Today’s DOTD - Drink Of The Day - is a Love Heart Cocktail inspired by the first human heart transplant, performed on this date, December 3, 1967, by Dr. Christiaan Barnard with his team. They performed the world’s first human-to-human heart transplant operation, which was a major historical event and a significant breakthrough for medical science.
Dr. Christiaan (Chris) Barnard was born in 1922 and qualified in medicine at the University of Cape Town in 1946. Following surgical training in South Africa and the U.S., Barnard established a successful open-heart surgery program at Groote Schuur Hospital and the University of Cape Town in 1958. In 1967, he led the team that performed the world’s first human-to-human heart transplant. The article describing this remarkable achievement was published in the South African Medical Journal just three weeks after the event and is one of the most cited articles in the cardiovascular field. In the lay media as well, this first transplant remains the most publicized event in world medical history.
Media coverage of this event around the world, as well as coverage of subsequent transplants, was front page news, in the years that followed. The news media would even give progress reports on the post-operative course of the patients weeks and months later.
This degree of public acclaim had not been previously experienced by any other physician or surgeon, nor would it be experienced subsequently. This was in part because the dramatic nature of the operation had captured the public’s imagination. But it was also a response to Dr. Barnard’s youthful good looks and charismatic personality . Barnard’s name and that of the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital are inextricably associated with the first heart transplant
Although the first heart transplant patient survived only 18 days, four of Groote Schuur Hospital’s first 10 patients survived for more than one year, and two lived for 13 and 23 years, respectively. This relative success amid many failures worldwide did much to generate guarded optimism that heart transplantation would eventually become a viable therapeutic option.
That first heart transplant, along with subsequent research in cardiac transplantation over the next 15 years, laid the foundation for heart transplantation to become the well-established method of handling end-stage cardiac disease that it is today.
During the period from 1968 to 1983, Dr. Barnard and his team continued to make major contributions to the field of organ transplantation, notably the development of the heterotopic (‘piggy-back’) heart transplants; advancing the concept of brain death, organ donation, and other related ethical issues. They also discovered methods for better preservation and protection of the donor heart - including hypothermic perfusion storage of the heart - and completed studies on the haemodynamic and metabolic effects of brain death. They even learned from early attempts at xenotransplantation, the process of using an animal heart in place of a human heart.
With all of that in mind, and with thanks in our hearts, we raise a glass to Dr. Barnard & his team, and salute them with the Drink Of The Day, the Love Heart Cocktail.
Ingredients
Here’s what you’re going to need for this drink:
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