Lentune Ladies Probus Club - Talk by Nick French

After our usual coffee and chat we all enjoyed finding out about the life and loves of Christiaan Barnard. He was born in 1922 in Beaufort West, a five hour drive from Cape Town. 

He had many other medical achievements as well as being the first person to do a successful heart transplant. 

Christiaan studied medicine at Cape Town University from 1940 to 1946, then Groote Schuur Hospital. After several affairs his wife divorced him. They had two children. Returning to Cape Town, he studied for two Masters degrees in two years and helped to design the De Waal-Lillehei Bubble oxygenator– the forerunner of the heart-lung machine. 

In December 1967 Christiaan carried out his first heart transplant. Louis Washkansky received the heart of Denise Darvall. It was hard to differentiate between rejection of the organ or an infection and Louis died after 17 days, with the heart still functioning well. He carried out his second heart transplant on Philip Blaiberg which was successful.

Christiaan Barnard by now was a celebrity. In an interview he described his work as palliative rather than curative. 

During this time there were reports of liaisons with beautiful women, including Gina Lollobrigida, Francoise Hardy and Princess Grace. He married twice more and had two children with each marriage although they all ended in divorce. 

He was nominated for a Nobel prize although didn’t win one, wrote several books, novels and health advice, ran his restaurants and was outspoken in politics particularly advocating anti-apartheid policies. He set up desegregated wards in the Children’s Hospital. By using the drug cyclosporin he managed to reduce rejection in transplants by 75%. He also operated using heterotopic transplants, known as piggyback operations, which left the original heart and added a donor heart. 

However, he then got into difficulties by setting up an aesthetics and longevity clinic in Switzerland, and prescribing Glycel. This was subsequently withdrawn in US and his rejuvenation therapy was controversial. 

He set up the Christiaan Barnard Heart Foundation with Princess Diana and maintained that she could have been saved if the right heart treatment had been used after her car accident.

As Christiaan got older his handsome looks deteriorated and he died on 2 September 2001 at the Coral Beach Hotel in Paphos, Cyprus from an asthmatic attack. A final quotation by Fulton Gillespie, a Cambridge Press reporter: “He was a star in ascendancy, feted by the medical fraternity and worshipped by the mini-skirted nobility”

A fascinating talk, very well delivered, left all the members talking about what they had just learnt. The morning ended with the usual excellent lunch and a convivial chat with friends.