Louis Washkansky

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Louis Washkansky (* 1913 in Kaunas ; † December 21, 1967 in Cape Town ) was the first person to receive a successful heart transplant .

transplantation

Washkansky, who came from the Jewish town of Vilijampolė in the second largest city of Kaunas in what is now Lithuania and who emigrated to South Africa in 1922, earned his living as a greengrocer. On December 3, 1967, after three heart attacks , the then 54-year-old man received the heart of Denise Darvall, who died in a traffic accident at the age of 25 in a five-hour operation by a team of 31 doctors . This operation, carried out under the direction of Christiaan Barnard at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town , was the first successful human heart transplant.

The intervention triggered an immense worldwide media response, with some very controversial debates. Washkansky was mentioned almost constantly by his full name - also with nicknames like "Washy" - and shown in earlier and current pictures. In 1972, the media hype prompted Eckart Roloff to speak of the “journalistic discovery of the patient” in his dissertation on press coverage of heart transplants. Jürgen Thorwald presented the processes at that time in detail in a chapter of his book "The Patients".

Washkansky survived the operation by 18 days. He died on December 21, 1967 of complications from pneumonia . The drugs that were supposed to prevent the new heart from rejecting had in turn severely weakened his immune system.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A similar media hype was repeated in 1983 after the first heart transplant in Austria on patient Josef Wimmer .
  2. ^ Eckart Klaus Roloff: The coverage of heart transplants in the West German press. A testimony-analytical case study on the phenomena of medical journalism. Phil. Dissertation, Salzburg 1972. 356 pages. Furthermore: Eckart Roloff: The journalistic discovery of the patient. A press analysis on medical journalism and the first heart transplants. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2013, ISBN 978-3-8487-0731-7 (Slightly edited version of the dissertation with a detailed foreword and afterword from 2013)
  3. ↑ Jürgen Thorwald: The transplanted. Louis Washkansky (and) Philip Blaiberg. In: Jürgen Thorwald: The patients. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1971, pp. 324–372.
  4. ↑ Lord of Hearts. In: Der Tagesspiegel. November 30, 2007.

See also

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Washkansky, Louis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish heart patient
DATE OF BIRTH 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Kaunas
DATE OF DEATH December 21, 1967
Place of death Cape Town