--- title: First Successful Heart Transplant: This Week in History description: "Now, almost four hours after the first incision, history's first transplanted human heart was in place..." canonical: https://time.com/5050803/1967-heart-transplant/ author: Lily Rothman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-12-11T14:00:47.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-23T18:28:19.511Z article:section: History og:title: First Successful Heart Transplant: This Week in History og:description: Also in this issue: 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' and the American parent og:url: https://time.com/5050803/1967-heart-transplant/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0583a026bac4b811/6988f3e6929fad62e5beebb7/1101671215_400.jpeg?branch=production&width=400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 400 og:image:height: 225 og:image:alt: Dec. 15, 1967 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: First Successful Heart Transplant: This Week in History twitter:description: Also in this issue: 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' and the American parent twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0583a026bac4b811/6988f3e6929fad62e5beebb7/1101671215_400.jpeg?branch=production&width=400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 50 Years Ago This Week: Inside the First Heart Transplant > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription.  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Dec 11, 2017 2:00 PM UTC  The Dec. 15, 1967, cover of TIME The Dec. 15, 1967, cover of TIME TIME  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Dec 11, 2017 2:00 PM UTC _Milestone moments do not a year make. Often, it’s the smaller news stories that add up, gradually, to big history. With that in mind, in 2017 TIME History will revisit the entire year of 1967, week by week, as it was reported in the pages of TIME._ [_Catch up on last week’s installment here._](http://time.com/5037804/1967-bonnie-clyde-cinema/) [**Week 50: Dec. 15, 1967**](http://time.com/vault/issue/1967-12-15/pages/) It was a medical breakthrough generations in the making. For as long as doctors had understood the crucial role of the heart, they had dreamed of using transplants to save people whose heart problems would otherwise doom them to death. Earlier attempts, especially before the discovery of blood types, had failed. Now, in late 1967, there were suddenly not one but two real-life examples to point to. Though one of the operations (a transplant between babies, in Brooklyn) failed, the other — performed in South Africa by Dr. Christiaan Barnard on Dec. 3, 1967 — actually worked. They were able to successfully transplant a heart donated by the family of Denise Ann Darvall, a young woman killed by a speeding car, to a man named Louis Washkansky, a grocer with progressive heart failure who had been given weeks to live. Barnard and his team had, as TIME put it, “reached the surgical equivalent of Mount Everest, followed automatically by the medical equivalent of the problem of how to get down — in other words, how to keep the patient and transplant alive.” Here’s how TIME described the surgery itself: --- > “” --- This amazing medical advance raised a new kind of moral and ethical problem. The need to keep the donor heart healthy enough might require keeping it beating after the donor’s brain and other bodily functions ceased, which would mean that the surgeons were in one sense killing the donor. Still, the life-saving potential of the operation, and the goal of eventually achieving success with an artificial heart, made the news something to celebrate. The patient, Washkansky, [died a few weeks later](https://www.wired.com/2007/12/dayintech-1203/) — from illness compounded by the immune-suppression drugs he was on to avoid rejecting the new heart — but the transplant itself is still considered a success. **White House wedding:** As first daughter Lynda Bird Johnson wed Marine Captain Charles Spittal Robb at the White House, TIME [noted](http://time.com/vault/issue/1967-12-15/page/43/) that the gifts they received included “a $6,770 silver tea and coffee service from the Washington diplomatic corps, a nest of teak tables from Chiang Kaishek, a color sketch of Eeyore by _Winnie-the-Pooh_ Illustrator Ernest Shepard (Lynda is a Pooh buff), and—from Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen, of course—a small silver elephant.” **Generation gap:** [This week’s TIME Essay](http://time.com/vault/issue/1967-12-15/page/44/) looks at the state of the American parent at a paradoxical moment in history: young people appeared to be breaking away from their homes and parents, becoming a generation of the disillusioned, and yet by many objective measures young Americans “work harder, think deeper, love more and even look better than any previous generation.” Though the story certainly indulges in ideas about families that are now out of date (for example, tsk-tsking at mothers who are “preoccupied” with their the parts of their lives that weren’t about the children), it also takes a rather modern approach to finding solutions, encouraging communication between parents and children as the most important element in a healthy family. **Criminal justice concerns:** A grand-jury investigation of conditions in Chicago’s Cook County Jail resulted in [an unusual level of exposure](http://time.com/vault/issue/1967-12-15/page/89/) for the terrible “catalogue of depravity” faced by those who were held even for relatively minor and nonviolent crimes. This year, ProPublica Illinois [launched](https://www.propublica.org/nerds/how-and-why-collecting-cook-county-jail-data) an investigation into the very same jail, which remains notorious. **_Guess Who_** **:** TIME’s movie critic took on [_Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner_ ](http://time.com/vault/issue/1967-12-15/page/122/)this week, a timely story in the year when the Supreme Court [legalized](http://time.com/4362508/loving-v-virginia-personas/) interracial marriage. Though the movie would win two Oscars (and be nominated for several more, including Best Picture), the review was middling, calling it one of producer Stanley Kramer’s “cinematic bouquets of platitudes about important-sounding social issues” and focusing on its standing as Spencer Tracy’s final film — he died a few weeks after filming wrapped — rather than what it said about society. **Great vintage ad:** A [reminder](http://time.com/vault/issue/1967-12-15/page/142/) from the post office that readers in 1967 still had to be told how to find out their own zip codes. **Coming up next week:** [Bob Hope](http://time.com/vault/issue/1967-12-22/page/1/) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5050803/1967-heart-transplant/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5050803/1967-heart-transplant/"},"headline":"50 Years Ago This Week: Inside the First Heart Transplant","datePublished":"2017-12-11T14:00:47.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-23T18:28:19.511Z","description":"Also in this issue: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and the American parent","url":"https://time.com/5050803/1967-heart-transplant/","keywords":["Media","heart health"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0583a026bac4b811/6988f3e6929fad62e5beebb7/1101671215_400.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Lily Rothman","jobTitle":"Rothman is managing editor at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/"}],"articleSection":"History","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0583a026bac4b811/6988f3e6929fad62e5beebb7/1101671215_400.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Dec. 15, 1967","caption":"Dec. 15, 1967","creditText":"TIME","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/history/","name":"History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/media/","name":"Media"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/5050803/1967-heart-transplant/","name":"50 Years Ago This Week: Inside the First Heart Transplant"}}]}] ```