Dorothy Fischer

Dorothy Fischer (1931 – 19 October 1981) was a South African woman who was for many years the world's longest surviving heart transplant recipient.

Fischer's heart had been damaged by rheumatic fever as a child and by 1969, when she was 38 years old, her doctors agreed that she was dying.^[1] Dr Christiaan Barnard and his team carried out Fischer's heart transplant—their fifth—on 17 April 1969.^[1][2][3] She survived for twelve and a half years after the operation and was held up by Barnard as proof that heart transplants were a viable long-term option in spite of the body's rejection of foreign tissue.^[2]

Fischer died from complications associated with chronic rejection on 19 October 1981,^[2] two years before the immunosuppressive drug Ciclosporin became generally available to transplant patients.