Dr. Michael DeBakey added another “first” to his list of accomplishments with a successful coronary artery bypass in a Houston hospital on Nov. 23, 1964.
But the Lake Charles, Louisiana native would not have the surgical world all to himself for long. Dr. Denton Cooley, estranged protégé turned world acclaimed rival, would perform the first implant of a human heart on American soil three and a half years later.
Cooley was born in Houston in 1920. His father was a dentist whose thriving practice and real estate investments guaranteed the “good life” for the family during the Depression. At home, however, the elder Cooley was an abusive alcoholic who ultimately drank himself to death as would Denton’s older brother.
Denton Cooley was a brilliant student and a gifted athlete. A three-year letterman on the University of Texas basketball team, he also excelled in the classroom as a pre-dental major and later in pre-med.
Graduating in 1941, Cooley took his first step toward becoming an M.D. at the UT Medical Branch in Galveston. He went on to receive his degree and surgical training at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, where he also did his internship.
Drafted into the Army Medical Corps in 1946, the young doctor spent two years as chief of staff at a military hospital in Austria. After that he picked up where he had left off at Johns Hopkins, finishing his residency and staying on as an instructor in surgery.
By the early 1950s, Cooley was back in his hometown and working as associate professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine. Later that decade, he joined Dr. Michael DeBakey’s team as one of the chosen few picked to provide operating room support for the most celebrated surgeon in the country.
The two physicians rubbed each other the wrong way from the start. Known for harsh treatment of subordinates, DeBakey seemed to go out of his way to find fault with the talented Texan. He objected to Cooley’s brash, risk-taking philosophy based in part on the stories the younger man told about himself such as the time he operated on a complex skull fracture with only a textbook and no one other than the patient in the room.
Cooley moved his practice to St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in 1960 but retained his position on the Baylor faculty. Two years later, he further distanced himself from DeBakey by founding The Texas Heart Institute with private money.
In 1961 an Argentine doctor named Domingo Liotta came to Houston seeking help in developing his working model of an artificial heart. He was hired by DeBakey to perfect his revolutionary invention or so he was led to believe. Instead, DeBakey assigned him to a different project and ignored his protests.
In frustration Liotta turned to Cooley. In a matter of months, the two doctors and a Rice University engineer redesigned the device, tested it on seven calves and declared it “ready for human use in a desperate situation.”
Dr. Cooley was confronted by such dire circumstances on Apr. 4, 1969, when his attempt to remove a big piece of Haskell Karp’s diseased heart failed.
“Was I going to let Mr. Karp die on the operating table or try to save his life by whatever means?” Cooley wrote in 100,000 Hearts, his autobiography published in 2011. “I decided to proceed with implanting the total artificial heart.”
Cooley’s controversial action, which led to a complete break with DeBakey and his resignation from Baylor, bought the 47-year-old patient three more days and a donated heart. Karp lived another three days before succumbing to pneumonia.
DeBakey accused his former underling of stealing the artificial heart for the sole purpose of being the first to implant it in a human subject. “I didn’t steal a thing,” wrote Cooley. “But he made it seem like that. He organized the whole sort of attack on me with the aid of his two sisters and his publicists.”
Cooley claimed he tried again and again to reach DeBakey by phone, but he did not take his calls. “He would not speak to me for nearly 40 years. If we happened to attend the same medical meeting, he would act as if I didn’t exist.”
Finally, in 2007 the two old warriors (DeBakey was 99 and Cooley 87) buried the proverbial hatchet – kind of. DeBakey showed up in person to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society. It was a sight few if any of those present thought they would live to see.
But DeBakey had to have the last word. A few weeks after the presentation, he told a reporter that Cooley “disappointed me with his ethics” and his “poor judgment” in the artificial heart affair. Cooley stood his ground saying simply his actions were “justified.”
A lawyer once asked Dr. Denton Cooley if he considered himself the best heart surgeon in the world.
“Yes,” was his answer.
“Don’t you think that’s being rather immodest?”
“Perhaps,” the doctor conceded. “But remember I am under oath.”
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