Hearts by Thomas Thompson

Author:Thomas Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2016-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

On the first day of December, 1967, Dr. James Nora faced the unpleasant task of telling a young couple that there was nothing surgically available for their newborn child. The infant had been delivered with a hypoplastic heart, an unusual condition in which the left side of the heart is underdeveloped, coupled with atresia of two valves. “The only thing to do would be to change hearts,” Nora speculated. “Someday it might be feasible, perhaps—someday in the future. If the child can live that long, we could do it.”

Twenty-four hours later, a bulletin flashed across the world from Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa:

The first human-to-human heart transplant in history was done last night by a team of doctors at the Groote Schuur Hospital. The name of the patient, as well as the donor, are being withheld by hospital authorities.

The heart transplant team was led by Professor Christiaan Barnard in a dramatic all-night operation—the first of its kind in medical history. Messages of congratulation are pouring in from around the world.…”

The parents of the doomed baby hurried up to Nora in a corridor of St. Luke’s. That far-off “someday” had arrived with breathtaking suddenness. Could Cooley transplant the heart of someone else into their baby? “I don’t know,” said Nora, surprised as was everyone else in Houston at the Cape Town bulletins. “I’ll see.” He found Cooley outside surgery. “You want to get into the transplant business?” asked Nora. Cooley nodded his head affirmatively and said, “Sure.”

Five months would go by and the child with the hypoplastic heart would die before the transplant era would begin in Cooley’s surgery. While surgeons around the world hurried to join the list and the headlines of those who attempted the procedure, Cooley held back. He seemed to have little enthusiasm for transplants. In speeches he publicly congratulated Barnard on the breakthrough, but warned against haste in pronouncing the operation as a cure-all for heart disease.

Three days after Barnard transplanted a heart into Louis Washkansky, Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz became the first American surgeon to attempt—and fail—in the procedure. He installed a new heart in the chest of a newborn child, but the infant died six and a half hours after the operation in Brooklyn’s Maimonides Hospital. A month later, in Stanford Medical Center, Dr. Norman Shumway attempted his first; the recipient lived but fifteen days. Shumway’s near decade of intense research in transplantation, and the knowledge obtained from swapping hundreds of animal hearts, had made him the preeminent figure in the field. One of the ironies of the transplant era was that had Shumway been the first—had the hands of Shumway been the first to lift a heart from a dying body and put it into a living man—then the medical world would have said, in effect, “Of course Shumway did it. He was eminently qualified to do it. He has done more research on the procedure than any man in the world and we have read his papers and heard his speeches and if any man must try it, then Shumway is he.

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