Cooley-ed Off

Denton Cooley, the Thomas Kinkade of cardiovascular surgery, has died at the age of 96. Once one of the busiest cardiac surgeons in the country, he would schedule multiple surgeries simultaneously, with junior surgeons beginning each procedure and opening the chest, while Cooley would rush from operating room to operating room for the tricky parts. Cooley performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States in 1968, then jumped the gun and implanted an artificial heart in a patient waiting for a donor heart, despite the fact that the device wasn’t approved. The patient died within 3 days. His boss and mentor Michael DeBakey had been developing an artificial heart, hadn’t authorized his protégé’s surgery and was outraged, arguing it was unethical to experiment on human patients. Cooley contended that his job as a surgeon was to help his patient, not wait for bureaucracy. Oh, and they were both cardiologists with God complexes who wanted to be the first at everything. The men then didn’t speak for 40 years while independently pioneering most of the techniques used to perform heart surgery. Cooley actually considered his greatest contribution to be a method for using a heart-lung machine to ventilate patients during open-heart operations that reduced the amount of transfused blood used during the procedure, reducing the risk for infection. His work with Dr. Moreau to transplant a sheep’s heart into a human was less successful.