On this day: first successful lung transplant, 1983

Surgeons at Toronto General Hospital carried out the world’s first successful lung transplant on Nov. 7, 1983, giving a Toronto man named Tom Hall about six more years of life, according to the University Health Network (UHN), the hospital’s parent organization.

Dr. Joel Cooper led the team that performed the operation, UHN said. The hospital’s anniversary material also names Drs. Thomas Todd, Alec Patterson and Griffith Pearson among the doctors who worked on the first successful lung transplant.

Hall was the 45th patient in the world to receive a transplanted lung, CBC News reported on the 30th anniversary in 2013. The first 44 had all died. UHN said none of those earlier patients survived, and Global News reported the first attempt came in 1963 in Mississippi, where the patient lived 18 days.

Cooper told CBC he laid out those odds to Hall before the operation. “I said, Tom, there have been about 44 attempts thus far and no one has survived,” Cooper said. Cooper recalled that Hall answered that he was grateful to be number 45.

Global News reported that Hall had a fatal lung disease called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and kept oxygen tanks at his desk and in his car. A teenager donated the lung, Global News reported.

Global News said the Toronto team spent several years on laboratory research into how transplanted lungs heal before trying again. Cooper told the outlet that Hall “understood and was willing to take the risk.” Global also reported that a year passed before the next lung transplant in Toronto, while doctors watched Hall’s progress.

Hall lived a full life for six years after the surgery, Global News reported. CBC put his survival at more than six years. His widow, Barbara Hall, said in a hospital video quoted by CBC that “Tom was not a quitter.”

Lung transplants are difficult because the organ is fragile, the blood supply to both the lung and its airways must be restored, and the donor lung must be preserved, Dr. Shaf Keshavjee said in the CBC report. Keshavjee, who directs Toronto’s lung transplant program, was a medical student in 1983 and heard about the operation on the radio. CBC reported he scrubbed in for the hospital’s first double lung transplant in 1986.

The Toronto program has grown considerably since. UHN said nearly 1,500 lung transplants had been done at Toronto General by the 30th anniversary, with a 95 per cent survival rate for recipients. Keshavjee put the figure at 97 per cent in his interview with CBC. The two outlets do not explain the difference, and the figures come from 2013, so current numbers will differ. Global News reported 232 lung transplants were done across Canada in a recent year, with one-year survival at 85 per cent nationally.

Cooper, later a thoracic surgeon in the United States, said in the Global News report that the result is still, to him, “a miracle.” Keshavjee told CBC that “Canada is No. 1 in some things and this is one of them.”

Sources conflict slightly on how Hall’s survival is described (six years versus more than six), and none of the three accounts reviewed gives his age. UHN gives the surgery date as Nov. 7, 1983, and the Canadian Press lists the Toronto operation under Nov. 7 in its Today in History feature.

Toronto’s transplant programs have also figured in other medical firsts. Our earlier report on a Toronto man whose HIV went into remission after a bone marrow transplant covers a more recent case.

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