The first transplant we are noticed of, in the History, was done in the III Century, by the brothers Cosmas and Damian.

A sacristan of Church, in Cilicia, had a gangrene problem in one of his legs and needed an amputation.

The brothers went to the local cemetery and the only dead body available was from a black Ethiopian man. They removed the leg from the corpse and, having operated the sacristan they put the new leg on him.

The transplant was a success and the sacristan spent the rest of his life having one leg of each color.

The brothers, considered holy saints by the Catholic Church, have their effigies crowning many Medical Schools, as they are considered patrons of Medicine.

But, it was in the XX Century that a south-African surgeon became famous, performing the first heart transplant in the world.

It was December third of 1967, when the doctor Christian Neethling Barnard implanted the heart of a twenty-five young lady, Denise Darwall, dead on a car accident, into a fifty-three sick man.

The Lithuanian Louis Washkansky survived for eighteen days. This intervention has made the surgeon from Cape Town, in less than twenty-four hours, a celebrity.

Exactly one month later, in January the third of the next year, Dr. Barnard performed his second transplant, putting the heart of a twenty-four years old black African, Clive Haupt, victim of brain hemorrhage, in the body of the white dentist Philip Blaiberg, fifty-eight years old.

He survived for eighteen months. After this try, Dr. Barnard and his team had performed over twenty transplants, and this kind of surgery spread all over the world. His patient, who had survived, Dirk Van Zyl, lived with his new organ for more than twenty-three years.

Dr. Barnard died in the resort of Paphos, in the year of two thousand and one, in the Island of Chipre, where he used to spend his vacation, being seventy-eight years old.

Dr. Christiaan Barnard dared to put his hands on the man´s heart and showed that the organ transplant was possible.

But, someone, before him, had already dealt with the question of the man´s heart. Not exactly the heart, physics organ.

Someone had dealt with other structure of the heart. He knew that all the achievements start in the intimacy of the creature.

So he proclaimed: Blessed are those pure in heart, for they will see God.

They will see God, not with their physical eyes, but with the eyes of the soul.

They will reach the stage of such purity that they will be able to see the Uncreated being, our Eternal Father.

Also have taught us Jesus that the man speaks about what fills in his heart, that is, his inside.

He has also said that the good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good.

In all His exhortations the Great physician of our souls, Jesus, uses the word heart to signify what is inside.

If Dr. Barnard had become famous by showing the techniques of the transplant of the delicate organ called heart, Jesus had realized the deepest surgery, going to the core of the creature.

His is the invitation to man to renew his intimacy.

Deepest than transplant a physical organ, Jesus proposes a change in attitudes.

Transplant of noble feelings, worthy attitudes, industrious thoughts.

Let´s think about it and submit ourselves to the delicate surgery of inner renewal.

Spiritist Moment Team, based on bibliographic datas from Dr. Christiaan Barnard; in the quotes in the Gospel of Matthew, cap.V, verse 8 and from the Gospel of Luke, cap.6, verse 45.
April 04.2011.