First successful living-donor kidney transplantation - Dec. 23, 1954

Richard Herrick received a kidney from his twin brother on this day in 1954. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff you
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hi, this is
Holly Fry. I am sitting in for Tracy V. Wilson
this week. It's December, and on this day in nineteen

(00:24):
fifty four, the first successful living donor kidney transplantation was completed.
Twenty three year old Richard Herrick, freshly discharged from the
Coast Guard, was diagnosed with serious kidney inflammation called chronic nephritis.
On October nineteen fifty four. He was referred to Peter
Bent Brigham Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where a team

(00:45):
led by surgeon and Professor Joseph Murray and Dr John
Merrill had been working on the idea of kidney transplants. Medically,
Richard Herrick was a very good candidate for transplant because
he had an identical twin brother who had too healthy kidneys. Behaviorally,
it was a slightly different story. Richard was a difficult patient.

(01:06):
There was concerned that he might not be the right
fit for this kind of surgery, but a psychiatrist named Dr. E. M.
Kudaruskus evaluated Richard's behavior and he actually came to the
conclusion that the patient was exhibiting signs of toxic psychosis. Basically,
Richard's infection and the toxic agents in his body were
causing all of that bad behavior. So they decided that

(01:29):
they would go forward, and the team also had to
be very sensitive to the psychological ramifications of asking a
healthy man his brother to give up one of his kidneys.
The chief of psychiatry at the hospital was very aware
that there was an ethical issue in the mix as well,
and he wrote in the patient record quote, I think
we have to be careful not to be too much

(01:50):
swayed by our eagerness to carry out a kidney transplant
successfully for the first time, i e. To succeed in
having it take permanently. It seems to me furthermore that
the potential recipient's mental state is a subsidiary issue. The
important question would seem to be whether we as physicians
have the right to put the healthy twin under the

(02:11):
pressure of being asked whether he is willing to make
this sacrifice. I do not feel that we have this
right in view of the potential danger to the healthy
twin as well as the uncertainty of the outcome for
this patient. But even as this issue of ethics was
being really carefully and thoughtfully examined during November of nineteen fifty,

(02:33):
time was kind of ussuring things along because Richard's health
was rapidly declining, and so the longer the medical team
wrestled with their ideology and the philosophy behind asking a
healthy man to give up part of his body to
save his brother, the worst Richard's chances got. Ronald, after
thinking it through, eventually decided that he was in fact

(02:54):
willing to donate one of his kidneys to his brother,
and everything seemed to be going along just fine. But
at the last minute it was actually Richard who tried
to put a stop to things. The night before the
surgery was to take place, he sent a note to
his brother telling him to go home, but Ronald replied
with a note of his own and said simply, I
am here and I am going to stay. Before the

(03:16):
operation with the Herrick brothers, there was a test run
of the entire procedure on December twenty on a fresh
canaver and once this rehearsal was completed, the live procedure
was scheduled. So on December eight, fifteen am, the operation began.
The donor team was in one operating room and the
recipient team was in the adjacent operating room. The Brigham

(03:39):
kidney transplant team was comprised of doctor's John P. Merrill,
who was head of nephrology, j Hartwell Harrison, Chief of urology,
Gustav Dammon, pathologist in chief, and Joseph E. Murray. The severed,
healthy kidney was transferred from the donor operating room to
the recipient operating room at nine am. The operation was

(03:59):
completed at eleven fifteen as clamps were removed and blood
flow was restored to the transplanted organ, and the urinary
flow began immediately. It is considered the first successful organ transplant.
Richard lived for eight years after this surgery, and in
that time he actually got married to one of the
nurses that he met in the recovery room, and the

(04:21):
couple had two children. His brother, Ronald, lived to the
age of seventy nine. He died in fifty six, years
after donating his kidney to his brother and making history
in the process. Joseph E. Murray was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine in nineteen He died in
late twelve at the age of ninety three. Today, more

(04:44):
than thirty thousand organ transplants are performed in the United
States each year, and more than half of those are
kidney transplants. Thanks for today's episode goes to eve's Jeff
Cote who worked on research for this casey Pegram and
Chandler Mays for their work on the audio for the episode.
And UH, you should subscribe to This Day in History Class,

(05:04):
which you can do on Apple Podcast, the I Heart
Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tomorrow, we're
going to delve into the story behind one of the
standard songs of Christmas.