On this day in 1965, Denise Darvall and Louis Washkansky became inextricably linked, their names being side-by-side in books, magazines, and various journals. Let’s start with Mrs. Darvall.
A resident of Cape Town, South Africa, Darvall and her family were going to visit some friends on Saturday, December 2, 1965. Not wanting to arrive empty-handed, they stopped at a bakery where Denise, 25, and her mom, 53-year-old Myrtle, went in to purchase a cake. Upon returning to their car, the mother and daughter were struck by another car. Myrtle died instantly. After valiant efforts to resuscitate Denise, she was declared brain dead at the hospital. It was 9 p.m.
Louis Washkansky, 55, a Lithuanian Jew, was a veteran of WWII. The Cape Town resident was athletic and active, working as a grocer as well as participating in sports like football, swimming, and weightlifting. And he was dying.
Three heart attacks and congestive heart failure had caused both his kidneys and liver to begin failing. In October 1967, he went into a diabetic coma but eventually regained consciousness. Doctors at Groote Schuur Hospital, a teaching hospital in Cape Town, ran several tests and said that the only thing that could save him was a heart transplant. However, this had never been done before.
Dr. Christiaan Banard, professor and head of the cardiothoracic surgery department at Groote Hospital had been studying the procedure that had been tested successfully on animals. Gaining permission from the Darvall family to harvest Denise’s heart, a team of over 30 doctors and nurses began working on Washkansky just after midnight on December 3, 1965. After about six hours, the surgery was completed and Denise’s heart was beating in Louis’s chest.
A mere 18 days later, Louis died. It wasn’t from heart failure, though. He had contracted double pneumonia, a side effect from the overly high doses of immunosuppressants he had been given. The procedure was new and the effective dosage was unknown. Still, this medical breakthrough has brought us to where we are today, 60 years later, with over 5,000 heart transplants are performed each year.1
While that sounds impressive, it’s really not that many. God does thousands of heart transplants every day! And he has been doing it since man came into existence.
The Lord made a prophetic promise to the house of Israel in Ezekiel 36:26. “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.”
The stony heart of man is stubborn. However, the heart of flesh is pliable and responsive. It’s indicative of what salvation does for us, making us malleable in the hands of the Heavenly Father. Only Jesus is qualified and capable of performing this heart transplant. Nobody else can do it for us and we certainly cannot do it for ourselves.
Have you had a heart transplant? If you are in need of one today, there is only one viable donor, and He is ready give you that new heart. Right now, you are sick in sin and may not even realize just how sick you are. But once you receive that new heart, you will find that you have just started really living!
“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
1https://aclsnow.com/blog/history-of-heart-transplants/
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