No wonder they called him the King of Hearts.
The son of a poor Afrikaaner preacher, Christiaan Barnard, a South African surgeon, made history when he successfully performed the first human-to-human heart transplant. The recipient, a 54-year-old grocer, received the heart of a young woman who had died in a traffic accident.
"On Saturday, I was a surgeon in South Africa, very little known," said Barnard later. "On Monday, I was world renowned."
During his career, Barnard performed dozens of successful heart transplants, many of which he did free of charge. Dirk Van Zyl, his longest lived patient, lived for more than 23 years after his transplant.
Internationally famous, the photogenic doctor began moving up into rarefied social circles, divorcing his wife to court numerous actresses and models. He married two more times and fathered six children in total before his death in 2001 while on holiday in Cyprus.
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