Denise Darvall, 25, had been killed in a car accident. But her heart would get a chance to live on in a history-making procedure. As Dr. CHRISTIAAN BARNARD performed the world's first successful heart transplant on a human, the world palpitated:
In painstaking sequence, Dr. Barnard stitched the donor heart in place. First the left auricle, then the right. He joined the stub of Denise's aorta to Louis Washkansky's, her pulmonary artery to his. Finally, the veins. Assistant surgeons removed the catheters from the implant as Barnard worked. Now, almost four hours after the first incision, history's first transplanted human heart...
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