THE WONDERS OF MEDICAL SCIENCE 1
In The Old Days, if you had heart disease, sooner or later you died.
In recent times, Medical science has made considerable advances and doctors have been able to carry out operations to restore the heart to health. Even so, some heart could not be healed and the patients died.
Then, out of Africa Emerged a new, wonderful technology,
spear-headed by a South African doctor, Christiaan Barnard. He carried out the first heart transplant on December 3rd 1967 in cape town, South Africa. The operation was carried out on Louis Washkansky, a south African grocer who would most certainly have died without the transplant.
A heart transplant occurs when the malfunctioning heart and muscles are replaced with a functioning heart-usually of a person who has just died. It is a very complex and time-consuming operation, and the main problem is the low availability of donors.
A heart transplant operation is done only in emergencies.
Washkansky was given the heart of road accident victim Denise Darvall. Although he lived for only 18days before his body rejected his new organ, the operation created headlines around the world.
Doctor had already transplanted livers and kidneys by that time. But the heart, with its peotic imagery of life and love, caught the public and scientific imagination. Doctor Barnard said he saw it as just another part of the body: 'we didn't see the heart as the seat of the soul. The cessation of the heart did not mean the end of life.
We knew that.'
Not many of us would fancy a heart transplant! But as DR. Bernard explain, 'for a dying person, a transplant is not a difficult decision. If a Lion chases you to a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you will never accept such odds if there were no lion. '
With the dedicated and unrelenting efforts of DR. Bernard and his team, the survival rate of his patients was impressive: 50% of his patients lived for at least five years after heart surgery. Dr Bernard's longest-surviving patient, Dirk Van Zyl, lived with an implanted heart for 23yrs before dying of diabetes - unrelated to his heart condition........
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