EDITORIAL

Then there was a “grey”, if not “black”, period in cardiotransplantology, when in all countries (including the USSR, and then Russia), longing for the prestige and wishing to go down in history, the surgery of transplanting heart and the “heart + lungs” complex have been performed by surgery teams whose leaders had vague knowledge of the transplantation problem per se. And the damage of this chase after vain glory is still felt by the considerable part of our society disapproving of the true humanistic direction of this line.

It was Valery Shumakov who changed the trend in our country. I had to participate in a special meeting at the former Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR where Shumakov, for the first time, demonstrated the full preparedness of his team not only to transplant heart but also to tend the patient after the operation. In 1987, the first successful orthotopic heart transplantation was performed, and Valery Shumakov is the only person to be named as the founder of this clinical line in Russia.

At the beginning of my surgery career, when I was a student, I was fortunate to work and communicate with Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov, whose name can now be found in every historical essay on transplantology. Unrestrained embellishment does harm to any biography, that’s why I am sincerely convinced that Vladimir Demikhov does not need any informational glossing. He has developed more than 20 options to transplant heart, and none of them has found a wide clinical use. Those taking care of the prestige of the domestic surgery tell everybody, who is not aware, that Demikhov is the founder of transplantology. This is certainly not true either: transplantology is not surgery. As for cardiosurgery, our great fellow countryman has demonstrated experimentally the possibility and reasonability of autoarterial coronary bypass, and as for transplantology, he was one of the first in the world to prove that a heart transplanted from one organism to another can contract and perform its pumping ability successfully for a long time. And truth to tell, this is enough for a whole human life, and more than enough to be named among outstanding figures of the world medicine.

This issue is completely dedicated to the remarkable date – the 50th anniversary of the first orthotopic heart transplantation from one human being to another.