1967 — The World's First Heart Transplant

On December 3, 1967, in Cape Town, surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital. His patient, Louis Washkansky, received the heart of young donor Denise Darvall, whose gift made the daring operation possible and gave a dying man a chance that medicine had never offered before.

Washkansky lived for eighteen days, and those days were enough to prove that such an operation could be done. The breakthrough electrified medicine and made South Africa the center of the surgical world. A single operation in Cape Town had redrawn the boundary of what doctors dared to attempt, and surgery would never be the same again.