Dr. Denton Cooley with a medical student in 2015

Denton Cooley, the Houston surgeon who performed thousands of heart operations

ByMarcus Tolliver

Photo: Cand,med,Egi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Denton Arthur Cooley was born in Houston in 1920 and played basketball at the University of Texas before attending medical school at Johns Hopkins. There he assisted in the first “blue baby” operation, which repaired a heart defect in a child.

After training in London and serving in the Army, he returned to Houston in 1951 to join Michael DeBakey at Baylor.

The Texas Heart Institute

In 1962, Cooley founded the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital. He became known for his speed and skill, performing tens of thousands of heart operations over his career.

In 1968, he performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States. In 1969, he implanted the first total artificial heart in a human, as a bridge to a transplant. The device had been developed in DeBakey’s lab, and the procedure led to a famous feud between the two surgeons that lasted decades. They reconciled in 2007.

Legacy

The Texas Heart Institute, now affiliated with Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, has trained thousands of surgeons and continues to work on artificial hearts and other devices.

Cooley received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Technology. He died in 2016 at age 96. Along with DeBakey, he made Houston one of the world’s centers for heart surgery, and his work made the Texas Medical Center a destination for patients.

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