The first human heart transplant

In the early hours of 3 December 1967 at Groote Schuur Hospital, Chris Barnard and a team of about thirty put the heart of Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old fatally injured by a car the previous afternoon, into the chest of Louis Washkansky, a 53-year-old grocer whose own heart was failing. The operation began after midnight and the new heart was started just before six in the morning. Washkansky lived eighteen days. By the end of the month Barnard was the most famous surgeon in the world.