On December 3, 1967, in a hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, a 53-year-old grocer named Louis Washkansky lay on an operating table with a failing heart. A surgeon named Dr. Christiaan Barnard and a team of 30 nurses and doctors prepared to do something no human had ever done before. They were going to lift out his sick heart and replace it with a healthy one from a young woman named Denise Darvall, who had been killed in a car accident hours earlier.
For nine tense hours, the team worked through the night. They cooled Louis's body, connected him to a heart-lung machine, carefully snipped the great vessels around his heart, and lifted the dying organ out of his chest. Then they sewed Denise's heart into place. At 5:43 in the morning, Dr. Barnard zapped the new heart with electricity. It twitched. Then it beat. Then it kept beating, all on its own. The team stared in amazement.
Louis lived for 18 days before dying of pneumonia, but the message rang around the planet. Newspapers shouted the news in every language. Suddenly, doctors everywhere realized that hearts could be moved between people, and the impossible was now possible. Today, more than 5,000 heart transplants happen every year, saving people of all ages, including kids. Every one of them traces back to one nervous Cape Town surgery on a December morning, when a human heart first beat inside a stranger's chest.
