Denton Cooley

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Denton Cooley with a medical student (2015)

Denton Arthur Cooley (born August 22, 1920 in Houston , Texas , † November 18, 2016 there ) was an American heart surgeon .

Life

Cooley studied zoology at the University of Texas (graduated in 1941) before studying medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (MD 1944 at the Johns Hopkins). During his internship at Johns Hopkins, he assisted Alfred Blalock in one of his pioneering operations on cyanotic congenital heart disease in young children, whereupon he decided to become a cardiac surgeon. The operative connection between the ascending aorta and the right pulmonary artery was later named after him as the Cooley-Waterston anastomosis . From 1946 to 1948 he did his military service with the Army Medical Corps in Linz , where he was in charge of surgery.

In 1950, after completing his specialist training, he went to London to study with the heart surgeon Lord Russell Brock . From 1951 he was back in Houston as an associate professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine . Here his collaboration with Michael Ellis DeBakey began , with whom he developed, for example, techniques for removing aneurysms and the use of the heart-lung machine in heart operations, which was successfully used by Cooley in 1955 at the Methodist's Hospital. In 1962 he founded the privately run Texas Heart Institute. In 1969 he switched entirely from his professorship at Baylor College to St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in Houston, where he had been a surgeon from Methodist's Hospital, where DeBakey was, since 1960. The Texas Heart Institute was also later located at St. Luke's. Over 100,000 open heart surgeries were performed there under the direction of Cooley, making the institute one of the leading such centers worldwide.

On May 3, 1968, he performed his first heart transplant, which was more successful than that of his predecessors, the patient survived 204 days. The following year he performed 22 heart transplants.

He has authored and co-authored over 1,300 scientific articles and 13 books.

During his career, he found himself in animosity-ridden professional competition with cardiac surgeon DeBakey for many decades, having previously worked closely in Houston. That was also the subject of the title of Life magazine . They officially buried their rivalry in 2007 when the Cardiovascular Surgical Society of Cooley presented a Lifetime Achievement Award to 99-year-old DeBakey.

Denton's Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Foundation was established in 1972.

While DeBakey hesitated to transplant an artificial heart into a human in the mid-1960s, Cooley was the first to transplant an artificial heart designed by Domingo Liotta from DeBakey's laboratory into a human in 1969 ; The patient was Haskell Karp. Cooley thus bridged 65 hours until the patient, who had previously been in critical condition, received a human heart transplant; however, he only survived this procedure for 36 hours. DeBakey was upset about the use of an artificial heart from his laboratory without consulting him, and an open rupture occurred between the two. DeBakey called Cooley's practice "unethical," and an investigation was conducted by Baylor College and the National Institutes of Health , which funded the research on the artificial heart. Cooley ended up leaving college primarily for this reason.

In 1988 he filed for bankruptcy due to failed property speculation and falling property prices during a bear market . As a student, his hobbies included basketball, later golf, and from the mid-1960s to the 1970s he played bass in a swing band called Heartbeats .

Cooley received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Technology , the René Leriche Prize from the International Surgical Society (1967), and the National Medal of Technology. The United States Sports Academy in Daphne awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1987 .

Anecdotes

When asked by a lawyer in court whether he considered himself the best heart surgeon in the world, he agreed. When asked if that wasn't a bit immodest, he replied: “Maybe, but remember that I am under oath”.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Pioneering US heart surgeon Denton Cooley dies at 96 . Reuters message from GulfNews.com , November 19, 2016, accessed November 20, 2016.
  2. ↑ With the Blalock-Taussig anastomosis , first used in so-called "blue babies" in 1944, blue discoloration, cyanosis due to poor blood circulation in the lungs.
  3. ↑ Reinhard Larsen: Anesthesia and intensive medicine in cardiac, thoracic and vascular surgery. (1st edition 1986) 5th edition. Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York et al. 1999, ISBN 3-540-65024-5 , p. 342.
  4. ↑ Todd Ackerman: Legendary heart surgeons DeBakey, Cooley mend rift . Houston Chronicle , November 6, 2007, accessed November 20, 2016 (for the DeBakey and Cooley contest).
  5. ^ A b Lawrence K. Altman: The Feud . New York Times , November 27, 2007, accessed November 20, 2016.
  6. ^ Honorary Doctorates: Awards of Sport. United States Sports Academy, archived from the original on May 4, 2014 ; accessed on November 20, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Cooley, Denton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cooley, Denton A .; Cooley, Denton Arthur (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American surgeon
DATE OF BIRTH 22nd August 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Houston , Texas
DATE OF DEATH 18th November 2016
Place of death Houston , Texas