Christiaan Barnard told dying grocer Louis Washkansky he had an 80 percent chance of surviving a procedure that had never succeeded in a human. This episode follows the South African surgeon from Beaufort West, where a brother died at age three of a heart defect, to his early work in Cape Town proving that intestinal atresia in infants was a blood supply problem. A detour across a hallway at the University of Minnesota put him in Walt Lillehei’s open heart surgery lab, and he returned home in 1958 to join a race against Norman Shumway and Adrian Kantrowitz, whose animal results far outpaced his own.

On December 3, 1967, Barnard transplanted the heart of Denise Darvall, a young woman fatally injured by a car, using a technique he modified to protect the heart’s septum. Washkansky lived 18 days before pneumonia killed him. About 100 transplants followed worldwide in 1968, and most centers then abandoned the procedure. Barnard kept going, introducing the heterotopic piggyback transplant in 1974. The episode also covers his 1978 remarks opposing one person, one vote, his Glycel skin cream, a 2016 assault allegation, and his death from asthma in 2001.

• Why none of Barnard’s 48 test dogs lived past 10 days while Shumway’s survived for over a year
• Hamilton Naki, the lab technician Barnard called a better craftsman, and the myth about the first operation
• The potassium injection used to stop the donor’s heart before brain death was a legal concept
• Philip Blaiberg’s 19 months with a transplanted heart and the controversy over donor Clive Haupt
• How a second heart wired in parallel let one later patient live more than 23 years