The Unsung Heroes of 20th Century

History doesn't tell us how people felt during the great moments of the past. Yet it is true that the course of history is always decided by how people feel. There are events that are reported in the press and recorded in history in a completely different light from how they influenced society. One such example is the heart transplant operations of 1969 and onwards.

Thanks to the poets, writers, philosophers and romantics of the past, the heart has come to be known as the yardstick of personality. Everyone knows what a chicken heart and a lion heart mean and only a generation ago black people were considered to have weak hearts compared to the white ones, and hence inferior. Women were regarded as the weaker and inferior sex almost all over the world. Their great intellectual achievements were totally ignored as accidental exceptions. Somehow their hearts were also to be blamed for that.

South Africa had somehow become the Vatican of racial prejudice or apartheid as they called it. The apartheid laws enacted in South Africa in the middle of the 20^th century imposed such indignities on the black and colored populations that the American law requiring a black person to vacate his or her seat in a bus in favor of a white person seemed like a blessing.

It was in this terrible country in 1969, that Dr. Christian Barnard and his team performed the first successful heart transplant operation in which the heart of a white woman was given to a white man, who survived for weeks with his new heart. Her kidney gave the gift of life to a colored boy. In the months and years to come, hearts were transplanted in al possible combinations of race and ethnicity -- and they all survived subject to medical limitations. The myth of racism was exposed. If hearts were interchangeable, all people were equal.

It is interesting that although the heart transplant received much publicity, the moral and intellectual implications were ignored. Although no leader made a statement and no editorials were written, the equality of hearts had proven the futility of racial and sexual prejudice. The truth had been expressed in action though not in words and it quietly sank into people's minds all over the world. Apartheid evaporated from South Africa and sexual and racial prejudice declined all over the world at a phenomenal rate. Today, one who considers women or blacks inferior would be considered abnormal.

The change can only be felt by someone who has seen society as it was in the mid-twentieth century and as it is today. I salute the heart transplant surgeons and so should all blacks and women.