Today in History, December 3rd
On December 3, 1967, Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant in Cape Town. Plus Illinois statehood and the first text message.
Published · Last updated
December 3 is best known for 1967, when surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant in Cape Town, South Africa. It is also the day Illinois became a state in 1818 and the day the first text message was sent in 1992.
The big story: The first human heart transplant (1967)
On December 3, 1967, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. His patient, Louis Washkansky, was a 53-year-old grocer dying of chronic heart disease. The donor heart came from Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old woman who had been fatally injured in a car accident. The surgery itself succeeded, and the transplanted heart worked normally. The problem lay elsewhere. To stop Washkansky’s body from rejecting the new organ, doctors gave him drugs that suppressed his immune system, which also left him open to infection. He died of double pneumonia 18 days after the operation. That balancing act between rejection and infection would define transplant medicine for years to come. Barnard kept operating, and as doctors got better at managing rejection, his later patients survived far longer, some for years. An operation that drew worldwide attention as a medical first went on to become an established treatment.
More events on December 3
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1552 | Francis Xavier, one of the leading Catholic missionaries of his age, died of fever off the coast of China. |
| 1818 | Illinois was admitted as the 21st U.S. state. |
| 1847 | Frederick Douglass published the first issue of The North Star, his antislavery newspaper. |
| 1854 | Gold miners who had built a stockade at the Eureka goldfield in Victoria, Australia, clashed with the government forces surrounding it. |
| 1912 | Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro signed an armistice with the Ottoman Empire, halting the fighting in the First Balkan War. |
| 1947 | Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway. |
| 1979 | Eleven people died in a crowd surge outside a Who concert at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati. |
| 1984 | Gas leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, causing one of the worst industrial disasters in history. |
| 1989 | Presidents George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met off Malta and signaled that the Cold War might be ending. |
| 1992 | Engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS text message. |
| 2000 | Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black writer to win a Pulitzer Prize, died in Chicago. |
| 2015 | Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that all U.S. military jobs, including infantry and armor, would open to women. |
Born on December 3
- 1755: Gilbert Stuart, American painter best known for his portraits of George Washington.
- 1857: Joseph Conrad, Polish-born English novelist and author of Heart of Darkness.
- 1895: Anna Freud, Austrian-British psychoanalyst and pioneer of child psychology.
- 1924: John Backus, American computer scientist who led the team that created the FORTRAN programming language.
Sources
- On This Day: December 3, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- This Day in History: December 3, History.com
- First human heart transplant, History.com
- SecDef opens all military occupations to women, U.S. Army
