Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

Denton A. Cooley, MD

244 Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery Denton A. Cooley, MD (b. 1920) If young people want to go into a profession that will give them the most reward, spiritual reward I will say, not necessarily financial reward, they should go into medicine. — On the future of medicine Interviewed May 4, 1997 I am a native Texan, born in Houston in 1920. My grandparents moved to Houston in 1885 when my father was three years old. My father graduated from the Texas Dental College in Houston when he was nineteen years old and practiced dentistry in Houston for forty-five to fifty years, becoming very prominent. He and my mother had two children: my brother, who is sixteen months older, and me. My brother and I were close friends our whole lives until he passed away. I went to public schools in Houston and then went to college at the University of Texas in Austin. I played basketball in high school and in college, and I continued to play basketball and tennis until I was about forty, when I switched to golf. I still play golf with a wonderful group of other senior cardiac surgeons. There are twelve of us, and all are chairmen of a department of cardiothoracic surgery somewhere in the country. We meet once a year and spend about three or four days with a little scientific program, and then we play golf. It’s a wonderful opportunity for us to get together informally. My father had wanted me to follow in his footsteps and become a dentist in order to eventually take over his practice. I went off to college planning to be a predental student , but dentistry really did not interest me much. I had always most admired the physicians and surgeons in our city. I felt as if my father also wished he had gone on to study medicine rather than getting sidetracked into dentistry. At first I didn’t know if I could compete with the better students at a big school like the University of Texas. I soon found out that I could not only compete with them, I could excel. I thought, “Why not go on and do medicine? It is much more intriguing and challenging than dentistry.” I switched to medicine. The first medical school I attended was the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1941, and I was there for two years. There were some political problems and the faculty was in a bit of turmoil, so I applied elsewhere for my junior and senior years. I applied to Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Washington University, Duke, and Pennsylvania . I was accepted at all of these schools except Harvard. In the end I was encouraged by friends to go to Johns Hopkins, and I transferred. It was an accelerated, year-round program with no summer vacations. I knew that a surgical internship would challenge me the most, but I was not sure whether I wanted to do my internship at Johns Hopkins or some other institution. Dr. Blalock encouraged me to do my internship at Hopkins on his service. This turned out to be a very fortunate decision for me, because I had the opportunity to be associated there with a new era in surgery. I was the intern that assisted Dr. Blalock in the first Blue Baby operation in November 1944. Congenital Heart Surgery 245 The patient’s name was Eileen Saxon. Anesthesia was different in those days, and the nurse-anesthetist, Ms. Olive Berger, used cyclopropane , which is not used any more for a number of reasons. We didn’t have an electric cautery. We couldn’t use it in the presence of cyclopropane. Also, we didn’t know whether the blood would clot in a cyanotic child with polycythemia. There were a lot of other things we didn’t know. I remember Dr. Helen Taussig stood at the head of the table behind Ms. Berger, the nurse-anesthetist, and Vivien Thomas, the man who worked in the lab, was also there. Dr. Blalock had brought Vivien Thomas from Vanderbilt to work at Johns Hopkins. Vivien stood behind Dr. Blalock at the table, and Dr. Blalock would ask Vivien questions over his shoulder. He would say, “Vivien, should I do it this way or that way?” Vivien would know the answers as he was used to having those kinds of questions put to him. That was Dr. Blalock’s way of getting everybody involved in the whole process. He...