By Nii B. Andrews
The date, December 3 1967; the place, Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town.
The principal actors; Dr. Chris Barnard – surgeon, Louis Washkansky – patient recipient, Denise Darvall – heart donor.
For ten days the operation had been delayed with danger to Washkansky.
Why?
Because Barnard’s surgical team was waiting for a “white heart” in order to circumvent the charge of experimenting on blacks.
A suitable “colored heart” was available – but we are talking apartheid South Africa……and the rest of the world in 1967.
Chris Barnard, a true patriot, was fiercely opposed to apartheid and he clashed frequently and regularly with hospital authorities. His intensive care unit was fully integrated against the wishes of his superiors.
Unfortunately, patient Washkansky died 18 days after surgery from pneumonia. The second and third of Barnard’s transplants lived much longer; the fourth lived more than twenty years with the transplanted heart.
Barnard went on to perform pioneering complex operations all over the world on children with congenital heart disease.
Charismatic, debonair and media savvy, Barnard became an international celebrity scientist and icon.
Hey hey, HE performed, in Africa, the first human heart transplant in the world.
Fifty years after his historic achievement, Barnard’s story has many lessons on science, politics and morals for those of us who still bother to wrestle with what passes for the Ghana Health Service, Teaching Hospitals and what is euphemistically called the National Ambulance Service.
We soldier on against the quintessential ghanaian (always a small “g” please) seamless, harmonious mediocrity and cant that permeates our health service, (and is entrenched in other spheres) – but only for the sake of our patients who we are under obligation to serve and protect.
That is how we choose to honor the memory of African titans such as Chris Barnard, Sayed El Gindi, Lawrence Levy, Latunde Odeku, Charles Easmon, EA Badoe and JKM Quartey.