Hamilton Naki
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Hamilton Naki (26 June 1926 – 29 May 2005) was a teacher, trainer, and surgical assistant of Dr Christiaan Barnard who undertook the world's first heart transplantation at Groote Schuur Hospital, South Africa, in 1967. His roles went unrecognised by the public at large at the time due to apartheid, and he retired on a gardener's pension.
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[edit] Background
Naki was born in 1926 to a poor family in Ngcingane, a small village in the Eastern Cape. He completed his primary school education there, then, aged 14, he hitchiked to Cape Town in search of work. He was employed by the University of Cape Town as a gardener, and for ten years maintained the tennis courts and university grounds.
[edit] Medical career
Naki was selected by Robert Goetz of the Medical Faculty, while working as a gardener, to work in the clinical laboratories, where he helped by caring for the laboratory animals; Goetz first asked him to help him hold a giraffe while he operated. He soon became involved in surgical procedures in the laboratories, including anaesthetics, as well as post-operative care for the animals. Despite his lack of formal education, his technique and capacity was recognised, and he received special permission to continue research in the laboratories. However, he was never able to train as a doctor, and was barred from the whites-only operating theatre during the apartheid era.
When an ambitious Christiaan Barnard returned from the United States to develop cardiac transplant techniques, Naki was enlisted as his assistant. It was in this role that he contributed to the development of transplant techniques. According to some accounts, he assisted in the removal and cleaning of Denise Darvall's heart, who was fatally injured in a car accident, during a marathon surgical operation on 3 December 1967. However, surgeons at Groote Schuur, the hospital where the transplant was performed, refute this claim as do some sources close to Naki. Even if he did not take part in this transplant, he did provide valuable training to thousands of student surgeons without receiving any formal acknowledgement -- rather he was identified as a cleaner or gardener, smiling broadly, beside Barnard in publicity photographs. Barnard (an opponent of apartheid) would later praise Naki for his role as a teacher and for his skills as a "surgeon". Despite being listed in hospital records as a cleaner or gardener, he was paid the salary of a senior lab technician, the highest pay the hospital could give to someone without a diploma. Naki was allowed to operate and give lectures to medical professors until his retirement. Barnard himself admitted before he died that "He (Naki) probably had more technical skill than I had". Indeed, he used this skill to become a trainer of over 3000 future surgeons, renowned for expecting high standards from his students. Meanwhile he would use his lunchbreaks to read the Bible to the homeless people gathered in the local cemetery, and warn them against alcohol and cannabis.
[edit] Retirement
Naki retired in 1991 on a gardener's pension. He received some recognition of his work after his retirement, receiving a National Order of Mapungubwe in Bronze in 2002 and an honorary degree in Medicine from the University of Cape Town in 2003. During his retirement, he arranged for a converted bus to act as a mobile clinic for his home area, and supported a school in the Eastern Cape with donations collected from doctors he had trained. He died on 29 May 2005, aged 78.
