First Heart-Lung Transplant Surgeon Discusses Procedure

March 10, 2016

(Medical Xpress) – On March 9, 1981, just minutes past midnight, Mary Gohlke, a 45-year-old Arizona woman dying of primary pulmonary hypertension, was wheeled into a Stanford Hospital operating room for a heart-lung transplant surgery that would become a medical milestone. For many months, as her health failed, Gohlke had waited, stuck: Lung transplants were technically feasible, but no human lung transplant patient had survived more than 23 days.