50 Years Ago This Week Inside the First Heart Transplant
Week 50 Dec. 15, 1967, It was a medical breakthrough generations in the making. For as long as doctors had understood the crucial role of the heart, they had dreamed of using transplants to save people whose heart problems would otherwise doom them to death. Earlier attempts, especially before the discovery of blood types, had failed. Now, in late 1967, there were suddenly not one but two real-life examples to point to. Though one of the operations a transplant between babies, in Brooklyn failed, the other  performed in South Africa by Dr. Christiaan Barnard on Dec. 3, 1967  actually worked. They were able to successfully transplant a heart donated by the family of Denise Ann Darvall, a young woman killed by a speeding car, to a man named Louis Washkansky, a grocer with progressive heart failure who had been given weeks to live. Barnard and his team had, as TIME put it, "reached the surgical equivalent of Mount Everest, followed automatically by the medical equivalent of the problem of how to get down  in other words, how to keep the patient and transplant alive.", Here's how TIME described the surgery itself, This amazing medical advance raised a new kind of moral and ethical problem. The need to keep the donor heart healthy enough might require keeping it beating after the donor's brain and other bodily functions ceased, which would mean that the surgeons were in one sense killing the donor. Still, the life-saving potential of the operation, and the goal of eventually achieving success with an artificial heart, made the news something to celebrate. The patient, Washkansky, died a few weeks later  from illness compounded by the immune-suppression drugs he was on to avoid rejecting the new heart  but the transplant itself is still considered a success. Get your history fix in one place sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter, White House wedding As first daughter Lynda Bird Johnson wed Marine Captain Charles Spittal Robb at the White House, TIME noted that the gifts they received included "a 6,770 silver tea and coffee service from the Washington diplomatic corps, a nest of teak tables from Chiang Kaishek, a color sketch of Eeyore by Winnie-the-Pooh Illustrator Ernest Shepard Lynda is a Pooh buff, andfrom Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen, of coursea small silver elephant.", Generation gap This week's TIME Essay looks at the state of the American parent at a paradoxical moment in history young people appeared to be breaking away from their homes and parents, becoming a generation of the disillusioned, and yet by many objective measures young Americans "work harder, think deeper, love more and even look better than any previous generation." Though the story certainly indulges in ideas about families that are now out of date for example, tsk-tsking at mothers who are "preoccupied" with their the parts of their lives that weren't about the children, it also takes a rather modern approach to finding solutions, encouraging communication between parents and children as the most important element in a healthy family. Criminal justice concerns A grand-jury investigation of conditions in Chicago's Cook County Jail resulted in an unusual level of exposure for the terrible "catalogue of depravity" faced by those who were held even for relatively minor and nonviolent crimes. This year, ProPublica Illinois launched an investigation into the very same jail, which remains notorious. Guess Who TIME's movie critic took on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner this week, a timely story in the year when the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage. Though the movie would win two Oscars and be nominated for several more, including Best Picture, the review was middling, calling it one of producer Stanley Kramer's "cinematic bouquets of platitudes about important-sounding social issues" and focusing on its standing as Spencer Tracy's final film  he died a few weeks after filming wrapped  rather than what it said about society. Great vintage ad A reminder from the post office that readers in 1967 still had to be told how to find out their own zip codes. Coming up next week Bob Hope