Transplant shambles must not recur

WHEN Christiaan Barnard placed another person’s heart in Louis Washkansky’s torso in 1967 he had reached one of the great milestones of medicine.

By his skill and imagination, he had shown that chronic heart disease might not have immediate consequences.

A similar milestone had been passed almost two decades earlier, when the first kidney transplant was performed at the Little Company of Mary Hospital in Illinois, in 1950.