The History of Medicine
Christiaan Neethling Barnard

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Professor Chris Barnard
Source: http://www.gsh.co.za/ab/barnard.GIF

Chris Barnard was born in Beaufort West in the Great Karoo in 1922. His father was a missionary and they were poor. One of his 3 brothers died when he was still a boy and this inspired Chris to become a doctor. He was a good student and did well at school. He also learned music and played sport.

Barnard left his home and went to study medicine at the University of Cape Town. He lived with his brother and had to walk to class every day because they were too poor to buy a car or take the train. His first medical practice was in Ceres in the Western Cape, but in 1956 he went to the United States of America to study at Minnesota University. He came back to South Africa in 1958 and was hired as a lecturer and director of surgical research at Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town. He introduced open-heart surgery to South Africa and also developed intensive care nursing for patients who came out of serious operations. Because he was so good at his job he got a bursary from the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust to go to the Soviet Union to study how to transplant hearts.

When he returned he developed further on these surgical techniques. He developed a way to replace heart valves and became a specialist in heart disease and treatments. On 3 December 1967 he and his team of specialists successfully transplanted the first human heart and he also did the first kidney transplant at Groote Schuur hospital in the same year. In 1968 Barnard made it public that he had arthritis in his hands and that he couldn’t operate as well as before, but that he had been helped by Hamilton Naki, his assistant.

In 1968 Professor Barnard was proposed for a Nobel Prize for medicine for his achievements, but he didn’t win. He became famous all over the world and was an unofficial ambassador for South Africa. He had suffered from asthma his whole life and on 2 September 2001 he died from an attack while on holiday in Cyprus, Greece.

 

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