When Dr. James Hardy became the first chairman of the Surgery Department at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, he, along with his researchers and students, focused on the new field of organ transplants.
Nine years later, on this week in 1964, Dr. Hardy and a team of surgeons performed the first successful heart transplant into a human recipient. This was only six months after Hardy’s team had performed the first human lung transplant. Two decades later, Hardy would lead a team performing the first ever double lung transplant that didn’t move the heart.
Today, organ transplantation is common. Approximately 7,000 liver transplants, and 3,000 heart transplants are performed annually in the United States alone. And it all started here, with Dr. James Hardy at U.M.M.C.
For more interesting facts about Mississippi's 200-year history, watch a new interstitial each week of 2017 with Mississippi: A Thread through Time on MPB TV.
