Celebration of 1st U.S. Heart Transplant
Penny Eastham is one of thousands of Americans over the last 25 years given “the ultimate gift”--a second chance at life through heart transplantation.
“You really have a different appreciation for life. The sun is brighter, the flowers prettier, children more important--your family more important. You don’t take things for granted,” said the 47-year-old Eastham, who received a new heart eight years ago.
She was a guest Friday at a 25th anniversary celebration of the first successful heart transplant in the United States.
Dr. Denton Cooley performed that operation May 3, 1968, a few months after Dr. Christiaan Barnard did the first such surgery in Cape Town, South Africa.
The doctors--longtime friends--held a news conference Friday at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, joking and reminiscing about the landmark operations.
Barnard downplayed the scientific significance of the first heart transplant.
“You’ll be surprised to know that the one thing that amazed us after the first transplant was the tremendous interest in this procedure and the tremendous amount of publicity that followed this procedure, because we never considered the transplant as a great scientific event,” he said. “In fact, I still don’t consider it a great scientific event. It was a technical event.”
Louis Washkansky lived 18 days after receiving the first transplanted heart on Dec. 2, 1967. Everett Thomas, the first American patient at St. Luke’s, died within a year.
But the life spans lengthened. Barnard’s seventh patient is still alive, 23 years after his transplant.
Frequent recipient rejection of the new heart caused the surgery’s popularity to decline after 1972. However, the procedure rebounded in the early 1980s with new organ preservation techniques and anti-rejection drugs.
Barnard, who is retired from operating, is professor emeritus of the University of Capetown. Cooley is surgeon-in-chief at the Texas Heart Institute, chief of cardiovascular surgery at St. Luke’s and a professor at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.
