Heart of Cape Town Museum

Located within Groote Schuur Hospital, the museum showcases the original operating theaters where Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful human heart transplant in 1967, offering guided tours that detail this groundbreaking medical achievement.

Planning your visit

On 3 December 1967, in an operating theatre at Groote Schuur Hospital, Christiaan Barnard transplanted the heart of a young woman killed in a road accident into a 53-year-old grocer named Louis Washkansky. The operation made worldwide headlines within hours and Barnard into a celebrity. Washkansky lived eighteen days before dying of pneumonia, his immune system suppressed to prevent rejection.

The museum preserves the original theatres — the donor theatre and the recipient theatre — with the equipment of the period in place and life-size figures recreating the surgical teams at the moment of the operation. Guided tours walk through the medical sequence, the technical problems Barnard's team had solved, and the ethical questions the procedure raised about the definition of death.

The story has an unavoidable South African dimension the museum addresses: the donor, Denise Darvall, was white; the second transplant recipient, Philip Blaiberg, survived over eighteen months; and the hospital operated under apartheid, with segregated facilities, while performing surgery that made the country briefly admired.

Tours are guided and scheduled rather than open-door. Allow ninety minutes. The main booking is an entrance ticket. Current availability is listed below.