HEART PATIENT DOING FINE’

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31568, 4 January 1968, Page 9

HEART PATIENT DOING FINE’

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) CAPE TOWN, January 3. Dr Philip Blaiberg began his long, tense battle for survival today, sustained with new life from the steadily-beating heart of a Coloured man.

The latest bulletins from the Groote Schuur Hospital say Dr Blaiberg, a 58-year-old retired dentist, is “doing fine”, thus confirming Professor Christian Barnard’s statement after yesterday’s transplant operation that he felt happier than he had done in the case of Mr Louis Washkansky.

When he regained consciousness after the operation, the patient’s first words were: “I’m thirsty,” Then he said: “Give my regards to my wife.”

Hospital staff attending Dr Blaiberg must pass through a disrobing room to don masks, gowns and theatre boots before they reach him.

by his mother. One of a family of 13 children, he was considered a likely donor by the doctor who treated him after his collapse on a New Year Day beach outing. The doctor telephoned the Groote Schuur Hospital and within minutes messages were flashed on to cinema screens and announced in theatres to muster Professor Barnard’s heart transplant team. Mrs Dorothy Haupt said last night “When the doctors asked me if they could use Clive’s heart, I was too upset to tell them at first. Then I said they could if they could not save him.

Dr Blaiberg slept peacefully overnight under strong sedation in an ultra-modern wing of the hospital, his room ringed by a barrier of security measures to ward off the kind of germs which fatally attacked the lungs of Mr Washkansky.

The patient’s wife, Eileen, spent the night in a furnished room which has been specially set aside for her so that she can be close to her husband. Professor Barnard and a surgical team of 16 bridged racial barriers as they worked through the blazing Cape Town summer day on yesterday’s operation. It took nearly five hours to transplant the heart of the Coloured donor, Mr Clive Haupt aged 24, who died after a brain haemorrhage. No Outcry Observers said today the surgeons’ achievement could have only a good effect on South Africa’s internal racial situation. Certainly it has raised no sudden outcry from staunch defenders of apartheid. And churchmen of different denominations, both for and against the segregation law, have so far been unanimous in praise of the hospital’s achievement.

The editor of one prominent Johannesburg newspaper said: “We were flooded with phone calls, but nobody even mentioned the colour aspect.” The Anglican Dean of Cape Town (the Rev. E. L. King) declared: “I couldn’t care less what was the colour of the donor.” And the Rev. A. Brandt, local leader of the Afrikaner Nederduitsch Hervorme Kerk, which supports apartheid, said “I have no objection to the operation.” Mr Haupt and Dorothy, his bride of three months, had a small, one-storey house in the working class, mixed race suburb of Salt River. The Blaibergs live in the leafy, prosperous middle-class suburb of Wynberg. Permission for the use of Mr Haupt’s heart was given