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May 3, 1968: Houston's first heart transplant

http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/daybyday/05-03-003.html

On this day in 1968, surgeon Denton Cooley and his associates at
Houston's St. Luke's Hospital performed the first heart transplant in
the United States.

The patient, Everett Thomas, lived for 204 days with the heart donated
from a fifteen-year-old girl. Texas physicians and scientists made
numerous contributions to the field of human heart transplantation as
it evolved from preliminary experimentation to an accepted orthodox
therapy for patients with end-stage cardiac disease. Two Houston
surgeons, Cooley and Michael E. DeBakey, have been in the forefront in
developing heart surgery and heart transplantation; their rivalry was
the subject of a book by journalist Tommy Thompson.

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, a total of 26,704
heart transplantations had been reported worldwide by the mid-1990s,
and 1,804 of these were performed in Texas. Worldwide, just over 3,000
heart transplants are performed each year. In 1994, 167 of these were
in Texas.