Denton A. Cooley, August 22, 1920 to November 18, 2016

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Dr Denton Arthur Cooley, MD, was an iconic pioneer from the dawn through the explosion of cardiovascular surgery. Along the way, he was a prolific researcher, the inventor of many instruments and procedures, and educated innumerable vascular and thoracic surgeons. His clinical productivity is almost incalculable, having carried out over 140,000 cardiovascular and vascular procedures, all with humor and a quick wit, sometimes very appropriately referred to as a surgical athlete. He was a humanitarian of the first order, and the number of lives that he saved and impacted is beyond calculation.—Dr Joseph S. Coselli, Baylor College of Medicine, December 2016Denton A. Cooley will always be remembered as perhaps the finest technical cardiac and vascular surgeon at the modern dawn of these two specialties. A native of Houston, Texas, whose grandfather was a real estate developer and father a dentist, Dr Cooley attended the University of Texas in Austin. At 6 feet 4 inches tall, he played basketball for the Longhorns as a forward and sometimes center. His zoology major led to medical school at the University of Texas, Galveston and to a transfer to Johns Hopkins to complete his medical degree in 1944. This began his relationship with Alfred Blalock, Chairman of Surgery at Hopkins, who Dr Cooley considered one of his primary surgical mentors. As a surgical trainee at Hopkins, Dr Cooley said he was “an intern down at the foot of the table” when Dr Blalock performed the first “blue baby” operation in November 1944. After 2 years in the military, Dr Cooley returned to Johns Hopkins to complete his surgical residency in 1950. He then spent 1 year in London with Russell Brock, who he described as the most prominent thoracic surgeon in the United Kingdom. In 1951, Dr Cooley returned to his hometown of Houston to be an associate professor of surgery at the Baylor College of Medicine and to work at Methodist Hospital with Dr Michael DeBakey. There followed collaboration with early fundamental work on cardiopulmonary bypass, artificial cardiac valve surgery, aortic surgery, and coronary artery bypass grafting. Dr Cooley moved his practice to St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in 1960 and founded the Texas Heart Institute in 1962. In 1969, Dr Cooley is credited with implanting the first artificial heart, which functioned for 3 days and was followed by a heart transplant. This led to a decades-long dispute with Dr DeBakey, who had been the principal investigator of the implantable heart. The two surgeons reconciled their differences publicly in 2007 when Dr DeBakey was 99 years old and Dr Cooley 87. Dr Cooley is credited with the first successful heart transplantation in the United States. He also performed congenital heart surgery regularly. His experience with aortocoronary bypass and valve surgery is unparalleled, as outlined in his recent autobiography, 100,000 Hearts–A Surgeon's Memoir.1Cooley D.A. 100,000 hearts: a surgeon's memoir. Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Austin, TX2012Google Scholar He also estimated that about 20% of his practice was aortic and other vascular surgery. A 1986 atlas of aortic surgery, which he authored,2Cooley D.A. Surgical treatment of aortic aneurysms. W.B. Saunders Co, Philadelphia1986Crossref Google Scholar remains to this day an outstanding reference for this work. Dr Cooley received many awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan in 1984 and the Renee Leriche Prize in 1967 as the “most valuable surgeon of the heart and blood vessels anywhere in the world.” Married for 67 years, he wed Louise Thomas, RN, in 1949 in Baltimore, where she was a head nurse at Johns Hopkins. Mrs Cooley died on October 21, 2016. The couple raised five daughters. Throughout his life, he played tennis and golf and he also played the double bass in a swing band. Denton A. Cooley died at home November 18, 2016 at the age of 96.