Christiaan Neethling Barnard (8 November 1922 – 2 September 2001) was a South African cardiac surgeon who performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant operation.

[1][2] On 3 December 1967, Barnard transplanted the heart of accident victim Denise Darvall into the chest of 54-year-old Louis Washkansky, who regained full consciousness and was able to talk easily with his wife, before dying 18 days later of pneumonia, largely brought on by the anti-rejection drugs that suppressed his immune system.

[7][8][9] Barnard's second transplant patient, Philip Blaiberg, whose operation was performed at the beginning of 1968, returned home from the hospital and lived for a year and a half.

[5][10] Born in Beaufort West, Cape Province, Barnard studied medicine and practised for several years in his native South Africa.

[12] He was introduced to the heart-lung machine, and Barnard was allowed to transfer to the service run by open heart surgery pioneer Walt Lillehei.

[13] Upon returning to South Africa in 1958, Barnard was appointed head of the Department of Experimental Surgery at the Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town.

[14] He retired as head of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery in Cape Town in 1983 after rheumatoid arthritis in his hands ended his surgical career.

[4] One of his four brothers, Abraham, was a "blue baby" who died of a heart problem at the age of three (Barnard would later guess that it was tetralogy of Fallot).

[4] In 1951, he returned to Cape Town where he worked at the City Hospital as a Senior Resident Medical Officer, and in the Department of Medicine at Groote Schuur as a registrar.

Jannie Louw used this innovation in a clinical setting, and Barnard's method saved the lives of ten babies in Cape Town.

[12] Simply by luck, whenever Barnard needed a break from this work, he could wander across the hall and talk with Vince Gott who ran the lab for open-heart surgery pioneer Walt Lillehei.

Gott had begun to develop a technique of running blood backwards through the veins of the heart so Lillehei could more easily operate on the aortic valve (McRae writes, "It was the type of inspired thinking that entranced Barnard").

"[citation needed] Upon returning to South Africa in 1958, Barnard was appointed head of the Department of Experimental Surgery at Groote Schuur hospital, as well as holding a joint post at the University of Cape Town.

From this modest beginning, Naki became principal lab technician and taught hundreds[36] of surgeons, and assisted with Barnard's organ transplant program.

A popular myth, propagated principally by a widely discredited documentary film called Hidden Heart[37][38][39][40] and an erroneous newspaper article,[36] maintains incorrectly that Naki was present during the Washkansky transplant.

[36][41] Barnard performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant operation in the early morning hours of Sunday 3 December 1967.

[7][9][46] This has been criticised by the ethicists Peter Singer and Helga Kuhse as making claims for chances of success to the patient and family which were "unfounded" and "misleading".

The donor heart came from a young woman, Denise Darvall, who had been rendered brain dead in an accident on 2 December 1967, while crossing a street in Cape Town.

[4] On examination at Groote Schuur hospital, Darvall had two serious fractures in her skull, with no electrical activity in her brain detected, and no sign of pain when ice water was poured into her ear.

[47] Coert Venter and Bertie Bosman requested permission from Darvall's father for Denise's heart to be used in the transplant attempt.

[1][51] A 2017 BBC retrospective article described the occasion as one where "Journalists and film crews flooded into Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital, soon making Barnard and Washkansky household names."

In fact, a US National Institutes of Health publication states, "Within several years, only Shumway's team at Stanford was attempting transplants.

[5][10] Blaiberg's heart was donated by Clive Haupt, a 24-year-old black man who suffered a stroke, inciting controversy (especially in the African-American press) during the time of South African apartheid.

[55] Full recovery of donor heart function often takes place over hours or days, during which time considerable damage can occur.

For example, in pulmonary hypertension the patient's right ventricle has often adapted to the higher pressure over time and, although diseased and hypertrophied, is often capable of maintaining circulation to the lungs.

[57] Barnard was an outspoken opponent of South Africa's laws of apartheid, and was not afraid to criticise his nation's government, although he had to temper his remarks to some extent to travel abroad.

[62] Barnard described in his autobiography The Second Life a one-night extramarital affair with Italian film star Gina Lollobrigida,[4][63] that occurred in January 1968.

According to Kuster, Barnard attempted to grope her under her skirt while she was seated at a business luncheon with US Representative Pete McCloskey, for whom she worked at the time.

[65][66][67] Barnard retired as Head of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery in Cape Town in 1983 after developing rheumatoid arthritis in his hands which ended his surgical career.