RIP: Heart Surgeon Denton Cooley dies at 96

Dr. Denton Cooley, famed Houston heart surgeon, dead at 96

Dr. Denton Arthur Cooley, legendary founder of the Texas Heart Institute and arguably the most gifted heart surgeon of his time, has died. He was 96.

Over four decades, Cooley performed an estimated 65,000 open-heart surgeries at the institute, drawing patients from around the globe. At one time, his team was handling a tenth of all such operations in the United States.

Cooley’s surgeries included two particularly noteworthy ones – in 1968, the first transplant of a human heart in which the patient lived more than a few weeks; and in 1969, the first implantation of a mechanical heart. The latter, a Kitty Hawk-type of advance, set in motion one of Houston’s signature stories, a rift with Michael E. DeBakey immortalized in a Life cover story as The Feud.

“At the height of his career, he was probably the best known heart surgeon in the world,” said Dr. David Cooper, a professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Open Heart: The Radical Surgeons who Revolutionized Medicine.”

Cooley stood above other surgeons because of his speed and technical prowess, a combination once described as “Woolworth volume and Tiffany quality.”

At the beginning of his career, the device that keeps patients alive during cardiac surgery — the heart-lung machine — was still in its infancy, a crude instrument that gave surgeons little time to complete an operation. Cooley performed with such precision that he demonstrated procedures such as bypasses could be safely done. He was among a small group of doctors who ushered heart surgery from a niche field into mainstream medicine.

"I was talking to a pilot friend of mine one time — he flew 747s — about Charles Lindbergh," said O.H. "Bud" Frazier, another pioneer of heart surgery at the Texas Heart Institute. "My friend said there's not a pilot alive today that could fly the Spirit of St. Louis by dead reckoning. Dr. Cooley is sort of the same way. There's not a surgeon alive today that could do what he could do."

Cooley was a native Houstonian, who would witness the city’s transformation from a provincial afterthought, known for its proximity to oil fields and refineries, to a metropolis famous not only as a world energy center but as a destination for cutting-edge medicine.

He was born on Aug. 12, 1920, to Ralph Clarkson Cooley and Mary Fraley Cooley, whose families were long established in Houston. A grandfather had helped found the Houston Heights neighborhood in 1890, and his father was a prominent dentist. The physician who delivered Cooley was Dr. Ernst William Bertner, who would later found the Texas Medical Center.

After graduating from San Jacinto High School, Cooley attended the University of Texas on a basketball scholarship. There, he was a three-year letterman and part of a team that won the Southwest Conference in 1939. Even late in life, he fondly recalled his playing days at Texas, and in 2003, the university opened the Denton A. Cooley Pavilion next to its basketball arena, a place for the men’s and women’s teams to practice.

Rick Barnes, the Texas basketball coach at the time, once invited Cooley to speak with his players. What stood out to Barnes was Cooley’s humor and the stunning trajectory of his life.

“There have been basketball players that have come through UT that have done more for the sport,” Barnes said. “But when you look at his contributions to society, it’s really quite astonishing.”

Cooley majored in zoology, graduating in 1941 with honors, then entered medical school at the UT Medical Branch at Galveston. He later transferred to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and graduated at the top of his class.

During postgraduate training, in 1944, he had an opportunity to assist Dr. Alfred Blalock with the first “blue baby” operation, a procedure to treat a small child with a congenital heart problem that robs the blood of oxygen. This was, in many ways, the dawn of heart surgery.

A few years later, he met and married Louise Goldsborough Thomas, a registered nurse at Johns Hopkins. Their first child, Mary, was born in 1950. The couple would go on to have four more daughters.

“He’s enormously proud to have had a very long married life, had five children and, lots of grand and great-grandchildren,” said Dr. Charles Fraser Jr., cardiac surgeon-in-chief at Texas Children’s Hospital. Fraser married Cooley’s youngest, Helen, and as both a heart doctor and his son-in-law, came to know him well.

“I think everybody in the family realizes that he sacrificed for many, and they sacrificed for many,” Fraser said. “My wife didn’t get to see her dad a lot, because she was daughter number five, and by the time she came around, he was super famous. But she has enormous respect for him.”

Among Helen’s highlights: meeting the pope and Presidents Reagan and Clinton when her father received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and National Medal of Technology, respectively.

http://www.chron.com/news/health/article/Denton-Cooley-renowed-heart-surgeon-dead-at-96-10622963.php
In the next six years, the pillars of Cooley’s life were set into place.