Norman E. Shumway

Norman E. Shumway (born February 9, 1923, Kalamazoo, Michigan, U.S.—died February 10, 2006, Palo Alto, California) was an American surgeon and pioneer in cardiac transplantation. On January 6, 1968, at the Stanford Medical Center in Stanford, California, he performed the first successful human heart transplant in the United States.

Shumway obtained an M.D. degree from Vanderbilt University (1949) and a Ph.D. degree in surgery from the University of Minnesota (1956), where he studied under Owen Harding Wangensteen and Clarence Walton Lillehei, both distinguished innovators in surgery. In 1958 Shumway joined the faculty of the Stanford University School of Medicine.

As a member of Stanford’s cardiovascular research surgery program, Shumway began conducting heart transplants on dogs. About one month after South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first human heart transplant, Shumway performed the operation on a 54-year-old man whose heart had been damaged by a virus infection. The surgery was a success, although the patient died 14 days later. The low long-term survival rates—most patients died soon after surgery because of organ rejection or infection—led many doctors to abandon the procedure by the early 1970s. Shumway, however, continued to improve the operation and advanced a drug that prevented organ rejection. Largely through his efforts, heart transplantation became a viable operation in the 1980s. In 1981 Shumway was part of a team that performed the first successful heart-lung transplant. His other major achievements included such open-heart procedures as the transplantation of valves.

In 1974 Shumway helped found the department of cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford, serving as its first chairman until 1993. He retired from surgery in 1993.