SEE Magazine
Issue #405: September 6, 2001
Copyright © 2001. All Rights Reserved

Up Front by Garnet Fraser Dr. Christiaan Barnard. Surgeon. Legend. Lover. Leper. No, scratch that last one; I meant "Guy who put dead people’s stuff into other people." The man who performed the first heart transplant was all these things, as well as a medical pioneer and an aging eccentric. And a Lover. (Oh yeah, I got that.) In his native South Africa, news of Barnard’s passing at age 78 dominated the news this week. It tore the national media’s attention far from Durban’s UN World Conference on Racism and the anti-Semitic resolutions it passed, as well as the adjoining UN World Conference on Sexism and its equally controversial "No Fat Chicks" resolution. Let us take a quick look at his life. 1922: Born simply Christian Barnyard after his rural place of birth in the Western Cape province, the process of life around him fascinates the future doctor at an early age. At age 10, a precocious attempt to combine pigs and chickens into one easy source of ham and eggs is a gruesome failure that puts the family off breakfast for a month. His father makes a suggestion with historic impact: "Only way this works is if one of them’s dead." 1954: As a researcher at the University of Transvaal, the young man now known as Dr. Barnard finds his judgment fogged by the long hours. At an international conference, he unveils what he calls his best work to date: he has successfully placed a human heart inside another human’s… heart. Inside the smaller heart, an even smaller heart, and inside that, a tiny Russian doll. Grant-giving agencies grow nervous; the patient also expresses great discomfort. 1957: Barnard successfully places a dead man’s heart inside a baboon. Barnard is pleased with his progress, but the director of the funeral home says he’s still fired. 1967: In a Cape Town hospital, Barnard stuns the world by transplanting the heart of Denise Darvall, a car accident fatality, into the chest of Louis Washkansky, a 55-year-old grocer with a failing ticker. Washkansky lives another 18 days, until chased down by a group of villagers bearing pitchforks and torches. The New England Journal of Medicine sees the procedure as the breakthrough it is, though the journal is not the sophisticated commentator we know today. Its lead editorial on the issue notes that "Transplanting tissue from dead creatures into the internal systems of another creature is, I don’t know, like making a haggis or something, except in the end the haggis gets up and walks around and thanks you, and writes you a great big cheque. Groovy." 1970: Seventeen magazine’s annual reader survey asks its readers to pick the Man You’d Most Like to Cut Open Your Rib Cage. Barnard finishes a close second behind Cat Stevens. Between his first and second wives, during this period the famous playboy began dating Italian movie star Gina Lollobrigida – perhaps part of the reason for his doomed efforts, around this time, to graft an extra set of hands onto himself. 1977: Barnard manages to replace every part of Keith Richards except the eyes. 1985: His gifts in the physical sciences now beyond question, Barnard turns to the metaphysical. At the Loma Linda Medical Centre in California he announces that he has surgically transplanted an extra letter ‘a’ into his first name. The donor: Willie Aames, former star of Eight is Enough. The letter has tragically become available after Aames committed career suicide by appearing with Scott Baio on Charles in Charge. Barnard’s legacy is not unmixed. During his ’60s heyday he was widely regarded as the most politically progressive of South Africa’s elite doctors, but this is roughly as great an honour as being the best cricket player in Drumheller. He was a passionate defender of euthanasia and, worse, ELO. By the early ’90s he was insisting that the best anti-rejection drug was "lemon gin and that second Chris Isaak album." And by the end of his career, the doctor’s judgment had grown even more erratic. Let the books he authored serve as eloquent testimony. There was Surgery of Common Congenital Cardiac Malformations (1968), Heart Attack: You Don’t Have to Die (1971), Yeast Infection: You Don’t Have to Die, Either (1973), You Can Lick Hemorrhoids (1978), Garfield Gets Odie’s Kidney (1985), No, You’re Thinking of Christian Slater (1991), No, Now You’re Thinking of Dr. Ballard the Dog Food Guy (1993), and finally, M is for Me Thrusting My Hand Inside Your Chest Cavity (1998)–a mystery written with Sue Grafton. Regardless, this titan of scientific daring has given longer lives to thousands and changed the way we think about mortality. But I guess I’ve talked him up enough, so let’s get on with it: What am I bid for his hands?

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