First heart transplantation

After the first heart transplant was successfully carried out in South Africa in 1967, Dr. Pierre Grondin, assisted by Dr. Gilles Lepage, performed Canada’s first heart transplant at the Montreal Heart Institute in May of 1968. It was also at the Montreal Heart Institute that the first nine heart transplants were carried out in 1968 using an approach based on the cardiocirculatory determination of death (CDD). In the same year, the Harvard definition in favour of an approach based on the neurological determination of death (NDD) was adopted.