James D. Hardy (Medic)

James Daniel Hardy (born May 14, 1918 in Newala , Alabama , † February 19, 2003 in Jackson , Mississippi ) was an American surgeon.

His father had a lemon plantation and he attended high school in Montevallo . Hardy studied from 1938 at the University of Alabama and then medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine with an MD in 1942. He then completed his specialist training in internal medicine (residency) there. In the Second World War he was from 1944 in the US Army Medical Corps at the 81st Field Hospital in Europe. After his military experience, he decided to turn to surgery and began a residency in surgery at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. In 1951 he received a Masters in Physiological Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania for his research on the use of heavy water to study body fluids. In 1951 he became an Assistant Professor in Surgery and Head of Surgical Research at the University of Tennessee at Memphis and in 1953 he was appointed to the Chair of Surgery. In 1952 his first book was published (Surgery and the Endocrine System). In 1955 he received the first chair of surgery at the newly formed University of Mississippi School of Medicine at Jackson (a university with four years of medical training), which he remained until 1987 when he retired.

He undertook the first heart transplant and first xenotransplantation of a heart when he implanted a chimpanzee heart on the dying Boyd Rush on January 24, 1964 at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. It struck between an hour and an hour and a half before the coma patient died, depending on the source. The operation demonstrated the possibility of a heart transplant in principle, but also led to a very heated debate about its ethical justification.

In June 1963, he performed the first lung transplant on a lung cancer patient who had been sentenced to life in prison. He transplanted a left lung, but already recognized during the operation that the cancer had also spread to the right lung. Hardy, however, promised a better quality of life for the patient if the operation was continued. He died of kidney failure 18 days later. These pioneering transplants met with some severe criticism at the time.

In 1987, he led a team that had two lungs transplanted without the heart.

Some of his books were standard surgery textbooks in the United States, and he wrote two autobiographies.

In 1949 he married Louise Scott Sams, with whom he had four daughters, three of whom were doctors.

In 1991 he received the Rudolph Matas Award in cardiac surgery. He has served as President of the Society of University Surgeons, the Society of Surgical Chairmen, the Southern Surgical Association, the American College of Surgeons, the American Surgical Association, and the International Society of Surgery, and was an honorary member of the French Academy of Medicine, the French Surgeons Association, and the Royal College of Surgeons, London.

Web links

• Biography from the University of Mississippi
• Entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The University of Alabama only had a two-year medical education program
2. ^ The World of Surgery, 1945–1985: Memoirs of One Participant, 1986, and The Academic Surgeon: An Autobiography, 2002