Today in History: Dorothy Fisher becomes the first South African woman to undergo a heart transplant
She lived for 12,5 years afterwards.
On this day in 1969, 40-year-old Dorothy Fisher was given a new heart, becaming the longest surviving heart transplant patient until another of Dr Christiaan Barnard’s patients – Dirk van Zyl – surpassed her.
Fisher’s heart had been damaged by rheumatic fever as a child, and by 1969 her doctors agreed that she was dying. Dr Christiaan Barnard and his team carried out her heart transplant on 17 April 1969.
She survived for 12-and-a-half years after the operation and was held up by Barnard as proof that heart transplants were a viable long-term option in spite of the body’s rejection of foreign tissue.
She was South Africa’s fifth heart transplant recipient and the first woman to undergo such an operation. When she died, on 19 October 1981, two years before the immuno-suppressive drug, Cyclosporin, which is still used, became generally available to transplant patients, Dr Barnard conceded that she had died of complications associated with “chronic rejection” of her transplanted heart.
Dr Barnard said of Fisher, “She lived her larger-than-life existence for more than 12 years, a woman in love with life and unafraid”.
Information courtesy of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Fischer and https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/first-sa-woman-receives-heart-transplant.
