Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: heart transplant

  • James Hardy, heart and lung transplant pioneer

    James D. Hardy was an American surgeon who performed the world’s first human lung transplant in 1963 and human heart transplant in 1964. Born in Alabama in 1918, Hardy obtained his medical degree from the University of Alabama in 1942. He served in the army during World War II, then returned to the University of…

  • Christiaan Barnard and the first heart transplant

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States In 1968 while I was a cardiology fellow at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, there was a buzz of excitement—Christiaan Barnard was coming to talk about his heart transplants! Our chief cardiovascular surgeon at the time was C. Walton Lillehei, no slouch of a surgeon himself, who had…

  • Adrian Kantrowitz: The IABA and the LVAD

    Philip R. LiebsonChicago, Illinois, United States I first met Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz at my fourth-year surgery oral examination. He was one of three interviewers, and although I was sure that I failed the exam, he assured me that I had done well. I next met him almost 10 years later when I was a junior…

  • Christiaan Barnard

    Shameemah AbrahamsSouth Africa The year 1945 is iconic as the end of one of the most pivotal and devastating periods in human history—World War II. That same year, as the world began to rebuild, in the coastal city of Cape Town at the tip of Africa, a young medical graduate began what would become an…