For patients whose hearts are beyond repair,
complete replacement may be their only hope for survival. In 1960, Dr. Norman
Shumway predicted the possibility of transplanting the human heart from the body
of one person to another.
He was able to foresee this because many of the
problems of heart transplantation were solved by this time using animal models.
A year later, he successfully performed the operation on a dog.
In 1967, Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the
first human-to-human heart transplant, and today, there have been over
40,000 such procedures performed. The technique is very successful,
with over 70 percent of transplant recipients alive and well more than five
years after the operation.
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