Word: blaibergs
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Dates: during 1968-1968
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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...
While Haupt lingered through the night, pathologists and hematologists compared his blood type and cells with Blaiberg's. By a 12-to-l chance, both had type B, Rh-positive. Droplets of serum containing Haupt's white cells were pipetted onto dime-size disks in a plastic tray, each disk containing a cell-reagent preparation. The intensity of the reactions on different disks was noted, and compared with those already obtained from Blaiberg's cells. The cells, concluded Pathologist Martinus C. Botha, were a fairly good match. Not identical-that is impossible-but similar enough to suggest...