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Medical Firsts: Lung and Heart Transplant Rooms
2024 marked the 60th anniversary of the world’s first heart transplant into a human — performed here at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. On Jan. 23, 1964, Dr. James Hardy led a team that transplanted a chimpanzee’s heart — no human heart was immediately available – into the chest of Boyd Rush, a critically ill patient. It would be nearly four more years before a South African surgeon named Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the first human-to-human heart transplant.
Following the operation at UMMC, Boyd lived 60-90 minutes, but Hardy had proved that heart transplantation in humans could work. This history-making surgery followed by only seven months the first-ever human lung transplant — also performed by Hardy and his team.
From "Dr. James D. Hardy: In Memoriam" courtesy of UMMC Communications and Marketing