SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT:

DE ECHTE (ZWARTE) HARTCHIRURG

(THE BLACK SURGEON)

DR. HAMILTON NAKI

Hamilton Naki, a laborer who became a self-taught surgeon of such skill that Dr. Christiaan N. Barnard chose him to assist in the world's first human heart transplant in 1967, but whose contribution was kept secret for three decades because he was a black man in apartheid-era South Africa, died on May 29, 2005, at his home in Langa, near Cape Town. He was believed to have been 78. The cause apparently was heart trouble, according to African and British newspapers, which reported the death. The transplant, which took place on Dec. 3, 1967, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, made medical history. It also made Dr. Barnard, who was young, handsome and white, world famous. Dr. Barnard began to acknowledge Mr. Naki's work only after the end of apartheid in 1991. In an interview shortly before his death in 2001, he called Mr. Naki "one of the great researchers of all time in the field of heart transplants." Mr. Naki, who left school at 14 and had no formal medical training, spent five decades working at the University of Cape Town. Originally hired as a gardener there in about 1940, he acquired his formidable surgical skills through years of silent observation and covert practice at the university's medical school. He retired in 1991.