September 29, 2025 • 45 mins
Surgeons across the country race to transplant the human heart. The stakes are unimaginably high, rivalries turn vicious, and the first surgeon to cross the finish line shocks the world.
Presented by: Chris Pine
Written and Narrated by: Jamie Napoli
Executive Producers: Cristina Everett for iHeartPodcasts; Dub Cornett and Jason Ross for OSO Studios; Gerald Imber; Eric A. Rose, M.D.; John Mankiewicz; Joshua Paul Johnson; and Jamie Napoli
Supervising Producer: James A. Smith
Editing and Sound Design by: Joshua Paul Johnson
Composer: David Mansfield Cover Artwork by: Alexander Smith
Production Companies: iHeartPodcasts, OSO Studios, and 13th Lake Media
Production Legal Services: Jacqueline Eckhouse & Mel Pudig, Sloss Eckhouse Dasti Haynes LawCo; and Lincoln Bandlow, Lincoln Bandlow Law
Additional Archival Materials Courtesy of: "The Dick Cavett Show" (ABC 1970); "Nova" (WGBH Boston & PBS 1988 & 1999); "The Vision of Perseus: Norman Shumway" (Stanford University Libraries 1993); Vanderbilt University; American Academy of Achievement; US National Archives; John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston; SABC News; BBC Archive; "A Tribute to Professor Barnard" (Netcare 2017); "Barnard: Straight from the Heart" (Electric Sky and Alexander Street 2013); BBC; and the McGovern Historical Center of the Texas Medical Center Library
Additional Music & Stock Media Provided by: "Dokter Bernard" by Bonnie St. Claire, adapted from "Sister Mary" by Joe Dolan, written by Peter Koelewijn, Peter Yellowstone and Roberto Danova, label: Phillips; Publishers: Red Bus Music, Dayglow-Tripper, 1976; eitanepsteinmusic / Pond5; Music Bed; Premium Beat; Artlist; APM; and Envato Market
This podcast was recorded under a SAG-AFTRA collective bargaining agreement.
For more information on the history of open heart surgery, check out Dr. Gerald Imber's book "CARDIAC COWBOYS: The Heroic invention of Heart Surgery."
Copyright 2025, TTB, LLC. All rights reserved.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the wild West of American medicine. I'm Chris
pine In. This is Cardiac Cowboys, the gripping true story
behind the birth of open heart surgery and the Maverick
surgeons who made it happen. It's nineteen sixty seven, twelve
(00:20):
years since Walt lilla High first used his bubble oxygenator
to repair a child's heart defect, and over nine years
since Lilahi and Earl Bachin developed the portable pacemaker. We're
more than halfway through a decade defined by social unrest
and the righting of wrongs, by the nightmare of nuclear
(00:42):
war and the dream of new frontiers.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
We choose to go to the moon and dis decay
and do the other thing not because they are easy,
but because they are hard, because that.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Though well, served to organize and measure the beft of.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that
we're willing to accept.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
In Palo Alto, California, a young doctor sits for an
interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association. His
casual dress and self deprecating manner feel more suited to
a liberal arts professor than one of the world's leading
cardiac surgeons. This is doctor Norman Shumway, and he's about
to make an announcement that will send shock waves around
(01:39):
the world. After training under Walt L. La High at
the University of Minnesota, Shumway has spent the last several
years working toward a moonshot within the field of cardiac medicine.
It's an operation long considered impossible, transplanting the human heart.
He and his team at Stanford University have been experimenting
(02:01):
with anti rejection drugs and performing test operations on lab animals. Today,
Shumway announces that he's ready for the real thing. All
he needs now is the right patient and a matching donor.
When this interview is published on November twentieth, it will
light a fire under all the other surgeons working around
the world to beat Sumway to the punch. The heart
(02:24):
transplant race is on.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
Really, the heart crisis was about adult heart disease.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That's cardiologist doctor J. Phillip Sohl. Much of our story
until this point is focused on congenital heart defects and kids,
but the cardiac crisis was far from limited to children.
By the nineteen fifties, heart disease was killing over half
a million Americans every year. I say Americans because the
(02:55):
problem seemed to be uniquely targeting this country, the richest
in the world, where people were living increasingly sedentary lives,
commuting by car or train, working long hours at a desk,
smoking cigarettes, and eating high fat diets.
Speaker 5 (03:12):
Hamburger steak, and lamb chops. You can almost track and
parallel the rise in both heart disease and lung cancer.
Starting about twenty years after the invention of the cigarette machine,
cigarettes began to be produced in much greater quantity that
almost single handedly explains a huge amount of the heart disease.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Red meat, cars, and cigarettes, the American dream was killing us.
For patients whose hearts were damaged beyond repair, a transplant
was the only hope for survival. Thanks to the experiments
conducted by Shumway and his partner Richard Lauer. By the
nineteen sixties, human heart transplantation was beginning to feel less
(03:55):
like science fiction and more like an attainable reality. But
Shumway and Lower weren't the only contenders in the transplant race.
In Brooklyn, there was doctor Adrian Cantrwitz, a brilliant and
burley surgeon inventor who ran the cardiovascular surgery department at
(04:16):
Mimonodes Hospital.
Speaker 6 (04:18):
Part surgeons who were capable of doing this kind of
surgery seemed the invincible, and that kind of aura was
important to win the confidence of the patient.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
In Jackson, Mississippi, there was doctor James D. Hardy as
chairman of the University of Mississippi's surgical department. Hardy courted
controversy when he attempted the first human heart transplant back
in nineteen sixty four. The operation did not succeed, but
most of the criticism focused on the fact that the
donor heart was taken not from another human, but from
(04:51):
a chimpanzee.
Speaker 7 (04:53):
Once that heart has been removed, then one is looking
at a hole in the chest, and then something's got
to be put there.
Speaker 8 (05:00):
One is going to have to talk to the family.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
None of these surgeons hailed from historically elite universities or hospitals,
as had been the case for the last decade and
a half. The real innovation in cardiac surgery was happening
on the margins.
Speaker 8 (05:15):
Of the field.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
For much of the world, the heart remained mythically tied
to the soul, and the promise of a heart transplant
tapped into our wildest dreams and deepest fears. Whichever surgeon
crossed the finish line first, be it Shumway, lour Cantowitz,
or Hardy, he could expect to receive both sweeping adoration
(05:38):
and rebuke. Less than two weeks after Shumway's announcement, a
shocking news story broke in Cape Town, South Africa.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
We had a recipient reading, we had the donor identified
in Philadelphia's math Act, and that morning my daughter came
in and said, some joker down in Africa has done
a hards transplant.
Speaker 9 (06:07):
On December third, nineteen sixty seven, Christian Barnard removed the
heart from a twenty five year old girl and transplanted
into the chest of a fifty five year old man.
In case you missed the news that.
Speaker 10 (06:17):
Day, performed by a surgeon virtually unknown except to a
handful of other surgeons.
Speaker 11 (06:21):
Newspapers everywhere Carrie Banner headlines, and from medical men as
far away as the Soviet Union, there is a claim
for the dramatic breakthrough.
Speaker 9 (06:28):
Will you welcome doctor Christian Barnard?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
The heart transplant race had just been won by a
man who wasn't even considered a contender in a country
no one regarded for its medical prowess. How could this happen?
And who the hell was Christian Barnard? The world was
about to find out Formoso's Studios. This is Cardiac Cowboys,
(06:58):
a podcast about life, death and innovation. In the American
Hartland episode four, The Transplant Race, Here's writer and executive
producer Jamie Napoli.
Speaker 12 (07:20):
For all the criticism that would be hurled at Christian
Barnard throughout his career, and there would be plenty, one
thing is certain. He fought tooth and nail for every
success that came his way. Unlike his American counterparts, Barnard
was born into poverty. His family lived in a small
(07:42):
town within South Africa's Great carew, a harsh semi desert
region stretching hundreds of miles between Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Speaker 13 (07:52):
It's a hell of a place, but I can tell
you terrible bliness. A very country, small little Karuta on
the back of ECUs, Nevada or Arizona.
Speaker 12 (08:02):
Adam Barnard is the son of Christian's youngest brother, Marius.
Speaker 13 (08:06):
A lot of people in life who get to invent
certain things, you tend to find quite a lot of
them have come from those humble beginnings, and the Barnard
brothers were very fortunate to have very humble, peaceful, god
loving pirates.
Speaker 12 (08:22):
Christian Barnard's father was a minister who preached both at
the local jail and at the Dutch Reformed church designated
for the town's black and mixed race population. As a result,
the Barnards, who were white were shunned by their white neighbors,
and the Barnard children would grow into fierce critics of apartheid.
Speaker 14 (08:42):
Chris didn't grow up in a household that entertained apartheids.
Speaker 12 (08:46):
That's Cindy Laddigan, manager of the Heart of Cape Town Museum.
Speaker 14 (08:50):
When she brought intensive Gate to South Africa, where the
rest of the hospital would lay divided. Even the er
itself had a different entrance for white. He had all
his patients laying together, and he had this attitude of
if you didn't like it, you could go die at home.
Speaker 12 (09:09):
Christian Barnard had three living brothers, Johann, Dodsley, and Marius.
A fourth brother named Abraham, had died at the age
of three from a congenital heart defect. Abraham's death loomed
over the Barnard children in the form of their mother's grief.
Speaker 14 (09:27):
She became a very hard woman after the loss of Abraham.
They were all terrified of the mother. She always pushed
him to be first, always, and if they didn't come first,
they'd be whipped.
Speaker 12 (09:43):
Christian Barnard spent his life racing to be first, regardless
of the obstacles that lay ahead of him. As a child,
he competed in his town's annual foot race without shoes.
He won his school's tennis championship playing with borrowed racket,
and he patched together scholarships to put himself through medical school,
(10:06):
leaving no money to buy clothes or to socialize with
his classmates. As a young doctor at Ruth Desciur Hospital
in Cape Town, he quickly set himself apart with his
pioneering research in the field of gastro intestinal surgery.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
He did seminal work on an operation to deal with
intestinal a treasure, which is a potentially lethal defect.
Speaker 12 (10:29):
That's medical historian and plastic surgeon doctor Gerald Imber. In
nineteen fifty five, Barnard's research caught the interest of an
American surgical chief nine thousand miles away.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Barnard earned his way to study with the great Owen
Wangenstein in Minnesota.
Speaker 12 (10:51):
He said goodbye to his wife, Loki and their two
young children with a vague promise that they join him
in America at some point in the future. Whoa the tall,
lanky country boy with a mop of unruly brown hair.
Barnard looked younger than his thirty three years as he
(11:13):
left behind beautiful Cape Town. He was filled with visions
of a future that until this moment had been unimaginable
to him or anyone in his family line of destitute
ministers and woodcutters. When Barnard arrived in Minneapolis on a
(11:35):
late December night, thousands of miles from the nearest friends
or family, the temperature hovered just below zero.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
In addition to freezing his butt off, what he found
out was the longest seem didn't want to teach him
clinical surgery. He wanted him working out projects in the
lab because he had great lab credentials.
Speaker 14 (12:00):
Einstein was extremely impressed with the amount of drive that
the sky had. Chris actually did his PhD in two years,
where it would normally take six years to accomplish.
Speaker 12 (12:12):
Barnard joked that he only slept on Sundays when he
was kicked out of the lab, and that may not
have been far from the truth. To fund his family's
eventual move to Minneapolis, he supplemented his hospital income with
odd jobs around town, shoveling snow in the winter, washing cars,
and taking night nurse shifts for wealthy patients. At the
(12:34):
University of Minnesota, Barnard developed a reputation not just for
his obsessive work ethic, but for the brash, confident charm
that masked insecurities about his finances and his foreignness. It
made him popular with senior surgeons and administrators like Owen Wangstein,
less so with his peers. Here's Christian Barnard's nephew, Adam Barnard.
Speaker 13 (12:58):
Again, he was very charismatic. He had a good looking,
toothy smile. He could make you feel a million dollars
and two seconds, but he could also make you feel
the biggest fool and two seconds.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Chris Barnard was beloved by everybody who didn't know him,
and not by anyone who did.
Speaker 12 (13:14):
But Barnard hadn't left behind his family and flown halfway
around the world to make friends. He was there to
make a name for himself. Early in his residency, Barnard's
ambition came into sharp focus when he was introduced to
the heart surgeons down the hall. He began observing open
(13:37):
heart operations from the upper level of the glass domed
o ar. Down below, Walt Lillahigh was repairing cases of
tetrology of below, the condition that had taken the life
of Barnard's three year old brother Abraham. As he watched
Lillihigh and his ingenious bubble oxygenator save a dying child,
(13:58):
Barnard sensed that this was the work he was meant
to be doing. It wasn't long before he asked Wangenstein
to be transferred to cardiac surgery. By now, Lillihi was
already a legend within the department, inventing new life saving
procedures on a monthly basis. Barnard worked tirelessly to impress him,
(14:21):
studying the bubble oxygenator and assisting in operations until he
was promoted to Lillihig's chief resident. It was then that
he made the first catastrophic mistake of his young career.
In his autobiography One Life, Barnard details exactly what went wrong.
(14:43):
As he was prepping a seven year old patient for
open heart surgery. As the boy's anxious father watched from above,
Barnard and his assistant accidentally sliced into the exposed heart.
Blood erupted from the boy's heart and filled his open
(15:03):
chest cavity. Barnard panicked. He struggled to staunch the bleeding,
but he couldn't locate the hole in the rising pool
of blood. By the time Lilahi arrived to help, the
boy was dead above them on the operating theatre's upper level.
The boy's father had seen it all. Barnard wandered aimlessly
(15:28):
through the hospital before finally dragging himself to Lilahi's office.
He didn't know whether the senior surgeon would show him
out or fire him.
Speaker 8 (15:39):
Look, Chris, Lilahai.
Speaker 12 (15:41):
Said, calmly, we've all made these mistakes that cost the
lives of patients. The only thing you can do is
to learn.
Speaker 8 (15:49):
By your mistake.
Speaker 12 (15:52):
Lila High task Barnard with prepping another young patient for
surgery the following day. Rather than hovering behind him, la
High remained absent from the r until the last possible moment,
show that Barnard had retained his full confidence.
Speaker 15 (16:08):
This early surgery was going to be fraught with trouble,
and Dad knew that.
Speaker 12 (16:12):
That's Walt lilla High's son, doctor Craig Lilihigh, what.
Speaker 15 (16:15):
He realizes, good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes
from bad judgment. It was clearly something they embraced in
those early days, that it was Okay, this didn't work,
We've got to figure out how we can try to
solve it next.
Speaker 12 (16:36):
Lillahigh valued ingenuity and work ethic far above technical prowess,
which favored Barnard, whose surgical ability didn't always measure up
to that of his colleagues. One such colleague was a
young surgical resident who would one day lead the heart
transplant race, Norm Shumway. Compared to the charming and outwardly
(16:58):
ambitious South African, Humway was self deprecating and low key.
Speaker 16 (17:03):
Dad always felt that in academic medicine people took themselves
too seriously.
Speaker 12 (17:09):
That's Norm Shumway's daughter, doctor Sarah Shumway. She's a surgeon
at the U of M who specializes in heart and
lung transplants.
Speaker 16 (17:17):
He told me when I started in my own operating
room to keep things light so people didn't get too
overwhelmed by the fact they were cutting out people's hearts.
Speaker 12 (17:28):
Within a decade, Christian Barnard and Norm Shumway would become
the two biggest names in heart transplantation, and their work
would define the future of cardiac surgery. For now, they
were lowly U of M residents whose personalities didn't always mesh.
Speaker 16 (17:46):
I think they were cordial, but they weren't really friends.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
Chumway thought he was a self serving bit of a
jerk and wanted nothing to do with them.
Speaker 12 (18:02):
While Schumwey struggled to stand out among many ambitious surgical residents,
Barnard had grown into the department's golden boy. As his
residency came to an end, Wangenstein begged Barnard to stay
in Minnesota, offering him a position with the u of
M faculty. Though Barnard turned down the offer, Wangenstein sent
him back to Cape Town with a life changing gift.
(18:25):
Here's an archival recording of doctor Norm Schomwey.
Speaker 17 (18:28):
When he went back to South Africa. Wangenstein, such a
generous man, gave Bernard ten thousand dollars for cardiopulmmeter bypass equipment,
so he had substantial backing.
Speaker 12 (18:49):
Rutskiur is a large, picturesque hospital nestled into the base
of the precipitous Devil's Peak, which overlooks Cape Town. In
nineteen fifty eight, Barnard rejoined the faculty as a returning hero.
He'd studied with the greatest heart surgeons in the world,
and thanks to Wartenstein, he brought back with him the
(19:11):
famous duwal Lillehigh bubble oxygenator. Now he was setting out
to bring South Africa into the era of open heart surgery.
Like his mentor Walt Lillehigh, Barnard had his own ticking clock.
In the frigid Minnesota climate, he'd begun experiencing crippling flashes
(19:31):
of pain, first in the joints of his feet, later
in his hands. He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an
excruciating autoimmune disease. Barnard tried all kinds of traditional and
non traditional medicines, everything from guava to break fluid, but
rheumatoid arthritis has no cure. For the rest of his career,
(19:55):
he'd live in fear that the pain and deformity in
his hands would grow so advanced that he'd no longer
be able to operate. If he was going to leave
his mark on the field of cardiac surgery, Christian Barnard
would have to do it quickly. Barnard's mission crystallized after
he learned of a breakthrough experiment performed at Stanford University
(20:18):
by an old colleague, doctor Norm Shumway. After finishing his
residency in Minnesota, Shumway had spent years struggling to find
his footing, first in Santa Barbara, then in San Francisco,
as he labored to support his young family. No job
was too small, from working night shifts operating an artificial
(20:40):
kidney machine to performing simple open heart operations at a
hospital across town. Anytime Shumway was referred to patient for surgery,
he and his partner, Richard Lower would pack their heart,
lung machine, and other equipment into a moving van and
brave San Francisco traffic to get from their Stanford Lane
laboratory to the o RS at the Children's Hospital. When
(21:03):
Stanford's Medical school relocated to Palo Alto in nineteen fifty nine,
Shumway was asked to take over the Department of Cardiac Surgery.
Thrust into a leadership role for the first time, Humway excelled.
His management approach was as low key as his personality.
He liked to describe himself as the world's greatest first assistant.
(21:27):
Here's an archival recording of one of Shumway's chief residents,
doctor Jack Copeland.
Speaker 18 (21:32):
He used to say that when you go to Houston,
you think that Denton Cooley's the only one that can operate,
because he's the only one that was operating. When you
go to Stanford, you think that anybody can operate because
we were in there doing all the cases and he
was helping us.
Speaker 12 (21:48):
In December, Chumway's team performed the first heart transplant in
a lab dog, proving to surgeons the world over that
human heart transplantation was within reach. The obstacle to getting
there was the lack of a viable donor. The ideal
(22:10):
heart for transplantation is still beating up until the instant
it's removed from the donor. The problem was that, up
until this moment in history, a beating heart meant that
the donor was still alive. Before a human heart transplant
could occur, Shumway and his colleagues would need to convince
the world that death could be defined as the loss
(22:31):
of brain function, not just the stopping of the heart.
Speaker 17 (22:37):
I used to call it the boy scout definition of death.
Speaker 12 (22:40):
That's doctor Norm Shumway again.
Speaker 17 (22:42):
Even our neurosurgeons were very slow to come to grips
with brain death. That philosophy or misjudgment, or lack of education, tradition,
whatever you want to call it, was very slow. This
was a difficult problem.
Speaker 12 (23:02):
Doctors and administrators alike feared that removing the heart of
a brain dead patient might result in a murder charge
against the surgeon, and not without reason, Norm Shumway would
be threatened with such charges in the years to come.
The other problem looming over the dream of a human
heart transplant was organ rejection.
Speaker 17 (23:23):
Some animals would live two or three weeks, others would
die in a few days because of rejection. The heart
transplant is such a bigger procedure and the preparation is
so dogone, fragile, and delicate that when we use the
same menu of immunosuppression that others were using in kidney transplants,
our animals would all die of toxicity.
Speaker 12 (23:46):
Norm Shumway and Richard Lauer spent years working out the
rejection problem, devising a precise cocktail of steroids and immunosuppressants
to give transplant recipients the greatest probability of accepting their
new hearts. Facing the same problem, Christian Barnard took a
different approach. In the summer of nineteen sixty seven, he
(24:10):
made a trip to Richmond, Virginia, where Richard Lower was working.
At the time, the Medical College of Virginia was renowned
for its kidney transplantation program, and that's the reason Barnard
gave for his visit. He was preparing to transplant a kidney,
he said, But while he was there, Lower happily showed
him the immunosuppression techniques he and Shumway had developed for
(24:34):
a heart transplant.
Speaker 17 (24:36):
So he'd go down to the lab and see Laurer
doing these heart transplants with the same facility and success
he'd had at Stanford. Barnard had one of his technicians
with him on this trip, and the technician told Lawyer,
he said, you know, Bernard's going to go home and
do that apparition, and Loward just shrugged it off as ridiculous.
Speaker 12 (24:59):
And yet Barne had set out to do exactly that.
Speaker 8 (25:04):
Here's Cindy Ladigan again.
Speaker 14 (25:06):
He had watched Richard Lower practice and experiment on dogs
on that side, so he had to come back and
teach the site everything that he'd seen, everything that he'd learned.
Speaker 12 (25:17):
Barnard had spent the last several years assembling an elite
cardiac surgery team in Cape Town. His most trusted confidante
was a young vascular surgeon named Marius Barnard, Christian's younger brother.
Speaker 13 (25:30):
I thought they never wanted to do hot surgery, and
he never wanted to work with Chris.
Speaker 12 (25:34):
That's Marius's son, Adam Barnard.
Speaker 13 (25:36):
Again in her brothers the competitive and that can be
very brutally honest with each other.
Speaker 12 (25:43):
Prior to joining his brother's team, Marius had spent a
year in Houston training under Baylor's demanding surgical chief, Michael DeBakey.
Speaker 13 (25:53):
When he worked on to the Beaky, he didn't really
learn a lot because the Beky just wanted to control
all ofs and didn't want anyone else to operate. He
liked Denton Cooley, he learned a lot from him, but
obviously surgeons, they all got a huge eager and they
all think they're the best. Denton Cooley used to say,
(26:13):
just call me GLD which stands called Good Old Denton.
Speaker 12 (26:23):
Christian and Marius Barnard employed many of the techniques they'd
picked up in the US from Walt Lillaheigh, Michael DeBakey,
Denton Cooley, Richard Lower, and Norm Shumway. Together, the brothers
performed dozens of heart transplants on lab dogs as they
prepared for their first human patient. In the fall of
(26:46):
nineteen sixty seven, Christian Barnard found himself in the same
position as Norm Shumway, ready to transplant, but waiting on
the right patient and donor. That's when a cardiology introduced
him to a Cape Town grosser named Louis Wishkansky. Here's
heart of Cape Town Museum manager Cindy Ladigan.
Speaker 14 (27:09):
Again, Louis had heart failure. He had had two heart
attacks prior to this, and he was actually admitted to
krutsky At Hospital purely because he was in such a
bad state.
Speaker 12 (27:22):
In his youth, Louis had been a powerful amateur boxer.
Now in his fifties, his heart failing, he was using
all his strength to fight for survival. Louis had already
outlived his prognosis by two years when Barnard met him
in addition to heart disease, he suffered from diabetes, liver failure,
(27:43):
kidney failure, and a host of other serious ailments. Without
an immediate heart transplant, Louis didn't have long to live.
Speaker 8 (27:53):
Thankfully, While Sumway and the.
Speaker 12 (27:55):
Other American surgeons were still struggling to garner widespread acceptance
for the concept of brain death, Barnard's job was easier.
Speaker 14 (28:03):
What was the upper hand for Chris to actually be
the first here was the declaration of death. In South Africa,
medical law stated that she needed two doctors to do
a death declaration. America was way stricter.
Speaker 12 (28:19):
Barnard didn't need to change anyone's mind about the definition
of death. All he needed was a brain dead patient
with a matching blood type.
Speaker 8 (28:29):
He wouldn't need to wait long.
Speaker 12 (28:37):
On December second, the darval family stopped outside of bakery
in the Salt River suburb of Cape Town. Twenty five
year old Denise and her mother ran inside to get
a cake. Denise's brother, Keith and their father, Edward, waited
in the car. As the Darvall women made their way
(29:00):
back to the car, a drunk driver careened down the
street toward them.
Speaker 14 (29:07):
Denise was flung forty feet in the air. She hit
her head on the back of a vehicle and she
fractured her skull in two areas. Her mom passed away
at the scene.
Speaker 12 (29:21):
Louie Wishkanski's wife, Anne, was leaving the hospital when she
drove by the scene of the accident. As police waved
her on, she could make out two women lying.
Speaker 8 (29:31):
In the road. Christian Barnard was at home when he
got the call. There was a young woman.
Speaker 12 (29:39):
At the hospital who'd suffered severe brain damage. It was
possible her heart might serve as a viable replacement for
Louis Wishkansky's.
Speaker 14 (29:50):
One can only imagine what her father, Edward, must have
felt like knowing that his wife had passed away. Sitting
at the hospital ten o'clock at night, He's hoping for
some kind of good news about his daughter, and these
doctors come out and say to him that there isn't
any that he needs to accept the fact that his
daughter's gone, but while she's on life support, she could
(30:14):
help this patient in the hospital, Louis Washganski.
Speaker 12 (30:19):
Edward Darval would later recount that in that moment, he
remembered how Denise had spent the first paycheck she ever
made on a gift for him. She was always giving
away things to other people. He'd say giving would be
her legacy.
Speaker 14 (30:35):
They say he took four minutes to think about it,
and his first words were, if you cannot save the
life of my daughter, then you need to save the
life of that man. We do consider Edward Duvall a
hero because he at a heart of no other.
Speaker 12 (30:54):
Christian Barnard arrived at the hospital ready to save Louis Wishkanski.
Denise was examined by the senior neurosurgeon at Route descure
and declared brain debt. She was relocated to one of
two adjacent oars B theater. Louis Wishkansky was moved to
a theater.
Speaker 13 (31:14):
The Americans and the French, and in most European countries
at the time, they had much better cardiac facilities than Manhatto,
South Africa, so that it came down to the theater, nurses,
the nethetists.
Speaker 9 (31:24):
You name it.
Speaker 13 (31:25):
Every single little aspect of that had to be right.
Speaker 19 (31:29):
It was no room for error.
Speaker 14 (31:31):
That's the type of person christ was in the workplace.
It was all or nothing.
Speaker 12 (31:37):
Initially, the plan was for Marius Barnard to remove Denise's
heart and for Christian to transplant it, but Marius suggested
a last minute change. Unless you cut it out yourself,
he told his older brother, it's not going to be familiar.
It's better you get acquainted with it from the beginning.
Christian Barnard dashed madly between the two ops rating theaters
(32:00):
as donor and recipient were.
Speaker 8 (32:02):
Prepped for surgery.
Speaker 12 (32:04):
In a theater, Woshkanski's chest was sliced open, his sternam
was sawed down the middle, and his ribs were cranked
apart with a retractor. The beating organ that lay inside
was enlarged and scarred beyond recognition. Barnard described it as
the waste and ruin of a ravaged heart. In b theater,
(32:27):
Marius Barnard turned off Denise's respirator. Despite the comparatively laxed
medical definition of death in South Africa, this team wasn't
taking any chances. They waited as Denise's heart began to fail.
The moment it stopped beating, Christian Barnard called out start cutting,
and then he scrubbed up for surgery. With her chest
(32:50):
spread open, Christian Barnard finally got his first look at
Denise's heart. It was tiny, but it would have to
do painstakingly. Barnard severed the eight blood vessels leading into
and out of Denise's heart. When the heart was finally
liberated from her body, Barnard placed it in a metal basin,
(33:11):
and then he carried it slowly and carefully.
Speaker 8 (33:14):
To a theater.
Speaker 12 (33:18):
Denise's heart looked absurdly small inside Louis's massive chest. Barnard
had to trim her blood vessels at an angle to
match their wide counterparts in Louis's body. His hands ached,
but he ignored the pain. This was the moment his
entire life had been racing to her, the moment that
would determine whether Louis Wishkanski lived or died, and whether
(33:41):
Christian Barnard went down in history or became a mere
footnote in someone else's story. Blood vessel by blood vessel,
he began to suture Louis's new heart into place.
Speaker 20 (33:56):
When I left the hospital that morning, it was summer
and the sun of just ride. There was not one photographer,
not one television camera, not one reporter outside at hospital.
Speaker 12 (34:06):
That's an archival recording of doctor Christian Barnard.
Speaker 11 (34:09):
I said to my brother who was with me.
Speaker 20 (34:11):
I said, you know, we'd better tell someone in hospital
that we've done it out Trance Donna.
Speaker 12 (34:16):
The brother's moment of quietude wouldn't last for long.
Speaker 10 (34:20):
Hotch truans done at Gucca Hospital in Canton.
Speaker 11 (34:23):
Medical history has been made in South Africa ors first.
Speaker 17 (34:26):
Heart transplant patients.
Speaker 20 (34:28):
Loy Wasashkinski continues to improve.
Speaker 19 (34:33):
I had phone balls from all over the world, and
that evening there was a television crewer, and then after
that it just became impossible to work. I don't think
they recognized as the need that I had to look
after my paces and that I couldn't spend all the
time answering questions and appearing in front of cameras.
Speaker 12 (34:53):
When news of the transplant reached doctors in the United States,
there was an immediate shock, followed by frustration. Here's doctor
Adrian Cantrowitz. Again.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
I must say I was disappointed because we were all
set to go. It was just a matter of luck
who got the donor in the recipient together.
Speaker 12 (35:11):
First, Denton Cooley, though we hadn't yet attempted any test
transplants of his own, sent Barnard a playful telegram that
read congratulations on your first heart transplant, Chris, I will
soon be doing my one hundredth. There was a sentiment
shared by many American surgeons that Christian Barnard did not
(35:32):
deserve to be first, that he'd benefited from the hard
work of others. Barnard fought back against these accusations vehemently.
Speaker 11 (35:41):
It really amazed me very much. I was present meetings
where senior surgeons got up and stated that I stole
the technique from Sway and that I should never have
been the first one to do the transplant. Well, you know,
I mean, there's no such thing as a single genius.
We get ideas from everybody, of.
Speaker 12 (35:58):
All the Americans. Rum Shumway had perhaps the most valid
reason for begrudging Barnard, but by all accounts, he didn't.
Speaker 16 (36:07):
Dad seemed to be quite excited that a transplant had
been performed. I'm sure he was disappointed not to have
been the first one, but I think that wasn't the
price he was after. What Barnard did really was to
establish that brain death was an acceptable definition of death.
Speaker 12 (36:26):
Barnard's operation had set a precedent, and while the concept
of brain death would remain divisive for years, to come,
American surgeons felt emboldened to attempt transplant operations of their own.
In the second week after Barnard's historic first, Louis Wishkanski's
health took a turn for the worse. He picked up
(36:49):
a bacterial infection in the hospital, and the abundance of
immunosuppressants in his body the anti rejection drugs Barnard had
given him made it impossible for him to fight it off.
On December twenty first, Louis became the first man in
history to die after someone else's heart stopped beating in
his chest.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
I was completely destroyed that morning. I went down to
my office and I lay on the couchs there, and
one of my laborty assistants came in and he saw
I was crying because he was a very likable man.
Mister Woshkinsky was a very nice man. It was great
sorrow that we let him down.
Speaker 12 (37:33):
Louis Wishkansky's death did little to slow the transplant fever
that was spreading rapidly around the world. Barnard already had
his second heart transplant operation on the books. His face
had appeared on the covers of Time and Life magazine,
and his days in the spotlight were just beginning.
Speaker 13 (37:52):
He literally became moullightly one of the most famous people
on the planet for two three years.
Speaker 8 (37:57):
That's Adam Barnard again.
Speaker 13 (37:58):
Aim, It's Johnson, the prison of the United States. He
met the Queen, he met the Pope. Not many people
do that in the space of a year. It's very
easy for it to go to your hit.
Speaker 12 (38:08):
The Guinness Book of World Records stated that Barnard received
more fan mail than anyone in the history of the world.
He was even the subject of a hit Dutch pop
song by Bonnie Sinclair.
Speaker 16 (38:21):
Delon Miss.
Speaker 12 (38:27):
The swell of celebrity enveloping him was all consuming, and
yet there was still plenty to go around. Fame and
fortune awaited any surgeon with the audacity to pull off
a heart transplant.
Speaker 7 (38:39):
There was enormous media response even for the second and
third and fourth heart transplants, and there were television programs
in the night talking about heart transplants, and pretty soon
it got to be that if she didn't do a
heart transplant, he wanted a real heart surgeon, and so
therefore everybody who wanted to be a real heart surgeon
started to do it including ain't some very real heart
(39:01):
surgeons like Mike de Baky and like Denton Cooley.
Speaker 13 (39:05):
You feel like, is here something like an astronaut? You know.
Speaker 12 (39:09):
That's an archival recording of doctor Cooley, who leapt headlong
into the heart transplant arena. By September of nineteen sixty eight,
he performed ten transplant operations.
Speaker 13 (39:21):
The astronaut gets all the credit, and he gets the
trip to the moon, but he had nothing to do
with the creation of the rocket or all of the
navigational problems.
Speaker 17 (39:31):
In the early events. We were, I think glorified behind
the reason.
Speaker 13 (39:38):
Who did the first kidney torn? Scot Dealer not, but
everyone knows he did the first heart Charles glot over
Than is the seat of religion, the seat of love,
the seat of compassion, is your heart. That's why it
was such a big deal at the time.
Speaker 12 (39:52):
For patients living with the death sentence of failing hearts.
The birth of heart transplantation offered new hope.
Speaker 13 (40:00):
I feel so much better than I have for twenty
five years.
Speaker 12 (40:03):
That's a recording of Cooley's first heart transplant recipient, Everett Thomas.
Speaker 11 (40:08):
I was getting worse and worse than week and week
now I'm getting stronger and stronger at Baby Bovan, I
feel exactly the same way I did when I was
a young boy.
Speaker 13 (40:17):
At nineteen twenty years older.
Speaker 12 (40:20):
Even as successful heart transplants were being performed by surgeons
all around the world, the public remained fascinated by the
man who did it first.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
Who is this man who has twice played God, who
is greeted like a Hollywood.
Speaker 9 (40:35):
Idol, who was adorned by his subordinates, who moves with
boyish charm among.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
The many races of his native land.
Speaker 7 (40:43):
The world wants to know who is doctor Christian Niedling Barnard.
Speaker 13 (40:52):
Fame is quite a lethal drug, I thought I used
to said that, But the worst drug in the world
is somebody claptensity, because it's because you know that did
unfortunately get to my uncle if everyone wanted a piece
of him.
Speaker 14 (41:07):
He made the lives of Francis, Diana, Grace, Kelly, Sophia Lorraine.
He loved the ladies. That is undeniable. His wife actually said,
you know that he should never have gotten married or
had children because he didn't belong to a wife or
a hoe. He belonged to the world.
Speaker 12 (41:29):
Newspapers breathlessly covered Barnard's romantic alliances with Gina Lolo Brigida
Sophia Loren, a former Miss Italy and Miss South Africa.
Within a year and a half of the first transplant,
Barnard's wife, Loki, had filed for divorce. Marius Barnard took
(41:50):
over much of the department's workload as his older brother
balanced a surgical schedule with life as a full time celebrity.
Speaker 11 (41:59):
I just stay Ordny doctor. All of a sudden, it
was big news. You know that I had it an
affair with a scout. So people often criticize me pall
for what I did, but then must remember that I
would never prepear for the situation I was putting. Overnight.
Speaker 12 (42:19):
Months into the rise of transplant fever, the fever broke.
Patients began dying at an alarming rate. Just as quickly
as the public had embraced heart transplantation as the future,
they turned on it as well as the doctors leading
the charge.
Speaker 10 (42:38):
At first, it was no more than a murmur. Today
it can be heard around the world. Heart swapping is directioning.
Speaker 8 (42:45):
Here's Denton Cooley again.
Speaker 9 (42:47):
I think we did twelve consecutive ones, and we had
about nine living the recipients.
Speaker 17 (42:53):
Then the attrition began.
Speaker 9 (42:56):
Within eighteen months, all over fading to die.
Speaker 14 (43:02):
Chris said letters of congratulations and a lot of letters
of hate. People that were asking for his earlier race
because he should be had up for murder, people that
said he was unmorl and a bunch of goolds.
Speaker 12 (43:17):
A nineteen seventy one issue of Life magazine ran with
the cover story a new report on an era of
medical failure, the tragic record of heart transplants. Doctors and
politicians alike called for an end to the procedure. The
careers of transplant surgeons and the lives of their dying
(43:38):
patients were suddenly under threat. The future of the field
would depend on what these surgeons did next.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
On our next episode, an ingenious medical device promises to
eliminate the need for heart donor's entirely, and the competition
between Houston's virgins Michael Debakean Denton Cooley explodes into an
all out few playing out in courtrooms and headlines across
the country. Next time on Cardiac Cowboys.
Speaker 12 (44:22):
Cardiac Cowboys is a production of iHeart Podcasts, OsO Studios
and Thirteenth Lake Media. We're presented by Chris Pine and
written and narrated by me Jamie Appley. Our executive producers
are Christina Everett for iHeart Podcasts, Dub Cornette and Jason
(44:42):
Ross for OsO Studios. Doctor Gerald Imber, author of Cardiac Cowboys,
The Heroic Invention of Heart Surgery, Doctor Eric A. Rose,
John Mankowitz, Joshua Paul Johnson, and myself. James A. Smith
is our supervising produce editing and sound design by Joshua
(45:03):
Paul Johnson. Our composer is David Mansfield. Our cover artwork
is designed by Alexander Smith. For more information on the
first cardiac surgeons, check out doctor Gerald Imber's book, Cardiac Cowboys,
The Heroic Invention of Heart Surgery,
Welcome to the wild West of American medicine. I'm Chris
pine In. This is Cardiac Cowboys, the gripping true story
behind the birth of open heart surgery and the Maverick
surgeons who made it happen. It's nineteen sixty seven, twelve
(00:20):
years since Walt lilla High first used his bubble oxygenator
to repair a child's heart defect, and over nine years
since Lilahi and Earl Bachin developed the portable pacemaker. We're
more than halfway through a decade defined by social unrest
and the righting of wrongs, by the nightmare of nuclear
(00:42):
war and the dream of new frontiers.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
We choose to go to the moon and dis decay
and do the other thing not because they are easy,
but because they are hard, because that.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Though well, served to organize and measure the beft of.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that
we're willing to accept.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
In Palo Alto, California, a young doctor sits for an
interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association. His
casual dress and self deprecating manner feel more suited to
a liberal arts professor than one of the world's leading
cardiac surgeons. This is doctor Norman Shumway, and he's about
to make an announcement that will send shock waves around
(01:39):
the world. After training under Walt L. La High at
the University of Minnesota, Shumway has spent the last several
years working toward a moonshot within the field of cardiac medicine.
It's an operation long considered impossible, transplanting the human heart.
He and his team at Stanford University have been experimenting
(02:01):
with anti rejection drugs and performing test operations on lab animals. Today,
Shumway announces that he's ready for the real thing. All
he needs now is the right patient and a matching donor.
When this interview is published on November twentieth, it will
light a fire under all the other surgeons working around
the world to beat Sumway to the punch. The heart
(02:24):
transplant race is on.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
Really, the heart crisis was about adult heart disease.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That's cardiologist doctor J. Phillip Sohl. Much of our story
until this point is focused on congenital heart defects and kids,
but the cardiac crisis was far from limited to children.
By the nineteen fifties, heart disease was killing over half
a million Americans every year. I say Americans because the
(02:55):
problem seemed to be uniquely targeting this country, the richest
in the world, where people were living increasingly sedentary lives,
commuting by car or train, working long hours at a desk,
smoking cigarettes, and eating high fat diets.
Speaker 5 (03:12):
Hamburger steak, and lamb chops. You can almost track and
parallel the rise in both heart disease and lung cancer.
Starting about twenty years after the invention of the cigarette machine,
cigarettes began to be produced in much greater quantity that
almost single handedly explains a huge amount of the heart disease.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Red meat, cars, and cigarettes, the American dream was killing us.
For patients whose hearts were damaged beyond repair, a transplant
was the only hope for survival. Thanks to the experiments
conducted by Shumway and his partner Richard Lauer. By the
nineteen sixties, human heart transplantation was beginning to feel less
(03:55):
like science fiction and more like an attainable reality. But
Shumway and Lower weren't the only contenders in the transplant race.
In Brooklyn, there was doctor Adrian Cantrwitz, a brilliant and
burley surgeon inventor who ran the cardiovascular surgery department at
(04:16):
Mimonodes Hospital.
Speaker 6 (04:18):
Part surgeons who were capable of doing this kind of
surgery seemed the invincible, and that kind of aura was
important to win the confidence of the patient.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
In Jackson, Mississippi, there was doctor James D. Hardy as
chairman of the University of Mississippi's surgical department. Hardy courted
controversy when he attempted the first human heart transplant back
in nineteen sixty four. The operation did not succeed, but
most of the criticism focused on the fact that the
donor heart was taken not from another human, but from
(04:51):
a chimpanzee.
Speaker 7 (04:53):
Once that heart has been removed, then one is looking
at a hole in the chest, and then something's got
to be put there.
Speaker 8 (05:00):
One is going to have to talk to the family.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
None of these surgeons hailed from historically elite universities or hospitals,
as had been the case for the last decade and
a half. The real innovation in cardiac surgery was happening
on the margins.
Speaker 8 (05:15):
Of the field.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
For much of the world, the heart remained mythically tied
to the soul, and the promise of a heart transplant
tapped into our wildest dreams and deepest fears. Whichever surgeon
crossed the finish line first, be it Shumway, lour Cantowitz,
or Hardy, he could expect to receive both sweeping adoration
(05:38):
and rebuke. Less than two weeks after Shumway's announcement, a
shocking news story broke in Cape Town, South Africa.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
We had a recipient reading, we had the donor identified
in Philadelphia's math Act, and that morning my daughter came
in and said, some joker down in Africa has done
a hards transplant.
Speaker 9 (06:07):
On December third, nineteen sixty seven, Christian Barnard removed the
heart from a twenty five year old girl and transplanted
into the chest of a fifty five year old man.
In case you missed the news that.
Speaker 10 (06:17):
Day, performed by a surgeon virtually unknown except to a
handful of other surgeons.
Speaker 11 (06:21):
Newspapers everywhere Carrie Banner headlines, and from medical men as
far away as the Soviet Union, there is a claim
for the dramatic breakthrough.
Speaker 9 (06:28):
Will you welcome doctor Christian Barnard?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
The heart transplant race had just been won by a
man who wasn't even considered a contender in a country
no one regarded for its medical prowess. How could this happen?
And who the hell was Christian Barnard? The world was
about to find out Formoso's Studios. This is Cardiac Cowboys,
(06:58):
a podcast about life, death and innovation. In the American
Hartland episode four, The Transplant Race, Here's writer and executive
producer Jamie Napoli.
Speaker 12 (07:20):
For all the criticism that would be hurled at Christian
Barnard throughout his career, and there would be plenty, one
thing is certain. He fought tooth and nail for every
success that came his way. Unlike his American counterparts, Barnard
was born into poverty. His family lived in a small
(07:42):
town within South Africa's Great carew, a harsh semi desert
region stretching hundreds of miles between Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Speaker 13 (07:52):
It's a hell of a place, but I can tell
you terrible bliness. A very country, small little Karuta on
the back of ECUs, Nevada or Arizona.
Speaker 12 (08:02):
Adam Barnard is the son of Christian's youngest brother, Marius.
Speaker 13 (08:06):
A lot of people in life who get to invent
certain things, you tend to find quite a lot of
them have come from those humble beginnings, and the Barnard
brothers were very fortunate to have very humble, peaceful, god
loving pirates.
Speaker 12 (08:22):
Christian Barnard's father was a minister who preached both at
the local jail and at the Dutch Reformed church designated
for the town's black and mixed race population. As a result,
the Barnards, who were white were shunned by their white neighbors,
and the Barnard children would grow into fierce critics of apartheid.
Speaker 14 (08:42):
Chris didn't grow up in a household that entertained apartheids.
Speaker 12 (08:46):
That's Cindy Laddigan, manager of the Heart of Cape Town Museum.
Speaker 14 (08:50):
When she brought intensive Gate to South Africa, where the
rest of the hospital would lay divided. Even the er
itself had a different entrance for white. He had all
his patients laying together, and he had this attitude of
if you didn't like it, you could go die at home.
Speaker 12 (09:09):
Christian Barnard had three living brothers, Johann, Dodsley, and Marius.
A fourth brother named Abraham, had died at the age
of three from a congenital heart defect. Abraham's death loomed
over the Barnard children in the form of their mother's grief.
Speaker 14 (09:27):
She became a very hard woman after the loss of Abraham.
They were all terrified of the mother. She always pushed
him to be first, always, and if they didn't come first,
they'd be whipped.
Speaker 12 (09:43):
Christian Barnard spent his life racing to be first, regardless
of the obstacles that lay ahead of him. As a child,
he competed in his town's annual foot race without shoes.
He won his school's tennis championship playing with borrowed racket,
and he patched together scholarships to put himself through medical school,
(10:06):
leaving no money to buy clothes or to socialize with
his classmates. As a young doctor at Ruth Desciur Hospital
in Cape Town, he quickly set himself apart with his
pioneering research in the field of gastro intestinal surgery.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
He did seminal work on an operation to deal with
intestinal a treasure, which is a potentially lethal defect.
Speaker 12 (10:29):
That's medical historian and plastic surgeon doctor Gerald Imber. In
nineteen fifty five, Barnard's research caught the interest of an
American surgical chief nine thousand miles away.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Barnard earned his way to study with the great Owen
Wangenstein in Minnesota.
Speaker 12 (10:51):
He said goodbye to his wife, Loki and their two
young children with a vague promise that they join him
in America at some point in the future. Whoa the tall,
lanky country boy with a mop of unruly brown hair.
Barnard looked younger than his thirty three years as he
(11:13):
left behind beautiful Cape Town. He was filled with visions
of a future that until this moment had been unimaginable
to him or anyone in his family line of destitute
ministers and woodcutters. When Barnard arrived in Minneapolis on a
(11:35):
late December night, thousands of miles from the nearest friends
or family, the temperature hovered just below zero.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
In addition to freezing his butt off, what he found
out was the longest seem didn't want to teach him
clinical surgery. He wanted him working out projects in the
lab because he had great lab credentials.
Speaker 14 (12:00):
Einstein was extremely impressed with the amount of drive that
the sky had. Chris actually did his PhD in two years,
where it would normally take six years to accomplish.
Speaker 12 (12:12):
Barnard joked that he only slept on Sundays when he
was kicked out of the lab, and that may not
have been far from the truth. To fund his family's
eventual move to Minneapolis, he supplemented his hospital income with
odd jobs around town, shoveling snow in the winter, washing cars,
and taking night nurse shifts for wealthy patients. At the
(12:34):
University of Minnesota, Barnard developed a reputation not just for
his obsessive work ethic, but for the brash, confident charm
that masked insecurities about his finances and his foreignness. It
made him popular with senior surgeons and administrators like Owen Wangstein,
less so with his peers. Here's Christian Barnard's nephew, Adam Barnard.
Speaker 13 (12:58):
Again, he was very charismatic. He had a good looking,
toothy smile. He could make you feel a million dollars
and two seconds, but he could also make you feel
the biggest fool and two seconds.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Chris Barnard was beloved by everybody who didn't know him,
and not by anyone who did.
Speaker 12 (13:14):
But Barnard hadn't left behind his family and flown halfway
around the world to make friends. He was there to
make a name for himself. Early in his residency, Barnard's
ambition came into sharp focus when he was introduced to
the heart surgeons down the hall. He began observing open
(13:37):
heart operations from the upper level of the glass domed
o ar. Down below, Walt Lillahigh was repairing cases of
tetrology of below, the condition that had taken the life
of Barnard's three year old brother Abraham. As he watched
Lillihigh and his ingenious bubble oxygenator save a dying child,
(13:58):
Barnard sensed that this was the work he was meant
to be doing. It wasn't long before he asked Wangenstein
to be transferred to cardiac surgery. By now, Lillihi was
already a legend within the department, inventing new life saving
procedures on a monthly basis. Barnard worked tirelessly to impress him,
(14:21):
studying the bubble oxygenator and assisting in operations until he
was promoted to Lillihig's chief resident. It was then that
he made the first catastrophic mistake of his young career.
In his autobiography One Life, Barnard details exactly what went wrong.
(14:43):
As he was prepping a seven year old patient for
open heart surgery. As the boy's anxious father watched from above,
Barnard and his assistant accidentally sliced into the exposed heart.
Blood erupted from the boy's heart and filled his open
(15:03):
chest cavity. Barnard panicked. He struggled to staunch the bleeding,
but he couldn't locate the hole in the rising pool
of blood. By the time Lilahi arrived to help, the
boy was dead above them on the operating theatre's upper level.
The boy's father had seen it all. Barnard wandered aimlessly
(15:28):
through the hospital before finally dragging himself to Lilahi's office.
He didn't know whether the senior surgeon would show him
out or fire him.
Speaker 8 (15:39):
Look, Chris, Lilahai.
Speaker 12 (15:41):
Said, calmly, we've all made these mistakes that cost the
lives of patients. The only thing you can do is
to learn.
Speaker 8 (15:49):
By your mistake.
Speaker 12 (15:52):
Lila High task Barnard with prepping another young patient for
surgery the following day. Rather than hovering behind him, la
High remained absent from the r until the last possible moment,
show that Barnard had retained his full confidence.
Speaker 15 (16:08):
This early surgery was going to be fraught with trouble,
and Dad knew that.
Speaker 12 (16:12):
That's Walt lilla High's son, doctor Craig Lilihigh, what.
Speaker 15 (16:15):
He realizes, good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes
from bad judgment. It was clearly something they embraced in
those early days, that it was Okay, this didn't work,
We've got to figure out how we can try to
solve it next.
Speaker 12 (16:36):
Lillahigh valued ingenuity and work ethic far above technical prowess,
which favored Barnard, whose surgical ability didn't always measure up
to that of his colleagues. One such colleague was a
young surgical resident who would one day lead the heart
transplant race, Norm Shumway. Compared to the charming and outwardly
(16:58):
ambitious South African, Humway was self deprecating and low key.
Speaker 16 (17:03):
Dad always felt that in academic medicine people took themselves
too seriously.
Speaker 12 (17:09):
That's Norm Shumway's daughter, doctor Sarah Shumway. She's a surgeon
at the U of M who specializes in heart and
lung transplants.
Speaker 16 (17:17):
He told me when I started in my own operating
room to keep things light so people didn't get too
overwhelmed by the fact they were cutting out people's hearts.
Speaker 12 (17:28):
Within a decade, Christian Barnard and Norm Shumway would become
the two biggest names in heart transplantation, and their work
would define the future of cardiac surgery. For now, they
were lowly U of M residents whose personalities didn't always mesh.
Speaker 16 (17:46):
I think they were cordial, but they weren't really friends.
Speaker 4 (17:51):
Chumway thought he was a self serving bit of a
jerk and wanted nothing to do with them.
Speaker 12 (18:02):
While Schumwey struggled to stand out among many ambitious surgical residents,
Barnard had grown into the department's golden boy. As his
residency came to an end, Wangenstein begged Barnard to stay
in Minnesota, offering him a position with the u of
M faculty. Though Barnard turned down the offer, Wangenstein sent
him back to Cape Town with a life changing gift.
(18:25):
Here's an archival recording of doctor Norm Schomwey.
Speaker 17 (18:28):
When he went back to South Africa. Wangenstein, such a
generous man, gave Bernard ten thousand dollars for cardiopulmmeter bypass equipment,
so he had substantial backing.
Speaker 12 (18:49):
Rutskiur is a large, picturesque hospital nestled into the base
of the precipitous Devil's Peak, which overlooks Cape Town. In
nineteen fifty eight, Barnard rejoined the faculty as a returning hero.
He'd studied with the greatest heart surgeons in the world,
and thanks to Wartenstein, he brought back with him the
(19:11):
famous duwal Lillehigh bubble oxygenator. Now he was setting out
to bring South Africa into the era of open heart surgery.
Like his mentor Walt Lillehigh, Barnard had his own ticking clock.
In the frigid Minnesota climate, he'd begun experiencing crippling flashes
(19:31):
of pain, first in the joints of his feet, later
in his hands. He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an
excruciating autoimmune disease. Barnard tried all kinds of traditional and
non traditional medicines, everything from guava to break fluid, but
rheumatoid arthritis has no cure. For the rest of his career,
(19:55):
he'd live in fear that the pain and deformity in
his hands would grow so advanced that he'd no longer
be able to operate. If he was going to leave
his mark on the field of cardiac surgery, Christian Barnard
would have to do it quickly. Barnard's mission crystallized after
he learned of a breakthrough experiment performed at Stanford University
(20:18):
by an old colleague, doctor Norm Shumway. After finishing his
residency in Minnesota, Shumway had spent years struggling to find
his footing, first in Santa Barbara, then in San Francisco,
as he labored to support his young family. No job
was too small, from working night shifts operating an artificial
(20:40):
kidney machine to performing simple open heart operations at a
hospital across town. Anytime Shumway was referred to patient for surgery,
he and his partner, Richard Lower would pack their heart,
lung machine, and other equipment into a moving van and
brave San Francisco traffic to get from their Stanford Lane
laboratory to the o RS at the Children's Hospital. When
(21:03):
Stanford's Medical school relocated to Palo Alto in nineteen fifty nine,
Shumway was asked to take over the Department of Cardiac Surgery.
Thrust into a leadership role for the first time, Humway excelled.
His management approach was as low key as his personality.
He liked to describe himself as the world's greatest first assistant.
(21:27):
Here's an archival recording of one of Shumway's chief residents,
doctor Jack Copeland.
Speaker 18 (21:32):
He used to say that when you go to Houston,
you think that Denton Cooley's the only one that can operate,
because he's the only one that was operating. When you
go to Stanford, you think that anybody can operate because
we were in there doing all the cases and he
was helping us.
Speaker 12 (21:48):
In December, Chumway's team performed the first heart transplant in
a lab dog, proving to surgeons the world over that
human heart transplantation was within reach. The obstacle to getting
there was the lack of a viable donor. The ideal
(22:10):
heart for transplantation is still beating up until the instant
it's removed from the donor. The problem was that, up
until this moment in history, a beating heart meant that
the donor was still alive. Before a human heart transplant
could occur, Shumway and his colleagues would need to convince
the world that death could be defined as the loss
(22:31):
of brain function, not just the stopping of the heart.
Speaker 17 (22:37):
I used to call it the boy scout definition of death.
Speaker 12 (22:40):
That's doctor Norm Shumway again.
Speaker 17 (22:42):
Even our neurosurgeons were very slow to come to grips
with brain death. That philosophy or misjudgment, or lack of education, tradition,
whatever you want to call it, was very slow. This
was a difficult problem.
Speaker 12 (23:02):
Doctors and administrators alike feared that removing the heart of
a brain dead patient might result in a murder charge
against the surgeon, and not without reason, Norm Shumway would
be threatened with such charges in the years to come.
The other problem looming over the dream of a human
heart transplant was organ rejection.
Speaker 17 (23:23):
Some animals would live two or three weeks, others would
die in a few days because of rejection. The heart
transplant is such a bigger procedure and the preparation is
so dogone, fragile, and delicate that when we use the
same menu of immunosuppression that others were using in kidney transplants,
our animals would all die of toxicity.
Speaker 12 (23:46):
Norm Shumway and Richard Lauer spent years working out the
rejection problem, devising a precise cocktail of steroids and immunosuppressants
to give transplant recipients the greatest probability of accepting their
new hearts. Facing the same problem, Christian Barnard took a
different approach. In the summer of nineteen sixty seven, he
(24:10):
made a trip to Richmond, Virginia, where Richard Lower was working.
At the time, the Medical College of Virginia was renowned
for its kidney transplantation program, and that's the reason Barnard
gave for his visit. He was preparing to transplant a kidney,
he said, But while he was there, Lower happily showed
him the immunosuppression techniques he and Shumway had developed for
(24:34):
a heart transplant.
Speaker 17 (24:36):
So he'd go down to the lab and see Laurer
doing these heart transplants with the same facility and success
he'd had at Stanford. Barnard had one of his technicians
with him on this trip, and the technician told Lawyer,
he said, you know, Bernard's going to go home and
do that apparition, and Loward just shrugged it off as ridiculous.
Speaker 12 (24:59):
And yet Barne had set out to do exactly that.
Speaker 8 (25:04):
Here's Cindy Ladigan again.
Speaker 14 (25:06):
He had watched Richard Lower practice and experiment on dogs
on that side, so he had to come back and
teach the site everything that he'd seen, everything that he'd learned.
Speaker 12 (25:17):
Barnard had spent the last several years assembling an elite
cardiac surgery team in Cape Town. His most trusted confidante
was a young vascular surgeon named Marius Barnard, Christian's younger brother.
Speaker 13 (25:30):
I thought they never wanted to do hot surgery, and
he never wanted to work with Chris.
Speaker 12 (25:34):
That's Marius's son, Adam Barnard.
Speaker 13 (25:36):
Again in her brothers the competitive and that can be
very brutally honest with each other.
Speaker 12 (25:43):
Prior to joining his brother's team, Marius had spent a
year in Houston training under Baylor's demanding surgical chief, Michael DeBakey.
Speaker 13 (25:53):
When he worked on to the Beaky, he didn't really
learn a lot because the Beky just wanted to control
all ofs and didn't want anyone else to operate. He
liked Denton Cooley, he learned a lot from him, but
obviously surgeons, they all got a huge eager and they
all think they're the best. Denton Cooley used to say,
(26:13):
just call me GLD which stands called Good Old Denton.
Speaker 12 (26:23):
Christian and Marius Barnard employed many of the techniques they'd
picked up in the US from Walt Lillaheigh, Michael DeBakey,
Denton Cooley, Richard Lower, and Norm Shumway. Together, the brothers
performed dozens of heart transplants on lab dogs as they
prepared for their first human patient. In the fall of
(26:46):
nineteen sixty seven, Christian Barnard found himself in the same
position as Norm Shumway, ready to transplant, but waiting on
the right patient and donor. That's when a cardiology introduced
him to a Cape Town grosser named Louis Wishkansky. Here's
heart of Cape Town Museum manager Cindy Ladigan.
Speaker 14 (27:09):
Again, Louis had heart failure. He had had two heart
attacks prior to this, and he was actually admitted to
krutsky At Hospital purely because he was in such a
bad state.
Speaker 12 (27:22):
In his youth, Louis had been a powerful amateur boxer.
Now in his fifties, his heart failing, he was using
all his strength to fight for survival. Louis had already
outlived his prognosis by two years when Barnard met him
in addition to heart disease, he suffered from diabetes, liver failure,
(27:43):
kidney failure, and a host of other serious ailments. Without
an immediate heart transplant, Louis didn't have long to live.
Speaker 8 (27:53):
Thankfully, While Sumway and the.
Speaker 12 (27:55):
Other American surgeons were still struggling to garner widespread acceptance
for the concept of brain death, Barnard's job was easier.
Speaker 14 (28:03):
What was the upper hand for Chris to actually be
the first here was the declaration of death. In South Africa,
medical law stated that she needed two doctors to do
a death declaration. America was way stricter.
Speaker 12 (28:19):
Barnard didn't need to change anyone's mind about the definition
of death. All he needed was a brain dead patient
with a matching blood type.
Speaker 8 (28:29):
He wouldn't need to wait long.
Speaker 12 (28:37):
On December second, the darval family stopped outside of bakery
in the Salt River suburb of Cape Town. Twenty five
year old Denise and her mother ran inside to get
a cake. Denise's brother, Keith and their father, Edward, waited
in the car. As the Darvall women made their way
(29:00):
back to the car, a drunk driver careened down the
street toward them.
Speaker 14 (29:07):
Denise was flung forty feet in the air. She hit
her head on the back of a vehicle and she
fractured her skull in two areas. Her mom passed away
at the scene.
Speaker 12 (29:21):
Louie Wishkanski's wife, Anne, was leaving the hospital when she
drove by the scene of the accident. As police waved
her on, she could make out two women lying.
Speaker 8 (29:31):
In the road. Christian Barnard was at home when he
got the call. There was a young woman.
Speaker 12 (29:39):
At the hospital who'd suffered severe brain damage. It was
possible her heart might serve as a viable replacement for
Louis Wishkansky's.
Speaker 14 (29:50):
One can only imagine what her father, Edward, must have
felt like knowing that his wife had passed away. Sitting
at the hospital ten o'clock at night, He's hoping for
some kind of good news about his daughter, and these
doctors come out and say to him that there isn't
any that he needs to accept the fact that his
daughter's gone, but while she's on life support, she could
(30:14):
help this patient in the hospital, Louis Washganski.
Speaker 12 (30:19):
Edward Darval would later recount that in that moment, he
remembered how Denise had spent the first paycheck she ever
made on a gift for him. She was always giving
away things to other people. He'd say giving would be
her legacy.
Speaker 14 (30:35):
They say he took four minutes to think about it,
and his first words were, if you cannot save the
life of my daughter, then you need to save the
life of that man. We do consider Edward Duvall a
hero because he at a heart of no other.
Speaker 12 (30:54):
Christian Barnard arrived at the hospital ready to save Louis Wishkanski.
Denise was examined by the senior neurosurgeon at Route descure
and declared brain debt. She was relocated to one of
two adjacent oars B theater. Louis Wishkansky was moved to
a theater.
Speaker 13 (31:14):
The Americans and the French, and in most European countries
at the time, they had much better cardiac facilities than Manhatto,
South Africa, so that it came down to the theater, nurses,
the nethetists.
Speaker 9 (31:24):
You name it.
Speaker 13 (31:25):
Every single little aspect of that had to be right.
Speaker 19 (31:29):
It was no room for error.
Speaker 14 (31:31):
That's the type of person christ was in the workplace.
It was all or nothing.
Speaker 12 (31:37):
Initially, the plan was for Marius Barnard to remove Denise's
heart and for Christian to transplant it, but Marius suggested
a last minute change. Unless you cut it out yourself,
he told his older brother, it's not going to be familiar.
It's better you get acquainted with it from the beginning.
Christian Barnard dashed madly between the two ops rating theaters
(32:00):
as donor and recipient were.
Speaker 8 (32:02):
Prepped for surgery.
Speaker 12 (32:04):
In a theater, Woshkanski's chest was sliced open, his sternam
was sawed down the middle, and his ribs were cranked
apart with a retractor. The beating organ that lay inside
was enlarged and scarred beyond recognition. Barnard described it as
the waste and ruin of a ravaged heart. In b theater,
(32:27):
Marius Barnard turned off Denise's respirator. Despite the comparatively laxed
medical definition of death in South Africa, this team wasn't
taking any chances. They waited as Denise's heart began to fail.
The moment it stopped beating, Christian Barnard called out start cutting,
and then he scrubbed up for surgery. With her chest
(32:50):
spread open, Christian Barnard finally got his first look at
Denise's heart. It was tiny, but it would have to
do painstakingly. Barnard severed the eight blood vessels leading into
and out of Denise's heart. When the heart was finally
liberated from her body, Barnard placed it in a metal basin,
(33:11):
and then he carried it slowly and carefully.
Speaker 8 (33:14):
To a theater.
Speaker 12 (33:18):
Denise's heart looked absurdly small inside Louis's massive chest. Barnard
had to trim her blood vessels at an angle to
match their wide counterparts in Louis's body. His hands ached,
but he ignored the pain. This was the moment his
entire life had been racing to her, the moment that
would determine whether Louis Wishkanski lived or died, and whether
(33:41):
Christian Barnard went down in history or became a mere
footnote in someone else's story. Blood vessel by blood vessel,
he began to suture Louis's new heart into place.
Speaker 20 (33:56):
When I left the hospital that morning, it was summer
and the sun of just ride. There was not one photographer,
not one television camera, not one reporter outside at hospital.
Speaker 12 (34:06):
That's an archival recording of doctor Christian Barnard.
Speaker 11 (34:09):
I said to my brother who was with me.
Speaker 20 (34:11):
I said, you know, we'd better tell someone in hospital
that we've done it out Trance Donna.
Speaker 12 (34:16):
The brother's moment of quietude wouldn't last for long.
Speaker 10 (34:20):
Hotch truans done at Gucca Hospital in Canton.
Speaker 11 (34:23):
Medical history has been made in South Africa ors first.
Speaker 17 (34:26):
Heart transplant patients.
Speaker 20 (34:28):
Loy Wasashkinski continues to improve.
Speaker 19 (34:33):
I had phone balls from all over the world, and
that evening there was a television crewer, and then after
that it just became impossible to work. I don't think
they recognized as the need that I had to look
after my paces and that I couldn't spend all the
time answering questions and appearing in front of cameras.
Speaker 12 (34:53):
When news of the transplant reached doctors in the United States,
there was an immediate shock, followed by frustration. Here's doctor
Adrian Cantrowitz. Again.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
I must say I was disappointed because we were all
set to go. It was just a matter of luck
who got the donor in the recipient together.
Speaker 12 (35:11):
First, Denton Cooley, though we hadn't yet attempted any test
transplants of his own, sent Barnard a playful telegram that
read congratulations on your first heart transplant, Chris, I will
soon be doing my one hundredth. There was a sentiment
shared by many American surgeons that Christian Barnard did not
(35:32):
deserve to be first, that he'd benefited from the hard
work of others. Barnard fought back against these accusations vehemently.
Speaker 11 (35:41):
It really amazed me very much. I was present meetings
where senior surgeons got up and stated that I stole
the technique from Sway and that I should never have
been the first one to do the transplant. Well, you know,
I mean, there's no such thing as a single genius.
We get ideas from everybody, of.
Speaker 12 (35:58):
All the Americans. Rum Shumway had perhaps the most valid
reason for begrudging Barnard, but by all accounts, he didn't.
Speaker 16 (36:07):
Dad seemed to be quite excited that a transplant had
been performed. I'm sure he was disappointed not to have
been the first one, but I think that wasn't the
price he was after. What Barnard did really was to
establish that brain death was an acceptable definition of death.
Speaker 12 (36:26):
Barnard's operation had set a precedent, and while the concept
of brain death would remain divisive for years, to come,
American surgeons felt emboldened to attempt transplant operations of their own.
In the second week after Barnard's historic first, Louis Wishkanski's
health took a turn for the worse. He picked up
(36:49):
a bacterial infection in the hospital, and the abundance of
immunosuppressants in his body the anti rejection drugs Barnard had
given him made it impossible for him to fight it off.
On December twenty first, Louis became the first man in
history to die after someone else's heart stopped beating in
his chest.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
I was completely destroyed that morning. I went down to
my office and I lay on the couchs there, and
one of my laborty assistants came in and he saw
I was crying because he was a very likable man.
Mister Woshkinsky was a very nice man. It was great
sorrow that we let him down.
Speaker 12 (37:33):
Louis Wishkansky's death did little to slow the transplant fever
that was spreading rapidly around the world. Barnard already had
his second heart transplant operation on the books. His face
had appeared on the covers of Time and Life magazine,
and his days in the spotlight were just beginning.
Speaker 13 (37:52):
He literally became moullightly one of the most famous people
on the planet for two three years.
Speaker 8 (37:57):
That's Adam Barnard again.
Speaker 13 (37:58):
Aim, It's Johnson, the prison of the United States. He
met the Queen, he met the Pope. Not many people
do that in the space of a year. It's very
easy for it to go to your hit.
Speaker 12 (38:08):
The Guinness Book of World Records stated that Barnard received
more fan mail than anyone in the history of the world.
He was even the subject of a hit Dutch pop
song by Bonnie Sinclair.
Speaker 16 (38:21):
Delon Miss.
Speaker 12 (38:27):
The swell of celebrity enveloping him was all consuming, and
yet there was still plenty to go around. Fame and
fortune awaited any surgeon with the audacity to pull off
a heart transplant.
Speaker 7 (38:39):
There was enormous media response even for the second and
third and fourth heart transplants, and there were television programs
in the night talking about heart transplants, and pretty soon
it got to be that if she didn't do a
heart transplant, he wanted a real heart surgeon, and so
therefore everybody who wanted to be a real heart surgeon
started to do it including ain't some very real heart
(39:01):
surgeons like Mike de Baky and like Denton Cooley.
Speaker 13 (39:05):
You feel like, is here something like an astronaut? You know.
Speaker 12 (39:09):
That's an archival recording of doctor Cooley, who leapt headlong
into the heart transplant arena. By September of nineteen sixty eight,
he performed ten transplant operations.
Speaker 13 (39:21):
The astronaut gets all the credit, and he gets the
trip to the moon, but he had nothing to do
with the creation of the rocket or all of the
navigational problems.
Speaker 17 (39:31):
In the early events. We were, I think glorified behind
the reason.
Speaker 13 (39:38):
Who did the first kidney torn? Scot Dealer not, but
everyone knows he did the first heart Charles glot over
Than is the seat of religion, the seat of love,
the seat of compassion, is your heart. That's why it
was such a big deal at the time.
Speaker 12 (39:52):
For patients living with the death sentence of failing hearts.
The birth of heart transplantation offered new hope.
Speaker 13 (40:00):
I feel so much better than I have for twenty
five years.
Speaker 12 (40:03):
That's a recording of Cooley's first heart transplant recipient, Everett Thomas.
Speaker 11 (40:08):
I was getting worse and worse than week and week
now I'm getting stronger and stronger at Baby Bovan, I
feel exactly the same way I did when I was
a young boy.
Speaker 13 (40:17):
At nineteen twenty years older.
Speaker 12 (40:20):
Even as successful heart transplants were being performed by surgeons
all around the world, the public remained fascinated by the
man who did it first.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
Who is this man who has twice played God, who
is greeted like a Hollywood.
Speaker 9 (40:35):
Idol, who was adorned by his subordinates, who moves with
boyish charm among.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
The many races of his native land.
Speaker 7 (40:43):
The world wants to know who is doctor Christian Niedling Barnard.
Speaker 13 (40:52):
Fame is quite a lethal drug, I thought I used
to said that, But the worst drug in the world
is somebody claptensity, because it's because you know that did
unfortunately get to my uncle if everyone wanted a piece
of him.
Speaker 14 (41:07):
He made the lives of Francis, Diana, Grace, Kelly, Sophia Lorraine.
He loved the ladies. That is undeniable. His wife actually said,
you know that he should never have gotten married or
had children because he didn't belong to a wife or
a hoe. He belonged to the world.
Speaker 12 (41:29):
Newspapers breathlessly covered Barnard's romantic alliances with Gina Lolo Brigida
Sophia Loren, a former Miss Italy and Miss South Africa.
Within a year and a half of the first transplant,
Barnard's wife, Loki, had filed for divorce. Marius Barnard took
(41:50):
over much of the department's workload as his older brother
balanced a surgical schedule with life as a full time celebrity.
Speaker 11 (41:59):
I just stay Ordny doctor. All of a sudden, it
was big news. You know that I had it an
affair with a scout. So people often criticize me pall
for what I did, but then must remember that I
would never prepear for the situation I was putting. Overnight.
Speaker 12 (42:19):
Months into the rise of transplant fever, the fever broke.
Patients began dying at an alarming rate. Just as quickly
as the public had embraced heart transplantation as the future,
they turned on it as well as the doctors leading
the charge.
Speaker 10 (42:38):
At first, it was no more than a murmur. Today
it can be heard around the world. Heart swapping is directioning.
Speaker 8 (42:45):
Here's Denton Cooley again.
Speaker 9 (42:47):
I think we did twelve consecutive ones, and we had
about nine living the recipients.
Speaker 17 (42:53):
Then the attrition began.
Speaker 9 (42:56):
Within eighteen months, all over fading to die.
Speaker 14 (43:02):
Chris said letters of congratulations and a lot of letters
of hate. People that were asking for his earlier race
because he should be had up for murder, people that
said he was unmorl and a bunch of goolds.
Speaker 12 (43:17):
A nineteen seventy one issue of Life magazine ran with
the cover story a new report on an era of
medical failure, the tragic record of heart transplants. Doctors and
politicians alike called for an end to the procedure. The
careers of transplant surgeons and the lives of their dying
(43:38):
patients were suddenly under threat. The future of the field
would depend on what these surgeons did next.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
On our next episode, an ingenious medical device promises to
eliminate the need for heart donor's entirely, and the competition
between Houston's virgins Michael Debakean Denton Cooley explodes into an
all out few playing out in courtrooms and headlines across
the country. Next time on Cardiac Cowboys.
Speaker 12 (44:22):
Cardiac Cowboys is a production of iHeart Podcasts, OsO Studios
and Thirteenth Lake Media. We're presented by Chris Pine and
written and narrated by me Jamie Appley. Our executive producers
are Christina Everett for iHeart Podcasts, Dub Cornette and Jason
(44:42):
Ross for OsO Studios. Doctor Gerald Imber, author of Cardiac Cowboys,
The Heroic Invention of Heart Surgery, Doctor Eric A. Rose,
John Mankowitz, Joshua Paul Johnson, and myself. James A. Smith
is our supervising produce editing and sound design by Joshua
(45:03):
Paul Johnson. Our composer is David Mansfield. Our cover artwork
is designed by Alexander Smith. For more information on the
first cardiac surgeons, check out doctor Gerald Imber's book, Cardiac Cowboys,
The Heroic Invention of Heart Surgery,
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