Quote of note:
"Hamilton Naki had better technical skills than I did," Dr. Barnard said in an interview quoted in The Daily Telegraph of London this week. "He was a better craftsman than me, especially when it came to stitching, and had very good hands."
But because of his race, Mr. Naki's role in the world's first heart transplant remained unknown for years.
"If Hamilton had had the opportunity to perform, he would have probably become a brilliant surgeon," Dr. Barnard told The Associated Press in 1993.
Hamilton Naki, 78, Self-Taught Surgeon, Dies
By MARGALIT FOX
Hamilton Naki, a laborer who became a self-taught surgeon of such skill that Dr. Christiaan N. Barnard chose him to assist in the world's first human heart transplant in 1967, but whose contribution was kept secret for three decades because he was a black man in apartheid-era South Africa, died on May 29 at his home in Langa, near Cape Town. He was believed to have been 78.
The cause apparently was heart trouble, according to African and British newspapers, which reported the death.
The transplant, which took place on Dec. 3, 1967, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, made medical history. It also made Dr. Barnard, who was young, handsome and white, world famous.
Dr. Barnard began to acknowledge Mr. Naki's work only after the end of apartheid in 1991. In an interview shortly before his death in 2001, he called Mr. Naki "one of the great researchers of all time in the field of heart transplants."
Mr. Naki, who left school at 14 and had no formal medical training, spent five decades working at the University of Cape Town. Originally hired as a gardener there in about 1940, he acquired his formidable surgical skills through years of silent observation and covert practice at the university's medical school. He retired in 1991.
In 2003, the university awarded Mr. Naki an honorary master of science degree in medicine.
Although South Africa's apartheid laws forbade blacks from performing surgery on whites, Mr. Naki's skills were so esteemed that the university quietly looked the other way. He worked alongside Dr. Barnard for decades as a lab technician, perfecting his craft and assisting in many operations on people. Operating on animals, Mr. Naki also taught surgical techniques to generations of medical students.
"If Hamilton had had the opportunity to perform, he would have probably become a brilliant surgeon," Dr. Barnard told The Associated Press in 1993.
Hamilton Naki was born, most likely in 1926, in a poor, rural village in Transkei, a largely black former British protectorate in what is now South Africa's Eastern Cape Province. At 14, lacking the money to continue his education, he hitchhiked to Cape Town to find work. The university hired him to tend its grounds and tennis courts.
In the late 1950's, Mr. Naki took a job at the medical school, where he cleaned lab animals' cages. He was quickly recognized for his intelligence, keen powers of observation and steady hands, and was gradually allowed to become involved in more serious work.
Mr. Naki learned to anesthetize animals, and eventually to do surgery on them, operating on rabbits, pigs, dogs and even a giraffe. Many of the animal surgeries he performed, including coronary bypasses and heart and liver transplants, helped to perfect techniques that were later used on humans.
"Hamilton Naki had better technical skills than I did," Dr. Barnard said in an interview quoted in The Daily Telegraph of London this week. "He was a better craftsman than me, especially when it came to stitching, and had very good hands."
But because of his race, Mr. Naki's role in the world's first heart transplant remained unknown for years.
On Dec. 2, 1967, Denise Darvall, a young white South African woman, was hit by a car as she was crossing a Cape Town street. Taken to Groote Schuur Hospital, she was declared brain-dead. Her family gave permission for her heart to be transplanted into the chest of Louis Washkansky, a 55-year-old grocer whose own heart was failing.
As a black man, Mr. Naki could not operate on Ms. Darvall even after she was dead. But Dr. Barnard so prized his ability that he drafted him as a member of the team that would lift out her heart.
In a painstaking operation lasting many hours, Mr. Naki's team removed Ms. Darvall's heart, washing it repeatedly to cleanse it of her blood before introducing some of Mr. Washkansky's. On Dec. 3, Dr. Barnard transplanted the heart into Mr. Washkansky, who lived for 18 days before dying of pneumonia.
During his years at the university, Mr. Naki lived on the outskirts of Cape Town in a one-room shack without electricity or running water. When he retired, he was paid a gardener's pension, far less than a lab technician's.
Mr. Naki is survived by several children, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, according to the reports in overseas news media.
In 2002, Mr. Naki was awarded the Order of Mapungubwe, one of South Africa's highest honors, for outstanding contribution to medical science.
In an interview with The Guardian of London in 2003, Mr. Naki expressed little bitterness about a lifetime spent working in the shadows. "I was called one of the backroom boys," he said. "They put the white people out front. If people published pictures of me, they would have gone to jail."
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"But because of his race,
"But because of his race, Mr. Naki's role in the world's first heart transplant remained unknown for years."
This is an interesting observation but it is only partially true. Dr. Christian Barnard and other members of the surgical team were well aware of the contributions that Mr. Naki had made to their work. They could have done more to promote his work. Dr. Barnard, for example, was certainly wealthy and influential enough to have paid for and arranged for Mr. Naki to enroll and attend a medical school anywhere in the world outside of South Africa.
What would that have done to
What would that have done to his career, his reputation?
Are you referring to
Are you referring to Barnard's or Naki's career and reputation?
My view is that Barnard's reputation and career would have only been enhanced if he had used his personal contacts, wealth and fame to promote and assist Naki's obvious ability and desire to become a surgeon. I don't think the racist government of South Africa would have lifted a finger against Barnard because it had too much to lose. Barnard, as I recall, was not only the most famous doctor in the world but he was also a world-wide celebrity. A little more charity from him toward Naki would have been nice.
Did you mean that Barnard's
Did you mean that Barnard's standing in the medical profession and scientific world would have been diminished if people had known that a self-taught black man had played a major role in Barnard's success?
A little more charity from
charity!?!? Enlightened self-interest is not charitable or altruistic, at all.
PT, this is the whole point of the Pensinger Work. The culture in which we are embedded is by its very nature de-evolutionary and both individually and in the aggregate incapable of conscious evolution. Don't let the tool-making skills fool you, as the oil runs dry, it'll become acutely apparent just how uncivilized the M0 really is, as if that handwriting were not already plainly evident on the wall.
Naki embodied a whole other order of skill. Barnard knew this, and suppressed it in service to his own egophrenic gluttony, a whole other species of self-interest and the very one which will be this culture's undoing. The great Christian how ironic Barnard, an automatized racist nullity.
Cain and Abel is far more apropo here..., the dopamine addicted hegemon has the mark of Cain upon it and no amount of apology, truth and reconciliation, or gradual social adjustment will suffice to alter its trajectory - by one jot or tiddle..., Noah and Deucalion time been in effect for a while now.
The problem as I see it, CN,
The problem as I see it, CN, is that if I can't to some degree allow for the possibility of someone like Barnard acting with humane regard for the life of someone like Naki then I am forced, at least from a logical point of view, to deny that Barnard had the capacity and freedom to act in a charitable and loving manner. It may true as you seem to suggest that Barnard's behavior and range of actions were severely circumscribed because of his own adherence to and participation in a culture and society that steadily eroded his capacities for sympathy and empathy.
As a result, Barnard obviously allowed his own egoistic needs to reign supreme over any other feelings that he may have had. My problem is that my own experiences and observations allow me to believe that folks can always act differently from what they have been led or taught to believe is in their self-interest. The rate of change may be small and it may be nearly glacial in pace but people can change. If they don't, however, they should be held accountable for their actions or lack thereof.
I only agree with Pensinger's work in part. Large and significant aspects of this culture are, to employ your term, "de-evolutionary" but all of us, perhaps because we are human, have the capacity to resist this pull. We may not succeed in arresting and halting this process. Claude Levi-Strauss once suggested that entropy may be the overarching law of the universe and that human beings may just be a transitory phase in this great unraveling that we are viewing.
I can't help but feeling, however, that whenever I listen to, for example, John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Roy Haynes playing "My Favorite Things" on a stage in Newport that human beings have an enormous capacity for wringing great and lasting beauty out of a world bounded by pain, sorrow, anger and selfish egotism. The "dopamine addicted hegemon" may ultimately triumph over all of us but it is important, I believe, that we leave signposts telling others that we were here and that we resisted the inexorable flow of the darkness. And that we did so because we were fully alive and understood what it meant to be human.
The problem as I see it, CN,
Glimpses of objective fact are nearly always troubling. Barnard was as subhuman as the apartheid culture which bred him. He has died like a dog, and human potential that he unconsciously and automatically disserved, is left with the immense unfunded debit that his personal sins accrued.
Think about what else racism made us miss..,
Really?
The dopamine addicted hegemon will go the way of all its ilk and die, shockingly soon I believe and with Ozymandian ignobility. You would be terribly hard-pressed to find anyone with even the barest inkling of what Egyptian music sounded like..., or for that matter, that could tell you what the meaning and aim of Ozymandian culture was - even from the permanent books it left - for precisely this instructive purpose.
I digress..., (^;
Because we rarely look
Because we rarely look beyond our own immediate needs and wants, antecedents of our self-defeat are found in virtually every aspect of human activity. Our rudimentary abstract thought (a) allows us to invent, fabricate, and apply tools, but does not require us to use these tools wisely; (b) allows us to conceptualize healthy government and ecologically sound economies, but does not force us to apply these notions; and (c) allows us to create scientific models of high predictive value, but does not oblige us to apply these to prevent our own demise. Indeed, our political leaders resolutely culture scientific illiteracy--theirs and ours.
This species is not wise.
"Glimpses of objective fact
"Glimpses of objective fact are nearly always troubling. Barnard was as subhuman as the apartheid culture which bred him. He has died like a dog, and human potential that he unconsciously and automatically disserved, is left with the immense unfunded debit that his personal sins accrued."
I don't agree. Barnard was human - all too human. The pity is that he didn't use his life to overcome his shortcomings as a human being. He probably thought that he hed been born to become a surgeon. What he probably never realized was that becoming a world famous surgeon was just a station on his way. If he truly understood his journey he would have done more to assist Naki and resist apartheid.
Yes, eventually everything
Yes, eventually everything runs downhill and even the memories of those who witnessed what once was fades away. In some ways I think we're like the guy in the joke that Woody Allen tells in a voice over at the end of "Annie Hall." The guy tells a psychiatrist that his brother believes that he, the brother, is a chicken. The shrink says that they have to do something to change his brother's mind. The guy says that he would like to but that he needs the eggs. Our lives are bounded by paradoxes.
I don't think the racist
His South African patients would likely have sued. The hospital would have suffered greatly ("They let kaffirs cut you open!")
And I don't think he was actively, or even passively, evil for not speaking up sooner. I think he was obeying both de facto and de jure law, just as any good citizen would.
On a related and happier
On a related and happier note, here's a story about Nigerian surgeon Mamitu Gashe.
I think he was obeying both
There you have it - a dog f'sho!!!
Luke 16.13 No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon." 16.14 The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they scoffed at him. 16.15 But he said to them, "You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts; for what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.
Yes, all of that was all too
Yes, all of that was all too possible, but Naki could have been a doctor in another African country and trained scores of other blacks to be surgeons. Barnard only got part of his mission here right. He missed the biggest part.
What is required of a man is
What is required of a man is vastly more demanding than what is required of a dog...,
Luke 16.1 He also said to the disciples, "There was a rich man who had a steward, and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his goods. 16.2 And he called him and said to him, 'What is this that I hear about you? Turn in the account of your stewardship, for you can no longer be steward.' 16.3 And the steward said to himself, 'What shall I do, since my master is taking the stewardship away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. 16.4 I have decided what to do, so that people may receive me into their houses when I am put out of the stewardship.' 16.5 So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he said to the first, 'How much do you owe my master?' 16.6 He said, 'A hundred measures of oil.' And he said to him, 'Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.' 16.7 Then he said to another, 'And how much do you owe?' He said, 'A hundred measures of wheat.' He said to him, 'Take your bill, and write eighty.' 16.8 The master commended the dishonest steward for his shrewdness; for the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. 16.9 And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal habitations. 16.10 " He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and he who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. 16.11 If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will entrust to you the true riches? 16.12 And if you have not been faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own?
Quaker:Beat ya!PT:Yeah. I
Quaker:
Beat ya!
PT:
Yeah. I love that they weren't absolutely blinded to the man's capabilities. I hate that they hoarded it to themselves...didn't even give him the benefit of it, for the most part.
cnulan, I'm going to have to check some context...I find that "unrighteous mammon" thing a bit disturbing for some reason. Mammon isn't my favorite diety, and "unrighteous" seems like the wrong direction...
I find that "unrighteous
heh, heh, heh..., many of the good crunchy bits come oddly packaged like this one.
You know what? That's a
You know what? That's a fucked up piece of scripture.
It says:
This has Jesus saying, buy some friends.
I can't tell you who "they" are if not "the sons of this world," at which point I can't explain how "they" are delivering these eternal habitations.
There's an error in the line of transmission here, and it goes back to the Greek...I have Strong's Hebrew and Greek dictionary, and the Interlinear Bible, which matches the KJV text to original Anglicized text.
My read of the story was the
My read of the story was the same. I was trying to figure out what CN meant and after awhile I gave up. CN, what were you trying to say by quoting that section of the Bible? I missed your point.
You know what? That's a
It's actually THE crunchiest bit in the gospels..,
Exoterically, it's rather simple if you read through the exigetical verses 13-15. Esoterically, and it's not cued up like other esoteric passages, it pivots on the use of the terms pistis and phronimos.
Pistis, typically translated as faith means more than belief. It means a different order of thinking Matthew 16: 5-12 would illustrate this;
The disciples had taken something said by Christ in its sensual meaning, according to the literal sense of the words. Christ told them that this was a sign that they had little faith. Faith is thus not a question of belief, in this case, faith means understanding on a level other than literal understanding. The leaven spoken of was not literal leaven nor was bread literal bread but instead, falsity infecting goodness.
Pharisees and Sadducees can be compared with Murkans or Afrikaners.., quite capable of being good citizens in the de facto and de jure sense of goodness, fundamentally, however, hypocrites incapable of full human-ness due to lack of empathy and selflessness. Their inability to see what is obvious to you, to me, to PT, and others, is a form of psychological blindness.
I haven't forgotten about phronimos..., It's just that it's important to understand fully and completely about pistis because this different order of thinking is necessary to open a part of the mind not opened by the senses or by reason - oh, and yeah, a mind not so opened - might indeed get to live like a king, but be assured that it is already duppy dead and certain to die exactly like a dog....,
From my references (biased
From my references (biased to European Christianity...Strong's is one of those classic references) the phrase "oh ye of little faith" is a single word in Greek: oligopistos, which means incredulous. But it's a compound word and pistis is in there.
KJV is the various ways the word is translated in KJV...unfortunately my software can't find every instance of a Greek term so I can't go sanity-check them.
Anyway, I'm not thrilled with this understanding either, because the problem wasn't that they didn't have faith,it was that they didn't understand the words Jesus said directly to their faces.
Can't search for Greek terms but I can dig into the etymology of the terms in front of me... seems pistis is derived from peitho:
And since the other part of the compound word, oligos, means of uncertain affinity; puny, I actually get the feeling the term means something along the lines of osteocephalic. I can picture Jesus slapping someone upside the head as he said it...
That said...I'm working with you for the moment because it's sure going to take a different order of thinking to get me to see this piece of scripture as something other than a tramsmission error. And I'm waiting for you because I can't see phronimos in the cited verses of Luke and finding a conjugation of a word in a language I don't speak is a non-starter.
So carry on...
The steward is called shrewd
The steward is called shrewd or wise and the word used here is important to understand, phronimos. It means having presence of mind, being practical and quick at conscious discernment.
In Matthew 25, the parable of the ten virgins, five virgins were phronimoi and five virgins were morai (ahem, a root of the modern word moron...,) Phronimos appears many times in the Gospels, always with an essential psychological meaning. It is a pronounced cue for esoteric meaning.
Phronimos is quite distinct from sophos also used repeatedly in the gospels, but with a comparatively derogatory meaning. Phronimos equals the afrofuturistic coinage, Hz....,
If a man knows better, but acts worse, (Christian Barnard), he owes himself, that is, he is in debt to his better nature and his better understanding. There are many parables about owing and about debt..., the Lord's Prayer is about debt..,
I will gladly explain this peculiarly crunchy parable more completely - if you like - tomorrow, however, it would perhaps be more useful if you skimmed other familiar parables in the light of what I've told you about pistis and phronimos to see for yourself whether a scheme of meaning strikingly different from the conventional meaning ascribed to these parables emerges.
to rely (by inward
yes...,
quite right!
There has never been a more ruthless psychological insurgency than the one sparsely documented in the gospels..., PT was tilting toward the conventional, sentimental understanding - sifting for a humanity in Barnard that authentic Christianity would simply and flatly deny.
btw - there is no transmission error in the parable of the unjust steward...,
 Yup, it was conjugated.
Yup, it was conjugated.
Still not feelin' it. Still a really fucked up piece of scripture.
And seriously, phronimos as Hz is like explaining one jargon in terms of another. One or the other should be brought in the common tongue.
sifting for a humanity in
Authentic...
I'm reminded of a verse fron The Diamond Cutter Sutra that goes something like "the religion of the Buddha is not Buddha-religion."
I'm not touching the humanity thing. I understand you're using it relative to "being human" the way "be a man" is used relative to "be an adult male human." {edited to get a semblance of clarity)
"PT was tilting toward the
"PT was tilting toward the conventional, sentimental understanding - sifting for a humanity in Barnard that authentic Christianity would simply and flatly deny."
You've lost me. "Authentic Christianity" would deny that Barnard was human and, therefore, lacked the capacity to act differently than the way he did act toward Naki? If my understanding of your point is correct, then when or how did Barnard lose the capacity to act in a more humane and charitable manner regarding Naki? Why would my assumption that Barnard had the capacity to act different be considered a "conventional, sentimental understanding" of what some Christians would call free will?
I'm not touching the
While it is correct that I'm using it in an unfamiliar way, your semblance of clarity misses the mark*. (the word translated as sin means in the literal Greek, "missing the mark")
humanity is the possibility of psychological evolution. Without pistis, this possibility is closed. Absent said possibility, one is considered dead. This designation dead should be familiar to you from the equally crunchy bit at Matthew 8:22..,
phronimos combined with pistis gives the possibility of epiphany and the accumulation or stewardship of real treasures, will, soul, what is essential and therefore pleasing to God.
In everyone, there is a cultivated side, a persona (mask), which in its highest and best expression may seek the truth. It is composed of material which is not your own. Whatever you do from this side, is bound to miss the mark.
OTOH, there is an essential side, undeveloped in most people, utterly neglected in this culture, and therefore not even known to exist by most. At its best, it is alive, active, and seeks the good.
Barnard, as a good Afrikaner - even provided full benefit of the doubt given his treatment of Mr. Naki - could at most be understood to be a Pharisee...,
"Barnard, as a good
"Barnard, as a good Afrikaner - even provided full benefit of the doubt given his treatment of Mr. Naki - could at most be understood to be a Pharisee...,"
My view about Barnard may be considered somewhat mystical but I think that he made a mistake that so many of us do because he misunderstood the nature of his calling. He thought that it was his destiny to become a world reknowned surgeon, but I would argue that this was only a portion of his fate. His real destiny and the point of his gift as a scientist and a surgeon was to use his influence, wealth and skills to assist Naki and others like him to become doctors and to resist apartheid. I find it difficult to accept, given my own views which are certainly not Christian or religious in any conventional meaning, that it was just a matter of happenstance that Naki and Barnard met and began working together. I believe that they were fated to meet and that Barnard was too blind to see why. I have no desire or need to excuse Barnard for his poor treatment of Naki and his failure to resist apartheid. He lost his way.
"The moral of this story,
the moral of this song
is simply that one should never be
where one does not belong.
"So when you see your neighbor
carrying something
Help him with his load
And don't go mistaking paradise
for that home across the road."
I am with all of that. Maybe
CN, I am with all of that.
Maybe it's me, but it seems a lot of this stuff is apparent from simple inspection. One just has to get about doing it.
I've said what the text of those verses say. The best lesson I can see in there is tactical: master the rules of the game as it is actually played. That puts an interesting spin of the old "render unto Caesar" thing.
I find it difficult to
blind, dead, missing the mark (lost) Barnard undoubtedly mistook that home across the road for paradise...,
if one had possession of will, a soul, the eyes to see, ears to hear, then what you have referred to as happenstance or fate would be a real and present hunk of the panem nostrem supersubstantialem for which we were taught to pray..., (:
Anyway, I'm not thrilled
This is absolutely correct. The disciples did not understand the words Jesus said directly to their faces, nor did many in the early church precisely because they did not have faith..., LOL!!!
Ah the other downfall..., phronimos ain't easy. The early church divided schismatically precisely along the lines of them what's got and could get, and them what's not, and must lose..., the latter becoming the decadent and sentimental state religion of Rome, the former remaining as an extraordinarily stringent psychological praxis mostly unknown outside three orthodox synods..., Coptic, Syraic, and Armenian...,
Distinct tactical pathways are identified and conflated in these crunchiest of verses..., the singular usage "unrighteousness mammon" is the telltale touch point fusing exoteric and esoteric meanings. Unrighteous mammon signifies the least of things, both psychological and sensual, it is the break beat between worlds...,
The gospels are a patchwork of anecdotal examples of Jesus Dubbing the psychological and sensual among his closest followers, in the world, but not of the world, constantly testing the posture of his students, pressing them to participate fully in the uncreated energies which can only be studied by pistis, cultivated by phronimos (in the moment) and exemplified in practice by eyes to see and ears to hear.
Not your garden variety Jesus loves me this I know variation on gospel themes.., closer by far to Professor Charles Xavier exhorting the X-Men to something extraordinary, or DJ Kool Herc signifying in the moment for the masses...,
Ponder it in your heart, and you will recognize that this praxis is VASTLY more consistent with what's actually depicted in the gospel text itself, than ANY of the sentimental nonsense we've been taught about Christian religion our entire lives.