Denton Cooley
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What's interesting (at least to me) is that I did my first heart in April of 1978. Not that long after it was considered "groundbreaking" in the big scheme of things. It was quite the rodeo back then. The surgeon with whom I worked was king of a "rock star" in the area:
He attained a full professorship and funded the Dept. of Cardiovascular Surgery at Northwestern Medical School and served as chairman until 1975. During his tenure he was the first in Chicago to use cardiopulmonary bypass in heart surgery.
He never got board-certified, by the way.
Of note, "rock stars," like Cooley, Shumway, et al, might have claimed to be doing 5-6 open hearts per day. The reality is quite different. In a big heart surgery
millplace like these, the first case would be anesthetized, and the second-tier surgeon would open, harvest the vein, cannulate the heart, go on CPB while Cooley, or whoever, would be getting dressed, having coffee. Once the heart is stopped, primary surgeon would come in, sew the vein graft to the heart and aorta and leave. 2nd tier surgeon would wean the patient off the pump (that's the hard part, by the way), close and transport to ICU.After the graft was completed and patient #1 was finishing, Cooley would walk into the next room, where patient #2 was already on pump, cold, and the heart was arrested.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
That's how "a" surgeon does 6 hearts in a day - he doesn't.
By the way, the guy I referenced never learned how to do vein grafts. Whenever someone needed a CABG, he's have an associate do the actual grafting. Everything else, however, was done by the professor.
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The greatest. Theodor Billroth
Even got a string quartet by Brahms dedicated to him
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But to answer your question, there certainly are stars. Now you can see everything on you tube so u don’t need to crowd in. But sure there are big big names which everyone in my circles know about. But their stardom rarely leaves medical culture into popular culture.
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The greatest. Theodor Billroth
Even got a string quartet by Brahms dedicated to him
@bachophile said in Denton Cooley:
Theodor Billroth
Even got a string quartet by Brahms dedicated to himYes. Billroth had a try at composing as well. Supposedly, he showed a piece of his (quartet?) to his friend, Brahms, who, being the prickly sort of guy he was, was rather disparaging of the effort.
Billroth took Brahms' advice to heart and told him, something to the effect of, "Thank you for your criticism, and I see that you are correct. Therefore, I took my work and threw it into the fireplace, whence it emitted a great stench."
Don't know if it's a true story, but I could see it.
@bachophile said in Denton Cooley:
stardom rarely leaves medical culture into popular culture
Exactly. Though advances are often large, they are incremental, rather than revolutionary. For example, who knows the name of the first surgeon to do a liver transplant? Even if you knew his name (Tom Starzl), he is not held in the same kind of reverence (?) as the likes of Cooley, et al.
"Transplant? Cool. Someone else already did a kidney, so...."
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The medical school at Pittsburgh is named after Starzl.
He was a pioneer in the use of “FK506”, aka tacrolimus over cyclosporine
@jon-nyc said in Denton Cooley:
The medical school at Pittsburgh is named after Starzl.
Yeah, I know that. And he deserves it - a true pioneer.
But, to Bach's point, take a random person on the street who is of a certain (older) age and ask him if they know who Denton Cooley was, the odds are pretty good that they recognize the name, at least.
Starzl? Probably not.
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i guess my level of stardom is having an instrument names after you, like maybe Debakey...(i think all anatomical parts being named were used up by the 19th century)
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Cooley would drop by the blood bank after he was done in surgery. The guys kept a fifth of whiskey and a glass hidden on a shelf for him. He'd prop his feet up, they'd pour him a shot and he would go through his list of surgeries for the next day, making sure his units were ready.
Never stayed but just long enough to sip his whiskey and never had more than one shot.
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@jon-nyc said in Denton Cooley:
Nowadays the celebrity doctors are snake oil pitchmen on morning tv like Oz.
Snake oil pitchman? Yeah, I guess.
Also board-certified heart surgeon, patent holder on various devices for heart surgery (LVAD), professor at Columbia, so there's that.
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i guess my level of stardom is having an instrument names after you, like maybe Debakey...(i think all anatomical parts being named were used up by the 19th century)
@bachophile said in Denton Cooley:
DeBakey
I worked at Ross Perot companies for 30 years. Ross was friends with Doctor DeBakey.
When an employee or an employee's family member got very sick Ross would send them to Dr. DeBakey.
That was a real morale boost for anyone who heard the stories.
Of course corporate health insurance doesn't work like this anymore.
