Officials of Beilinson Hospital, where Israel’s first heart transplant was performed Dec. 5 on Itzhak Sullam, reported today that they had received a number of offers from prospective donors of various parts of their bodies for posthumous use in such surgery. Sullam died from a kidney malfunction without recovering consciousness.
The officials said it appeared that since the Sullam operation, many Israelis had decided that such transplants were a vital part of modern medicine. Meanwhile, Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim, who at first expressed gratitude to the surgeons who did the heart transplant, remarked after learning of Sullam’s death, that “one should not be in a rush on things like this.”
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