Hamilton Naki - A life worth emulating

I am an avid reader of the obituary column in The Economist. It recounts the life and times of many interesting people. It covers the entire spectrum of the human race. The deaths of the noble and the ghastly; the rich and the poor; the super-successful and the the super-duds are featured in this column.

This week it was about Hamilton Naki, an unsung African pioneer who should have rightly been given half the credit for the First ever heart transplant done in 1967. Unfortunately, neither the racist South African government nor Dr. Christian Barnard (the suregeon who became famous overnight for his apparently pioneering achievement) thought fit to do so. In all fairness, Dr. Barnard did hire Dr. Maki (an honorary medical doctrate was awarded by the University of Capetown) and apparently admitted before his death that Dr. Maki might have been more skillful than he was. Dr. Naki had possession of a dextrous and steady pair of hands that harvested the heart from a white corpse, which finally landed in the body of Louis Washkansky. Mr. Washkansky is the first ever heart-transplant patient. For all Dr. Naki's achievements, the hospital that he worked in listed him as a gardener or cleaner and made sure that his touching the white patients was not known to the outside world.

Wonder how many such noble humans are out there..... !