Christiaan Barnard

South African cardiac surgeon

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South Africa rank#83

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Fame57.3
Momentum0.6
South Africa rank#83
Doctors rank#87
Wikipedia20.6K

Lived 1922–2001, aged 79South Africa

South Africa DoctorsDoctor

Wikipedia
60 languages
Cross-language footprint
Rank in South Africa
#83
Doctors
Era
1922–2001
Aged 79

Summary

Updated 2026-06-09

He transplanted a human heart from one chest into another — the first surgeon to do it. December 3, 1967: Louis Washkansky woke, spoke to his wife, and died eighteen days later. The line between breakthrough and gamble has never been thinner.

Biography

About

Born in Beaufort West in 1922, Barnard trained in South Africa and early on devised a fix for intestinal atresia in infants, saving ten babies in Cape Town and earning adoption abroad. In 1955 he went to Minnesota, where Owen Harding Wangensteen set him on gastrointestinal work until he shifted to Walt Lillehei's open-heart service and met the heart-lung machine. Back in Cape Town in 1958, he led experimental surgery at Groote Schuur, building toward the transplant that made his name. His second patient, Philip Blaiberg, lived a year and a half; Washkansky's 80% success estimate would later dr…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Christiaan Barnard

Christiaan Barnard

said28 Apr 1985

Suffering isn't ennobling, recovery is.

— New York Times, April 28, 1985; as quoted in A Speaker's Treasury of Quotations by Michael C. Thomsett and Linda Rose Thomsett (McFarland,

Christiaan Barnard

said1979

Last year a Dutch animal breeding centre sent me two chimpanzees as a gift. I killed one and cut its heart out. The other wept bitterly and was inconsolable.

— The Best Medicine (Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers, 1979), p. 38.

Christiaan Barnard

said1970