Denton Cooley

And always having been in school, and so about...

The end of May during my internship, Cooley, who I worked with, Denton Cooley was the chief resident at the time, and Dwight Magoon was an assistant resident on the service.

And Denton came up to me and said, how are you going next year? I said, I don't know.

I haven't applied anyplace yet.

And he said he leaped out of the chair, made a crude drawing of it, went to the office, started tinkering, and within a very short time came up with a tilting disc valve.

That became the Bjork-Shally valve.

He showed the valve to Denton Cooley initially who felt that it did not appeal to him at that time.

And he showed it to Bjork and At that time, Bjork was very experienced in doing aortic valve replacement in small aortas and the problem with the ball valve in that area.

And then I ended up in Houston working for a company.

that was founded by a guy named Dr. Denton Cooley, who did the first heart transplant in the United States.

And what was interesting, it was a large billing department, and they would package cardiothoracic procedures for insurance companies, Medicare, and large employer groups.

So, for example, Shell Oil Company had a contract that

So over the years, our paradigm for the management of these complications has changed in one way and the other.

So the early studies from the late 1960s from Denton Cooley at Texas Heart replacing doing ventricular septal rupture, they clearly recognize it as innate complication of shock.

But that was simply because I think the early patients were all dying, and this was a survival of the fittest, and those were the patients that they then operated on.

And so that really brought up the issue of whether we should wait for patients to have this complication, because a lot of people were dying even before they had surgery.

And so the mortality of the aortic stenosis went down.

But what Rodewald told me, he was at a EETS meeting and Denton Cooley presented 15 patient with stone heart after aortic valve replacement in hypertrophic aortic stenosis, all that.

And Rodewald wanted to say, yes, I have something, and then you have less than 10% mortality.

But he doesn't find a sponsor, so it was not allowed that he go out and present in a short one minute.

Yeah, yeah.

So my first job kind of out of school was really, you know, in the hallowed halls of Texas Heart Institute, you know, where Denton Cooley and, you know, huge, huge names like that that are so important to, you know, the history of kind of cardiac medical technologies in particular were developed.

And I worked for an electrophysiologist by the He's a serial innovator and serial inventor and, you know, worked developing technologies in his lab and really fell in love with the concept of working on a medical device.

I think some of the reason I ended up in med device and not say biotech or or pharma or something else, you know, was I was impatient, you know, impatient to get to impact medicine.

So over the years, our paradigm for the management of these complications has changed in one way and the other.

So the early studies from the late 1960s from Denton Cooley at Texas Heart replacing, doing ventriculoseptal rupture, they clearly recognized it as a late complication of shock, but that was simply because I think the early patients were all dying, and this was a survival of the fittest, and those were the patients that they then operated on.

And so that really brought up the issue of whether we should wait for patients to have this complication because a lot of people were dying even before they had surgery.

And so prior guidelines really recommended immediate correction of a mechanical defect as soon as it was diagnosed.

Then I did my five years of general surgery under Dr. Michael DeBakey.

And I did two years of cardiothoracic under Dr. Denton Cooley.

Then I joined the staff at the Memphis Hospital.

When Dr. DeBakey retired, I became professor and the first chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Baylor.

This is under Reagan.

Uh, Denton Cooley from down in Houston.

Yep.

Got it.

Uh-

Under Clemens, Denton Cooley, Oprah Winfrey

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Anwar Sadat, Eunice Kennedy Shriver.