Obituary: Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes

Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes

Heart surgeon. Died aged 82.

Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes earned international acclaim as a pioneering heart surgeon. His career covered a span in which the progress made in heart surgery by the medical profession was remarkable.

But his work also involved many bureaucratic battles to get enough money and staff to do such work in days when, he observed, "New Zealand has the rather dubious position of leading the world in the incidence of heart disease." In 1969 some 52 per cent of all New Zealand deaths were from heart disease.

Barratt-Boyes was a also a man who battled to give up smoking. And, brilliant surgeon that he was, he managed to deny the signs for some years that he was developing heart trouble himself.

But his achievements were formidable. In 1965, he led a team at Green Lane Hospital that carried out what was described as the first successful heart operation in New Zealand to give a 3-year-old boy a new lease of life.

The boy was a "blue baby," then a regrettably familiar term for children physically retarded by a heart fault. The surgeons inserted a piece of tissue into his heart that channelled oxygen-charged blood onto its proper course instead of being short-circuited back to the lungs.

In 1967 Barratt-Boyes suggested in a lecture that most varieties of congenital heart disease could be corrected by surgery. He also spoke of future progress including the expanded use of transplanted human heart valves and the development of techniques of transplanting the whole heart - five months before the world's first transplant.

New Zealand's first heart transplant at Green Lane was still 20 years away with many questions over problems like rejection and, not least, money to be overcome.

By then Barratt-Boyes, who went into private practice in 1966, was approaching the end of his surgical career. He had been awarded a CBE and had been described as one of the leading heart surgeons in the world.

Achievements included performing New Zealand's first cardiopulmonary bypass (1958), introducing aortic valve replacement (1982) and pioneering a now standard procedure of lowering the temperature of babies during heart surgery (1985).

He was knighted (KBE) for his achievements in 1971.

Ken Graham, as a trainee surgeon in 1958, found his mentor kindly but "slightly demanding".

"You can't achieve the things he has achieved in his lifetime by being completely relaxed."

When it came to resources, Barratt-Boyes was seldom less than blunt.

In 1971 he told a hospital boards' conference that the cardio-thoracic unit at Green Lane was only doing half the work that could be done if it was adequately staffed. The unit, he said, was nearly entirely dependent on postgraduates who came from overseas for additional study.

"Without their help we would have been able to cope with only one-fifth of the work we have been doing."

But there were 990 New Zealand graduates praticising overseas, equal to the output of the Otago Medical School for 10 years.

In 1975, he said patients needing heart surgery were dying because of finance curbs. In 1986, he and Ken Graham said the waiting list for life-saving heart surgery had risen by more than 100 in a year to 358, the vast majority urgent cases.

Educated at Wellington College and Otago University Medical School, Barratt-Boyes' most unexpected challenges in life were his own heart problems. From the Heart, a biography by Donna Chisholm in 1987, revealed that he first had heart pains in Bangkok in 1963. After five years of pain he had to admit he was fooling himself.

Trying to treat himself he kept his secret until 1974 when Green Lane heart surgeon and former colleague Dr Alan Kerr performed an open heart operation known as a coronary artery bypass. It was the first of four operations, the last two weeks ago in Cleveland to replace two valves. He died from complications this week.

Barratt-Boyes was 50 when he had the first operation in 1974. The expertise to which he contributed so much gave him more than 30 years of extra life.

He was married first to Norma Thompson in 1949 and secondly to Sara Monester in 1986. He had five sons by his first marriage.