Christiaan barnard autobiography sample
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Christiaan Barnard: The Surgeon Who Dared
- A memoir of Christiaan Barnard bygd a former colleague and personal friend
- New insights on the controversial surgeon bygd many who knew him well
- An insider’s perspective of the early development of heart transplantation
From humble beginnings as a ‘barefoot boy’ in a small town in the heart of South Africa, the charismatic and controversial Christiaan Barnard became the most famous surgeon the world has ever known by performing the first human heart transplant in Cape Town on 3 December 1967. His new-found fame led him to mix with presidents and prime ministers, with royalty and popes, and he quickly became addicted to the high-life of the jet-set who surrounded him, eventually becoming distracted until he was a mere shadow in his own department. Yet, he remained in the public eye through his gifts for public speaking and as a writer.
He caused controversy by his role in advertising a cream that reputedly prevented wrinkling of the s
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In 1967, an obscure cardiac surgeon in South Africa became an instant household name and the name Christiaan Barnard was indelibly linked to a feat once thought impossible – transplanting the human heart.
PATH TO MEDICINE
Christiaan Neethling Barnard was born on 8 November 1922 in a small town called Beaufort West in South Africa. Many have speculated that his decision to pursue a medical career, particularly one in cardiac surgery, was motivated by the death of his five-year-old brother Abraham from heart disease. However, Barnard later said that his initial attraction to medicine was his desire to make money. He graduated in 1946 from the University of Cape Town Medical School, placing near the middle of the class. After an internship at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, he worked as a general practitioner in the rural town of Ceres. In 1948, he married a nurse at Groote Schuur, Aletta Louw. A few years later in 1951, Barnard took a junior medical post at City Hospital, th
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Author: David K. C. Cooper
Overview
This biography of Christiaan Barnard is set on the background of his epoch-making first successful human heart transplantation, a landmark event in the history of medicine which the book said ‘stunned the world’. The book provides a detailed portrayal of Barnard’s qualities and habits, both positive and negative, that made it possible for a seeming upstart working in the backwaters of the medical world to beat one of the leading heart transplant surgeons to the finish line. With a first-hand account of his personal and professional lives, the author explored the determination and ambition that drove Bernard’s success, asserting that ‘no other heart surgeon of that era was as good a clinician, or as good a cardiologist, as Chris Barnard’. The book nevertheless also depicted how Barnard’s larger-than-life personality wreaked havoc on his family life, and dented his professio