Harry Windsor (surgeon)

Henry Matthew John Windsor, known as Harry, was an Irish-born Australian cardiac surgeon who lived from 27 October 1914 to 20 March 1987. Born in Cork to Irish parents, he moved to Australia with his mother in 1916 and met his father, a physician and ship's surgeon, only when he was sixteen. He studied at the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney, graduating in medicine in 1939, and trained as a resident at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney. In the Second World War he served as a doctor with the Australian Army Medical Corps and the Australian Imperial Force, mostly in New Guinea, and his wartime experience turned him towards thoracic surgery. After further training in England he returned to St Vincent's, where by 1950 he had built a specialist thoracic surgery department. With his protégés Victor Chang and Mark Shanahan he pioneered cardiac valve surgery, surgery under hypothermia, valve replacement and coronary artery grafting in Australia, and in 1968 he carried out the country's first heart transplant. His patient survived six weeks.