-to-human heart transplant, in Cape Town in December 1967.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.