A big heart

Denton Cooley was a surgeon larger than life.

Consider the daily life of Dr. Denton A. Cooley, who died last Friday at age 96. For decades every morning, he left his home in River Oaks, donned his surgical smock at Texas Medical Center and from dawn to dusk plunged his gifted hands into the open chests of men, women and children whose hearts were failing, who were within days, or less, of death. And then, after saving the lives of as many as a dozen individuals on that particular day, he went home and did it all over again, day after day after day.

The man who performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States operated on more than 100,000 heart patients throughout his long career. And when he wasn’t in the operating room, he was perfecting numerous other advances in cardiac surgery, including valve replacement, bypass operations, removing aortic aneurysms and the development of heart-lung machines that keep people alive during cardiac surgery. He stopped performing surgery on his 87th birthday but was still working, still saving lives, a week before his death.

It’s hard to imagine a life more challenging — or more fulfilling.

We like to think that the most famous heart surgeon in the world was quintessentially Houston. A native son, he was the grandson of the man who helped found the Heights in 1890. The physician who delivered Cooley was Dr. Ernst William Bertner, who would later found the Texas Medical Center. Cooley, in the words of the Chronicle’s Todd Ackerman, “would witness the city’s transformation from a provincial afterthought, known for its proximity to oil fields and refineries, to a metropolis famous not only as a world energy center but as a destination for cutting-edge medicine.”

Founder of the Texas Heart Institute in 1962, Cooley was an integral part of that transformation, as was his one-time partner and later his bitter rival, Dr. Michael DeBakey. The details of their decades-long feud are not worth rehashing, although it is worth noting that they reconciled a year before DeBakey died in 2008, at age 99. In death as in life, the two strong-willed surgeons, both larger than life, both quintessentially Houston, must be mentioned together.

Like the Allen brothers and Sam Houston, like wildcatters and astronauts, Cooley thrived in this brash, open city. We bid farewell to the good doctor with one of our favorite stories about the man, who, like many surgeons, did not lack for confidence. When he was a defendant in a medical liability trial, an attorney asked him if he considered himself the world’s best heart surgeon. “Yes,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s being rather immodest?” the lawyer asked.

“Perhaps,” Cooley replied. “But remember, I’m under oath.”