Heart of Cape Town Museum

This guide to the Heart of Cape Town Museum traces the race, in autumn 1967, between surgical teams in the United States and a young Cape Town surgeon named Christiaan Barnard to perform the world's first human heart transplant. It follows the second of December, when a car accident killed twenty-five-year-old Denise Darvall, and grocer Louis Washkansky lay nearby with weeks left in his own heart. In the United States, surgeons Richard Lower and Norman Shumway had already kept a transplanted dog's heart beating for over a year, preparing for human trials of their own.