December 3, 1967, a historic date for medicine. At the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South African surgeon Christiaan Neethling Barnard, assisted by his brother Marius and a team of thirty people, performed the first heart transplant on a human being. The beneficiary was 55-year-old Louis Washkansky, suffering from a serious form of heart disease, who entrusted his last hope of life to the skill of Dr. Barnard's medical team. His new heart was that of Denise Carvall, a 25-year-old girl in an irreversible coma following a serious car accident and whose father agreed to the removal of the organ to save the life of another human being. Christiaan Barnard, a cardiothoracic surgeon in the United States, remained in the operating room for many hours, but in the end the operation could be considered successful.
Louis Washkansky lived for 18 days with his new heart before dying of pneumonia resulting from the immune system rejecting the foreign body. And it was precisely this new challenge, solving the problem of rejection, that would be won between the 1970s and 1980s with the discovery of cyclosporine. Struck by rheumatoid arthritis, Christiaan Barnard retired from surgery in 1983 and devoted himself to teaching and consulting. He died in 2001 at the age of 78 due to an acute asthma attack while on holiday in Cyprus. The first heart transplant in Italy was performed in 1985 by Professor Vincenzo Gallucci.
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