Denise Darvall

Who was Denise Darvall?

Denise Ann Darvall was the donor in the world’s first successful human heart transplant, performed at Groote Schuur Hospital, South Africa, by a team of surgeons led by Christiaan Barnard.

Darvall was seriously injured in a car accident on Main Road in Observatory, Cape Town. She and her family were visiting friends for afternoon tea and went shopping for cake. They were run over by a drunk driver who failed to see them. Her mother died immediately. Darvall sustained a skull fracture and severe head injuries, after the car flung her across the road and her head hit the wheel cap of her own car. She could not stay alive without life support, and was essentially brain dead. At 9 p.m. on the day of the accident, the resuscitation team stopped trying to revive her.

Surgeons had a serious ethical problem because death then could only be declared by whole-body standards. The Harvard Criteria of Brain Death did not begin until 1968. The problem in this case was that, although Denise's brain was damaged, her heart was healthy. Various reports over the years attributed conflicting reasons for her heart stopping. The answer has recently become known. For forty years, Barnard's brother Marius kept a secret: that rather than wait for her heart to stop beating, at Marius’s urging, Christiaan had injected potassium into Denise’s heart to paralyze it and thus, to render her technically dead by the whole-body standard.