Not to be confused with heart OR lung ones, patients needing heart-lung transplants have had both organs irreparably damaged by a congenital (present at birth) condition, hypertension, or in rare cases cystic fibrosis. Heart-lung transfers are difficult enough to carry out due to increasingly complex logistics, but even more for the lack of matching donors for both organs. After 1981, when the first heart-lung transplants were carried out, their annual count remained in the single and low double-digit amounts. That number grew after the development of a new transplant procedure.

On this day, May 11, in 1987, doctors at two hospitals in Baltimore, Maryland, carried out the first “domino” heart-lung transplant. A healthy human heart was taken from a living person and transplanted into another human. The donor, whose lungs were destroyed by cystic fibrosis, received the heart and lungs of an accident victim.

The CS sufferer had nothing wrong with his heart, but doctors replaced it because heart-lung transplants were statistically more successful than heart transplants alone. Not letting the removed heart go to waste, the surgeons transported it to a third person, who had been waiting for a suitable heart donor for nearly a year.