Johannesburg | Monday
WORLD leaders and the global medical fraternity voiced sorrow at the death of Christiaan Barnard, the pioneering South African heart transplant surgeon who died in Cyprus on Sunday at the age of 78.
“His death is a great loss to the country after all the contributions he made. He was also very vocal against apartheid,” former South African president Nelson Mandela told reporters at his Johannesburg home, where he was meeting Cuban President Fidel Castro.
The colourful Barnard, who became a worldwide celebrity after the 1967 operation and had an outsized ego to match, died by his hotel pool in the coastal resort town of Paphos — while reading one of his own books.
Barnard, a regular holiday visitor to the Mediterranean island, was alone at the Coral Beach hotel and sunning himself by the pool when he lost consciousness on Sunday afternoon, a hotel manager said. Another guest, a Cypriot doctor, tried unsuccessfully to revive him. Doctor Neophytos Papageorgiou, a heart specialist, said he rushed to the pool after people started shouting that someone had fallen ill. “When I reached the sun bed where he was, he was on his side and he wasn’t breathing. I tried to revive him with other members of staff but failed,” Papageorgiou told reporters. Barnard rose from humble beginnings of a small dusty South African town to superstardom with his skills as a heart physician.
Born on November 8, 1922 in the arid Karoo town of Beaufort West, 460 kilometres northeast of Cape Town, Barnard was one of five sons to his father, Adam, a church pastor and his mother Maria, who played the organ.
It was the death of a brother, Abraham, at age five which may have spurred the young Barnard on a path that would eventually make him one of the most famous surgeons in the world.
He finished high school in 1940, and joined the prestigious Medical School at the University of Cape Town shortly afterwards.
His family was not rich, and at the time the student had to walk five kilometres to get to his classes.
Barnard served his internship at Groote Schuur (Dutch for ‘big shed’) Hospital, where his biggest achievement would come some 20 years later.
On December 3, 1967, Barnard and a team of doctors, performed the first human-to-human heart transplant at Groote Schuur, catapulting the young doctor to international stardom.
The heart of Denise Darvall (25) who was killed in a car accident, was transplanted to 52-year-old Louis Washkansky.
Although Washkansky died 18 days later, Professor Chris Barnard became a household name throughout the world.
His face adorned the covers of magazines and Barnard met the some of the world’s most famous people, including actress Sophia Loren and the Pope.
“On Saturday,” he said in a recent interview, “I was a surgeon in South Africa. On Monday I was world-renowned.”
With the good looks of a slightly toothy Cary Grant, Brad Pitt or Alain Delon, the surgeon became known as the “filmstar surgeon”.
Celebrities fought to be photographed alongside him and modesty was never Barnard’s strongest suit.
“I was as popular in those days as (former President Nelson) Mandela is today,” Barnard said.
He jet-setted the world and at times could be very charming, at others, he would act like the spoilt prima donna.
He started an almost holy grail-like quest to stay young, especially after arthritis forced him to retire from surgery in 1983, carrying out a set of bizarre genetic experiments in an effort to keep his youthful gloss.
With the income of a questionable anti-aging cream, he bought a farm in the semi-desert Karoo-region to write books.
Not widely known is that Barnard treated hundreds of patients around the world, free of charge.
In June, Barnard who had moved to Austria, returned to Cape Town with a two-year-old Russian boy who has a constriction is his main heart artery and will not live much longer without surgery.
He won countless awards through the years and in 1984, was made a Professor Emeritus.
His personal life seemed to have suffered under his fame and Barnard was married three times, divorcing his last wife Karin last year after a 12 year marriage.
He leaves behind six children. – AFP