Talk:Norman Shumway

Heart transplant pioneer

It should be noted that Dr. Shumway was working on heart transplantation at Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco, California, in the late 1950s. Early experiments were carried out around 1957–1959 on dogs. Shumway wasn't the only one working on this research, but he was the most successful. According to a relative who worked with Shumway at the time, after the transplant operations he would spend nights with his animal patients, caring for them and trying to make them live as long as possible, while his colleagues, who would "call it a day" and go home in the evening, showed little success. By the time Shumway attempted his first heart transplant on a human patient in 1968, he already had over ten years of experience working with animal subjects. One would have expected Dr. Shumway to be the first-ever to perform human heart transplantation surgery, so it was with some surprise that the world learned of Dr. Christiaan Barnard doing it first in South Africa on December 3, 1967. Those who were familiar with these developments in medical science suspected there was a bit of competition for publicity. At any rate, Shumway performed his first human transplantation operation on January 6, 1968, barely a month later. Barnard's patient succumbed to pneumonia 18 days after surgery; Shumway's patient succumbed within 15 days due to multiple systemic complications. — Quicksilver^{T @} 19:37, 24 April 2015 (UTC)