Dr. Norman E. Shumway performs the first heart transplant on an adult patient in the United States at Stanford University Hospital on January 6, 1968. The recipient, 54-year-old steel worker Mike Kasperak, lives for 14 days. Says Shumway in a later interview:
“We put in the heart and nothing happened. There were slow waves on the EKG and then the heart began beating stronger and then exuberance…. We knew we would be okay.”
Shumway’s historic first heart transplant comes four weeks after the first such operation in the world by Dr. Christiaan Barnard, in South Africa. Barnard, who uses techniques developed by Shumway at Stanford, also did his residency with Shumway at the University of Minnesota.
At the time of the surgeries, transplanting a heart is still the stuff of science fiction or even horror movies. But today there are roughly 2,000 heart transplants performed in the United States each year. Shumway’s techniques have extended the lives of more than 60,000 patients in America, the San Francisco Chronicle says in its 2006 obituary of Shumway.
TOP PHOTO: Dr. Norman Shumway. Photo by the Stanford Medical History Center.