Celebrity Surgeon: Christiaan Barnard, a Life by Chris Logan

Description

Dr Chris Barnard caused a world sensation in December 1967 by performing the first human heart transplant, transforming him overnight from an unknown surgeon into a household name. Although he wrote a number of books about himself, and his first wife, Louwtjie, wrote a book in reply to one of them, there has never been a full scale, objective biography of the man named by Time Magazine as one of only two South Africans on a list of people who had changed the world – the other being Nelson Mandela.

The author has conducted numerous interviews and done research to uncover the real Chris Barnard. Logan covers Barnard’s boyhood in Beaufort West, his medical training, his marriage to Louwtjie and his first fulltime job, to his becoming a surgeon, and finally succeeding in a human transplant. He discusses how Barnard became transformed into a social butterfly, wearing Italian suits and having affairs with celebrities such as Gina Lollobrigida and Francoise Hardy. He then fell in love with and married a 19-year-old model, Barbara Zoellner. We see how he collaborated with Eschel Rhoodie’s Department of Information; a period about which Logan has uncovered previously unpublished details. His troubled relationships with children of his first marriage are described, and his divorce from Barbara due to his constant adultery. At the age of 65, he married another model, Karin Setzkorn, 24 who also divorced him. The lonely and dejected Barnard moved to Vienna where, inevitably, he became involved with an attractive lady doctor. He died in Cyprus having suffered an acute asthma attack, at the age of 78.