> Washkansky lived for only 18 days after the transplant, eventually succumbing to double pneumonia.

I think what's underappreciated is how much effort nowadays goes into making sure patients don't die from infection after the surgery. People always focus on the surgeons, but it's an incredible team effort. Modern post-op care in specialized cardiac ICUs is what makes todays high survival rates possible.

For some strange reason, Dr Christiaan Barnard keeps popping up in my life. There is a distant family connection and I found him associated in the past in one way or another with a number of places and organisations that I have been involved with. I live two blocks away from Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town and look up the hill at the imposing and beautiful building every time I leave the house. Sadly I have not been to the museum itself (isn't that typical for locals), but know about it and will make a point of it to visit next week. The other thing is that I grew up in Ceres (a small rural village surrounded my mostly fruit farms) and I had no idea that he was a GP there, admittadly a long time before I was born or my family moved there, but that is normally something that a town will boast about. You learn something everyday!

An event of worldwide impact when I was young. The patient, Louis Washkansky, died 18 days later of unrelated causes. The first donor was the victim of a motorcycle accident, a 25 year-old woman named Denise Darvall, whose father had to make what I now understand to be an agonizing decision: to forgo any possibility of a brain-dead child to continue living.

The hospital name 'Groote Schuur' is Dutch for 'Big shed/barn', which is a pretty weird name for something to happen which at the time was super futuristic.

Correct, there used to be a granary (for storing grain) from 1657 in the time of the VOC (Dutch East India Company)