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00085_Field_Art-ST5.TXT.txt
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1996-08-21
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Heart Transplant
In 1967, a 25 year old South-African
woman named Denise Darvall
suffered a serious car crash. Her
head and lower body were fatally
injured, but miraculously, her heart
kept beating.
This provided the 44-year old
heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard
with the opportunity he had been
waiting for. He removed the living
heart from Denise and used it to
replace the ailing heart of a 55-year
old man, Louis Washansky. While his
sick heart was removed, the patient
was kept alive using a heart-lung
machine, which diverted his blood
around the heart area. Once the new
heart was in place, Barnard attached
two electrodes to ΓÇ£kick-startΓÇ¥ it into
beating. The procedure worked, and
Washansky awoke several hours
later, the first human being ever to
live with a transplanted heart.
The patient lived for 18 days. Then
he contracted pneumonia, and died.
The operation ignited a debate which
reverberates to this day: where to
draw the line between life and death.
Still, the heart transplant operation
of 1967 inaugurated a new era of
cardiac treatment and surgery, and
today, transplant operations have
become commonplace.