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Today, 50 years after the first heart transplant, 3,500 such operations take place every year
PIONEER TRANSPLANT SURGEON RECEIVED HEALING FOR ARTHRITIS Absent treatment was sought from Harry Edwards by friends of Prof Christiaan Barnard
THE HALF-CENTURY anniversary of the first heart transplant operation, carried out in South Africa by Professor Christiaan Barnard, has been commemorated in many countries with TV and other media coverage reflecting on the importance of the pioneering medical procedure. Today, 50 years later, heart transplants are almost routine so long as a suitable donor heart can be found, with around 3,500 operations taking place each year of which more than half occur in the United States and an average of 200 in Britain. What is not widely known, however, is that the great cardiac surgeon successfully received spiritual healing for incurable arthritis in his hands – a condition that would have seriously limited his surgical skills. Prof Barnard was head of the Cardiothoracic Surgery Department at Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, when shortly after midnight on 3 December 1967 he and his colleagues began an operation that captured world headlines.
Just before 6am, the donor heart in the chest of grocer Louis Washkansky was electrically shocked into action. The patient regained consciousness and was able to speak with his wife and reporters, but lived for only 18 days having contracted pneumonia because of a weakened immune system. A year after that historic advance in medicine, Barnard’s friends sought absent healing for the surgeon from Harry Edwards, who was Britain’s most famous healer at that time. Edwards never revealed the names of his patients but during a visit to his healing sanctuary at Shere, Surrey, a reporter from the local newspaper noticed a photograph of the heart surgeon on which was a
Prof Christiaan Barnard in 1969 PSYCHIC NEWS | JANUARY 2018
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Famous healer Harry Edwards
handwritten message of good wishes “to Harry Edwards”. Asked about his connection with Barnard, Edwards explained that a request for absent healing had come from mutual friends and that he had received no direct communication from Barnard and had never met him. But he knew the surgeon was interested in Shere’s healing work and
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PSYCHIC NEWS | JANUARY 2018
believed that he was no longer troubled by arthritis in his hands. The story made front-page news in the Surrey Advertiser in May 1970 and was quickly followed up by Psychic News which was able to add more to the story after speaking with Edwards (PN 16 May 1970). Barnard and Harry Edwards’ mutual friends, it transpired, included Eben and Mona van der Watt who ran a Spiritualist church, the Little Temple of Spiritual Fellowship, on the slopes of Table Mountain in Cape Town. They were also healers but Mona was best known as a remarkable trance and physical medium. Edwards and one of his healing colleagues, Olive Burton, had visited South Africa in 1968 and Barnard had accepted an invitation to attend a dinner in their honour. He was unable to do so, however, as the event clashed with his preparations for a second heart transplant operation on 2 January 1968. The recipient, dentist Dr Philip Blaiberg, survived for more than 19 months. The signed photograph seems to have been given as an apology for not being able to attend the dinner. “He must have known about the healing,” Edwards told the local reporter, adding that as far as he knew Barnard was not now troubled by the arthritis in his hands. A British newspaper reporter had told the healer that the surgeon still had a little of the disease in his hands, but he had built
a “natural resistance” to it. In fact, Barnard was able to continue operating until 1983, by which time his once-nimble fingers had become gnarled by rheumatoid arthritis. He died in September 2001. It seems likely that he knew about Spiritualism and mediumship as well as healing, for the same issue of Psychic News reported: “Last November Barnard opened a bazaar in the Cape Town Spiritualist church run by the van der Watts”. n
Eben and Mona van der Watt