Word: barnard
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While Surgeon Christiaan N. Barnard was visiting the U.S. during Christmas week, he got reports from Cape Town that the patient next in line for a transplant, Philip Blaiberg, 58, was getting weaker. Several coronary occlusions had compelled Blaiberg to give up his practice as a dentist and caused irreparable damage to his heart, which was steadily failing. On Dr. Barnard's return, the transplant team at Groote Schuur Hospital was ready. So was Blaiberg, who insisted that he wanted the next transplant even when Barnard told him of Washkansky's death. But where would the heart come...
...Barnard now had a delicate problem. Haupt was of a complicated racial mixture (part white, part Bantu, part Malay, perhaps even part Hottentot) that is classified as "Colored" under South Africa's race laws. Dr. Barnard asked Blaiberg whether he would object to receiving a Colored man's heart. No, replied the desperate patient-who, like Washkansky, happened to be Jewish. Then the surgeons had to get consent from Haupt's next of kin. His wife Dorothy collapsed when she was told he could not survive. To protect themselves, the doctors asked Haupt's mother. Widowed...
...they opened his chest and made the necessary connections to a heart-lung machine to supply oxygenated blood to his body (except the heart) and brain. Then they removed his heart. In its place, Dr. Barnard installed Haupt's heart, using essentially the same technique as in Washkansky's case (TIME, Dec. 15). There was, however, a different atmosphere. The 30-man team of surgeons, physicians and nurses were less tense. As Barnard put it: "We are not going into the unknown-we are going where we have been before." Another difference was encouraging. The transplanted heart began...
...first to undress in one antechamber, then scrub, then mask and robe themselves in sterile garments. Warned by experience that they might have overtreated Patient Washkansky, the doctors were giving Blaiberg fewer immunosuppressive drugs and in smaller doses. "Perhaps we treated the last patient too early for rejection," Dr. Barnard said. "We are not going to make the same mistake again." Four days after the transplant, the doctors could see no sign of either infection or a rejection reaction. Blaiberg's condition was better than Washkansky's had been at the same stage, with good circulation...
Last week the irresistible force was at least slowed down. The project was an NBC documentary advertised as "Dr. Barnard's Heart Transplant Operations." Immediately after the Washkansky operation last month, Mrs. Jarvis set about gathering material for a program to be pegged to the next such event. She shot biographical background footage on Surgeon Christiaan Barnard, interviewed his friends and medical colleagues, and filmed Barnard and his team as they performed open-heart surgery. She also discussed with Barnard the technical problems of covering the next heart-transplant operation, and came away with the impression that he would...