The
History of Medicine
The
First Heart Transplant
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| GRADE LEVEL | SECTION | SUB-SECTION | DURATION |
| 6 | AFRICAN HISTORY | HISTORY OF MEDICINE | 10 LESSONS |
The
History of Medicine |
| The first time human tissue was medically attached or grafted from one to another part of a human body was in 1870, by a Swiss surgeon called Jacques Reverdin. The next big step in transplant history was made in 1912 when a French surgeon called Alexis Carrel developed ways to join blood vessels. This made it possible to transplant human organs from one body to another. Carrel discovered ways to make fluids, like blood, run through transplanted tissues to keep them alive. In the 1940s British doctors Sir Peter Brian Medawar and Sir Macfarlane Burnet described how the body rejected foreign tissue making it necessary for a person’s immune system to be suppressed in order to carry out an organ transplant.
Picture A Professor Christiaan Barnard and Louis Washkansky. The first successful heart transplant from one human to another human in the world was made in the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. Professor Christiaan Neethling Barnard and his medical team operated successfully on Mr Louis Washkanski on 3 December 1967. Mr Washkanski lived for 18 days but then died of pneumonia. Louis Washkanski was given the heart of a young woman who died in a car accident. Denise Darvall was run over by a car and had very serious brain damage. Her father was willing to give her organs up for donation and her heart was sent to Groote Schuur Hospital.
Picture
B: Hamilton Naki, Dr Chris Barnard’s
assistant. A heart transplant is a complex and difficult operation and needs a large team of medical specialists. Dr Chris Barnard was the head surgeon and cardiologists, radiologists, anaesthetists, technicians, nurses, immunologists and pathologists assisted him. Dr Barnard developed the heart transplant technique with his assistant, Hamilton Naki, but Naki was not recognised for his contribution to the transplant. Click here to listen to Professor Chris Barnard’s speech about the first heart transplant. Heart transplants
A heart after a transplant. A heart transplant is undertaken when someone’s heart can no longer function adequately. It is a last resort when all other treatments have been tried. The diseased heart is taken out and replaced by a healthy heart from a donor. A donor has to have been declared brain dead. A patient has to be approved for a heart transplant and then put on a waiting list. Some people only wait for a few weeks while others can wait for months depending on how soon a donor can be found. A heart cannot survive outside the body for long and has to be packed in ice as soon as possible. The donor heart has to be healthy and strong and the person receiving the heart, or the recipient, needs to be infection free. To put the heart into the recipient’s body a cut of about 20 - 23 cms is made along their breastbone to expose the heart. The surgeon then takes out the recipient’s heart leaving parts of the arteries that feed blood to the heart muscle. The donor heart is sewn onto these parts. Some of the nerves in the recipient’s chest have to be cut. This is called denervation and it makes it harder to feel pain in the chest. Some of these nerves also help to regulate the heartbeat so a temporary pacemaker is attached to the heart to make sure it beats properly. Sometimes the recipient’s immune system attacks the new heart because the heart is a foreign object in the body. The body then rejects the heart. This is why the recipient has to take medicine that suppresses his or her immune system, and this can make the body more open to infections. Outcomes:
The learner is able to give reasons for and explain the results of
actions of people in the past in a given context, and to use information
about heart transplants to answer questions.
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