Denton Cooley


Denton Arthur Cooley was an American heart and cardiothoracic surgeon famous for performing the first implantation of a total artificial heart. Cooley was also the founder and surgeon in-chief of The Texas Heart Institute, chief of Cardiovascular Surgery at clinical partner Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center, consultant in Cardiovascular Surgery at Texas Children's Hospital and a clinical professor of Surgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

School and early career

Cooley was born August 22, 1920 in Houston and graduated in 1941 from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity and the Texas Cowboys, played on the basketball team, and majored in zoology. He became interested in surgery through several pre-medical classes he attended in college and began his medical education at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He completed his medical degree and his surgical training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, where he also completed his internship. At Johns Hopkins, he worked with Dr. Alfred Blalock and assisted in the first "Blue Baby" procedure to correct an infant's congenital heart defect.
In 1946, Cooley was called to active duty with the Army Medical Corps and served as chief of surgical services at the station hospital in Linz, Austria. He was discharged in 1948 with the rank of captain and returned to complete his residency at Johns Hopkins, where he remained as an instructor in surgery. In 1950, he went to London to work with Russell Brock.

Major career events

In the 1950s, Cooley returned to Houston to become associate professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine and to work at its affiliate institution, The Methodist Hospital. Cooley began working with American cardiac surgeon, scientist, and medical educator Michael E. DeBakey. During this time, he worked on developing a new method of removing aortic aneurysms, the bulging weak spots that may develop in the wall of the artery.
In 1960, Cooley moved his practice to St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital while continuing to teach at Baylor. In 1962, he founded The Texas Heart Institute with private funds and, following a dispute with DeBakey, resigned his position at Baylor in 1969.
His skill as a surgeon was demonstrated by successfully performing numerous bloodless open-heart surgeries on Jehovah's Witnesses patients beginning in the early 1960s.
He and his colleagues worked on developing new artificial heart valves from 1962 to 1967. During that period, mortality for heart valve transplants fell from 70% to 8%. In 1969, he became the first heart surgeon to implant an artificial heart designed by Domingo Liotta in a man, Haskell Karp, who lived for 65 hours. The next year, in 1970, "he performed the first implantation of an artificial heart in a human when no heart replacement was immediately available."

Personal life

Cooley's interests included basketball, which he played in high school and as a three-year letterman for the UT men's basketball team, and golf, which he became interested in during his youth and played for 68 years. The practice and training facility of the UT men's and women's basketball teams, the Denton A. Cooley Pavilion, which opened in 2003, was named in his honor. Among his other outside interests, Cooley played upright bass in a swing band called The Heartbeats from 1965 through the early 1970s.
On March 13, 1972, the Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society was founded at the Texas Heart Institute by the Residents and Fellows of Cooley to honor him. Founding President Philip S. Chua had envisioned this exclusive society to foster academic, professional, and personal camaraderie among cardiac surgeons in the United States and around the world through scientific seminars and symposia. There are now more than 900 cardiac surgeons from more than 50 countries around the globe who are members of the Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society. In the HBO film Something the Lord Made, Cooley was portrayed by Timothy J. Scanlin, Jr.
Cooley reportedly answered in the affirmative when a lawyer during a trial asked him if he considered himself to be the best heart surgeon in the world. "Don't you think that's being rather immodest?” the lawyer replied. "Perhaps," Cooley responded. "But remember I'm under oath."
Cooley filed for bankruptcy in 1988, citing real estate debts during a market downturn.
During the 2000 U.S. presidential election, Cooley was asked by then-candidate George W. Bush to review vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney's medical records, particularly concerning the status of his chronic heart condition.
Cooley and the heart surgeon Michael E. DeBakey had a professional rivalry that lasted more than 40 years. They made amends in a public rapprochement on November 7, 2007, when DeBakey was 99 years old. Cooley died on November 18, 2016, at the age of 96.

Honors and awards