James Hardy

James D. Hardy (May 14, 1918 – February 19, 2003) was an American surgeon who performed the world's first lung transplant into John Russell, who lived 18 days. The transplant was performed at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi on June 11, 1963. He also had emphysema of both lungs, squamous cell carcinoma of his left lung, and kidney disease. To complicate matters, Russell was a prisoner at the Mississippi State Penitentiary serving a life sentence for murder. One source states Russell was in prison for accidentally shooting and killing a 14-year-old boy.

Prior to the surgery, Russell would awake at night coughing up bloody sputum until he was blue in the face. Every movement left him extremely short of breath, and he was scared of suffocating. Tests showed he only had one-third of normal lung capacity. When Hardy approached him about the potential transplant, Russell talked with his wife and three children. His main concern was whether the transplant would help improve his shortness of breath. Hardy told him that he thought it would.

Initially, the transplanted lung did provide Russell with better breathing, before kidney disease impacted him. Hardy used azathioprine, prednisone, and radiation to suppress his immune system. One source states that Russell died from a combination of cancer, infection, and kidney disease.

First heart transplant (1964) At the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Hardy transplanted the heart of a chimpanzee into the chest of a dying Boyd Rush and shocked it with a defibrillator to resume beating at approximately 2:00 a.m. on Friday, January 24, 1964. This heart beat either 60 or 90 minutes Hardy had been inspired by the limited success of Keith Reemtsma at Tulane University in Louisiana who in the early 1960s transplanted chimpanzee kidneys into thirteen human patients.

Boyd Rush was a 68-year-old retired upholsterer described as a "deaf mute" who was referred to Hardy by a community hospital on Jan. 21, 1964. He had been found by neighbors in a comatose state with only a faint pulse. Rush's stepsister Mrs. J.H. Thompson signed a consent form which stated, "I agree to the insertion of a suitable heart transplant if such should be available at the time. I further understand that hundreds of heart transplants have been performed in laboratories throughout the world but that any heart transplant would represent the initial transplant in man." The consent form did not include the possibility that a chimpanzee heart might be used. Hardy later stated that he had verbally discussed the procedure in detail with relatives, although Mrs. Thompson was the only relative. A 2012 medical article stated, "Such was the medicolegal situation at that time that this 'informed' consent was not considered in any way inadequate." Just after 2:00 am in the early morning hours of Friday, Jan. 24, 1964, Hardy completed the stitching to connect the chimpanzee heart into Rush's chest. He used a defibrillator to start the donor heart beating. The chimpanzee heart beat in Rush's chest for approximately one hour and then could not be restarted.

The hospital's director of public information put out a guarded statement which included the vague phrase "the dimensions of the only available donor heart" and did not disclose that the donor heart came from a chimpanzee. The Associated Press story began: "Surgeons took the heart from a dead man, revived it and transplanted it into the chest of a man dying of heart failure today." At that point, the Mississippi Medical Center revealed the crucial detail that the donor heart had come from a chimpanzee. On Jan. 25, the New York Times printed a more accurate headline: "Chimpanzee Heart Used in Transplant to Human." Years later, Hardy stated, "The publicity, the outcry and the criticism were enormous. Public media reporters seemed to come out of the woodwork. We hunkered down and waited it out."

Several weeks later Hardy attended the Sixth International Transplantation Conference in New York City. Author Donald McRae of Every Second Counts (2006) wrote that the publicity surrounding the transplant had made Hardy's work "seem chaotic and even duplicitous" and that Hardy could feel the "icy disdain" from his fellow physicians.

Hardy later wrote, "I had noted that when one loses his academic post, for whatever reason, he is not likely to get another one of comparable significance. I decided to wait until [Norm] Shumway and his group transplanted a heart in man." James Hardy thus withdrew from the race to perform the first successful heart transplant.

More than three and a half years later, the first heart transplant using a human heart was performed by Christiaan Barnard of South Africa on Dec. 3, 1967, with patient Louis Washkansky surviving for eighteen days.

Personal life Hardy married Louise Scott Sams of Decatur, Georgia in 1949. They met when he was working in Stark General Hospital in Charleston. She died from Alzheimer's disease in 2000. They had four daughters – Dr. Louise Roeska-Hardy, professor of philosophy in Heidelberg and Frankfurt, Germany, Dr. Julia Ann Hardy, psychiatrist in Michigan, Dr. Bettie Winn Hardy, clinical psychologist and director of the eating disorders program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, Dallas and Dr. Katherine H. Little, medical director of the Diagnostic Center for Digestive Diseases at Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas.

Retirement Hardy retired from the Department of Surgery, University of Mississippi School of Medicine, Jackson, in 1987. He died at the age of 84 on February 19, 2003.

Books Hardy wrote an autobiography, The World of Surgery 1945–1985: Memoirs of One Participant, which was published in 1986. Apart from his autobiography, Hardy also wrote several other books including: Hardy's Textbook of Surgery Surgery and the Endocrine System The Academic Surgeon