Hearts Exposed: Transplants and the Media in 1960s Britain

In 1968, a year not short of news, a story from within the traditionally reticent medical profession kept making headlines: transplantation of the human heart.

Following the pioneering South African operation the previous year, over 100 cardiac transplants were performed worldwide, three of them in Britain.

But with most recipients dead within weeks, the procedure was all but abandoned for a decade.

Hearts Exposed offers the first analysis of the media involvement in the early heart-transplant operations in Britain, understanding this as an integral part of a critical period in medical history, and a turning point in medical-media relations.

Using a wealth of newly available sources, it demonstrates how unprecedented media attention reshaped professional ethics and, by threatening public trust in doctors, profoundly affected the course of transplant surgery.