50 Years Since the First Heart Transplant (Second Version of "Lives Hanging by a Thread - Dr. Barnard's Challenge")

• Documentary

Episode overview

50 years after the event that marked the history of medicine, the program dedicates an episode to one of the most shocking medical achievements of the last century: that of allowing a person to live by removing their diseased heart and putting the heart of another in its place. Something that no one in the past could have even imagined and which was achieved in December 1967 by an unknown South African surgeon who later went down in history: his name was Christiaan Barnard. The program will tell his story, and above all the behind the scenes of the first heart transplant ever performed on a human being. We will follow the operation step by step thanks to a fascinating filmed reconstruction of Wall to Wall directed by Patrick Reams. we will also see original film documents, shot in Cape Town, with the protagonists of this great adventure: doctors and patients of the time.

124 minutes