A pioneering surgeon who led the first human heart transplant operation in the UK has died, aged 93.
Sir Terence English, who performed the procedure on Keith Castle in 1979, died peacefully at his home in Oxford on Sunday.
One of Sir Terence’s daughters, Mary, said in a statement released by Royal Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, that she and her three siblings were “immensely proud of what dad did”.
Sir Terence, who was born in South Africa in 1932, worked at Royal Papworth Hospital from 1972 to 1995.
The operation on Mr Castle followed a 10-year moratorium on heart transplants in the UK after three failed surgeries in the late 1960s.
Sir Terence said in an interview in 2019: “I’d been turned down by various transplant bodies, and had been met with an awful lot of criticism, so we knew this was likely to be the last chance.
“I very much had my back to the wall.”
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He undertook his first heart transplant at Royal Papworth Hospital in January 1979, but it was not a success.
“I had a second shot and I was going to take it,” said Sir Terence. “Our recipient was Keith Castle, a 52-year-old builder from London.
“He was a smoker with peripheral vascular disease and a duodenal ulcer. Not the best of candidates, you might think, but what always struck me about Keith was that he was a survivor.”
Mr Castle lived for five years after his transplant.
