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.
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.
[8] In January 1967, Washkansky was referred to Mervyn Gotsman, a cardiologist at the Cardiac Clinic in Groote Schuur Hospital, due to refractory heart failure.
[9] Washkansky underwent cardiac catheterisation confirming severe heart failure, and was subsequently referred to Barnard for possible surgery.
When Barnard later explained the possibility of a transplant to both of them, the idea was so new that Ann initially worried her husband might absorb some of the personality of the donor heart.
[10] Barnard stated to Ann and Louis Washkansky that the proposed transplant had an 80% chance of success,[11][12] which has been criticised as "misleading".
[13] Part of the pre-op procedure was to take swabs from Washkansky's skin, nose, mouth, throat, and rectum to find out what bacteria lived on and in his body, so that the most effective antibiotics could be given after the transplant.
[15] Washkansky received his heart transplant on 3 December 1967, at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.
The operation lasted approximately six hours,[16][17][18] beginning at 01:00, with Christiaan Barnard leading a team of thirty surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses and technicians.
Coert Venter and Bertie Bosman were the doctors who approached Denise's father Edward Darvall and asked for permission to use her heart for a possible transplant.
[21] Although Washkansky died of pneumonia eighteen days after the transplant because of a weakened immune system,[22] Barnard regarded the surgery as a success because the heart was "not being stimulated by an electrical machine".
[3] As Barnard related in his book, One Life, a decision was made on the fifth postoperative day to bombard Washkansky's system with immunosuppressants to guard against a potential rejection of the new heart.