Christiaan barnard biography book

Overview

This biography of Christiaan Barnard is set on the background of his epoch-making first successful human heart transplantation, a landmark event in the history of medicine which the book said ‘stunned the world’.

Christiaan Barnard: One Life by Christiaan Neethling …

The book provides a detailed portrayal of Barnard’s qualities and habits, both positive and negative, that made it possible for a seeming upstart working in the backwaters of the medical world to beat one of the leading heart transplant surgeons to the finish line.

With a first-hand account of his personal and professional lives, the author explored the  determination and ambition that drove Bernard’s success, asserting that ‘no other heart surgeon of that era was as good a clinician, or as good a cardiologist, as Chris Barnard’.

The book nevertheless also depicted how Barnard’s larger-than-life personality wreaked havoc on his family life, and dented his professio