Dr. Christiaan Barnard (left) performed the first human heart transplant on this date 47 years ago on December 3, 1967. The nine-hour surgery was performed in Cape Town, and the recipient was a South African grocer dying of heart disease in his 50s. The donor was a 25-year-old woman who was declared brain dead after being struck by a car while crossing the street.

The 45-year-old Barnard was no stranger to groundbreaking medical procedures at the time. He had performed South Africa’s second kidney transplant two months earlier, and had experimented for years on animal heart transplants, in tandem with work being done in the United States by his acquaintance, Dr. Norman Shumway.

Barnard’s heart patient lived for 18 days after the transplant. His eventual death from pneumonia was brought on by the immunosuppressive drugs intended to keep his body from rejecting the transplant; his new heart functioned perfectly right up to his death.

Today, around 70% of heart transplant recipients live at least five years from the operation, and around 3,500 of the operations are carried out every year…still far less than the number of people needing new hearts. Finding suitable donors is a constant challenge, and animal hearts and artificial hearts have been explored as alternatives for transplant patients in recent years. The most famous heart transplant recipient is probably Dick Cheney, who underwent the surgery in 2012, proving that George W. Bush’s famously scowling vice president had a heart after all.

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