The first successful human heart transplant took place in South Africa on on December 3, 1967. The patient, 55-year-old Louis Washkansky, lived only 18 days afterward, but became a part of history. In the year that followed, over 100 heart transplants took place in several nations. Each of those surgeries was groundbreaking, and the patients as well as the doctors became media sensations. Frederick West (pictured) became the first heart transplant recipient in Britain, followed that same week by two such surgeries in the U.S.
West’s operation was an object of national obsession in Britain, and it kicked off an unprecedented relationship between the media and the medical world, as historian Ayesha Nathoo meticulously chronicled in her book Hearts Exposed: Transplants and the Media in 1960s Britain. Photographers and reporters mobbed the hospital; one member of the operation team described a street clogged with arc lights and so many people “the whole thing looked like a royal wedding being watched”.
The hospital went to extraordinary lengths to accommodate the press. They held a hastily assembled press conference where attendees fought and shoved each other, and reporters were admitted into their halls. “As West was recovering,” wrote Nathoo, “photographers and film crews were allowed right inside the hospital space, turning the patient ward into a television studio and bringing the hospital world into public view.” In addition to posing with smiling nurses, West was photographed winking for the camera and even filmed playing chess.
Sadly, the early patient celebrities did not live long, and the number of transplants plunged until the surgery and aftercare was refined. Read about those early heart transplants at Atlas Obscura.
This article is part of Atlas Obscura's Hearts Week.