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- [00:00]
Dr. Denton Cooley
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:04]
Jasper AI Narrator
This podcast is about bold moves, the kind that change everything. At Jasper, we bring that same energy to the way marketing teams work. Jasper is the agentic content automation platform used by thousands of marketers to streamline how content gets created, reviewed and shipped. From global campaign launches to SEO and GEO to multi language localization, Jasper helps teams create better content faster and at scale. It's not just AI for writing, it's an engine for modern marketing execution. Start building scaled content pipelines lines at Jasper AI. That's Jasper AI.
- [00:36]
Chris Pine
Welcome to the Wild west of American Medicine. I'm Chris Pine and this is Cardiac Cowboys, the gripping true story behind the birth of open heart surgery and the maverick surgeons who made it happen. It's 1944. Jim Crow looms large over Baltimore, Maryland. Marriage between an interracial couple is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Public schools are segregated by race, as are restaurants, hotels and parks. Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, located in a Victorian red brick hospital complex that looms over East Baltimore, won't admit its first black student for another 18 years. And yet, a young black man working in a research laboratory at Johns Hopkins is about to pave the way for the future of cardiac surgery.
- [01:36]
Dr. Denton Cooley
Vivian Thomas was a very skillful surgeon and could carry out all of these procedures unassisted. That might take a normal surgeon two or three assistants to help them through.
- [01:49]
Chris Pine
Vivian Thomas ran the animal lab for Hopkins surgical chief Alfred Blalock. Thomas was a master surgeon, but he never operated on a human patient. He was paid little more than a janitor's wages. To make ends meet, he'd moonlight as a bartender at Blaylock's parties, mixing drinks for the very same medical students he trained during the day. Nearly a decade before Minnesota surgeons John Lewis and Walt Lillehei operated on the living heart, Vivian Thomas and Alfred Blaylock pioneered a treatment for one of the most fatal heart defects.
- [02:24]
Dr. Denton Cooley
We became almost overwhelmed with congenital heart cases of Tetralogy of Fallot.
- [02:29]
Chris Pine
Tetralogy of Fallot is a complex of four different heart defects. It deprives infants of oxygen, turning their skin bluish gray. In most cases, it kills them. It was one of the few female doctors at Johns Hopkins, a pediatric cardiologist named Helen Taussick, who had the groundbreaking idea to sidestep the defect. What if you could create a shunt, a small pathway connecting two of a child's arteries to allow some blood to flow directly to the lungs without first passing through the defective heart? It wasn't quite open heart surgery and it wouldn't fix the defect for good, but it might just allow these kids to live long enough for someone else to invent a permanent cure. Helen Taussig's idea wasn't taken seriously until she shared it with Alfred Blalock, who assigned it to Vivian Thomas. And Thomas got to work. For months, he toiled in the lab, perfecting the procedure that would come to be known as the Blalock Taussig Shunt, named for Alfred Blalock and Helen Taussig. As a black lab worker without a medical degree, Vivian Thomas was not credited for his contribution. In the fall of 1944, a baby girl named Eileen Saxon was admitted to Johns Hopkins. Eileen suffered from tetralogy of Fallot. She struggled to breathe even inside an oxygen tent. Her skin and lips were blue. And at 15 months old, she weighed just nine pounds. Eileen was dying. Her only shot at survival was the experimental Blalock Taussig Shunt. But there was a problem. Neither Blalock nor Tausig knew how to perform the procedure. Only Vivian Thomas did. Early on, November 29, Eileen was rushed into an OR in the top floor of the hospital. Vivian Thomas assumed he wouldn't be welcome in the room. In 1944, and for a long time to come, surgery was the exclusive domain of white men. But Alfred Blalock couldn't operate without him.
- [04:49]
Dr. Denton Cooley
I remember when Vivian Thomas stood behind him. And Dr. Blaylock would ask Vivian questions all the time over his shoulders. Vivian, should I do it this way or that way, you know?
- [05:01]
Chris Pine
Thomas was given a stool so he could see over Blaylock's shoulder. With an overhead view of the operating table. He talked the chief of surgery step by step through the technique he'd developed. When the operation was over and the clamps removed from Eileen's blood vessels, Blalock and Thomas watched with amazement as the girl's sickly blue skin turned a healthy pink.
- [05:27]
Dr. Denton Cooley
You did well in there, Vivian.
- [05:30]
Chris Pine
Thank you. You performed an excellent surgery, Doctor.
- [05:34]
Dr. Denton Cooley
Yes, I think I did.
- [05:42]
Chris Pine
In 2004, HBO dramatized the Eileen Saxon surgery in the film Something the Lord Made, starring Yassine Bey and Alan Rickman. This blue baby operation saved the lives of thousands of children and opened the door to all future cardiovascular procedures. Vivian Thomas would be an old man before he was recognized for his achievement. In the meantime, he trained a generation of surgeons. His greatest pupil was a smooth, talking, strikingly handsome Texan, Dr. Denton Cooley.
- [06:18]
Dr. Denton Cooley
I felt so grateful that I was part of the team that I was right in the middle of it. And that Therefore, I had an obligation to carry on that Legacy.
- [06:29]
Chris Pine
Cooley was 24 when he assisted in the first Blue Baby operation. His surgical training under Thomas and Blalock set him on a path to become the greatest technical surgeon the world had ever seen.
- [06:43]
Jamie Napoli
It also fueled his fierce competitive streak.
- [06:46]
Chris Pine
Which would send him headlong into the most famous feud in medical history. From OSO Studios, this is Cardiac Cowboys, a podcast about life, death and innovation in the American Heartland. Episode 2 Ready. Fire.
- [07:18]
Jamie Napoli
Aim.
- [07:19]
Chris Pine
Here's writer and executive producer Jamie Napoli.
- [07:23]
Jamie Napoli
In 1951, Denton Cooley could have written his own ticket to any hospital in the country. He'd performed Blue Baby operations at Johns Hopkins, commanded an army hospital in Austria, and spent a year training under the eminent British surgeon Russell Brock. So it might have seemed like a step backward when the 30 year old hotshot surgeon accepted a job at the long undistinguished Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. But for Denton Cooley, Houston was home. Not only that, Baylor's surgical department was quickly making a name for itself on the national stage. That was thanks to Cooley's new boss, a brilliant, ambitious and uncompromising chief of surgery by the name of Michael DeBakey. Denton Cooley rarely encountered anyone, man or woman, who didn't instantly fall under the spell of his genteel Texas charm. Now he was putting that charm to good use. To succeed at Baylor, he'd need to win over DeBakey. He started by moving his wife, Louise and their young daughter Mary into a house down the street from the DeBakey family.
- [08:32]
Michael DeBakey's Son (Michael DeBakey Jr.)
I always found him to be extremely charming.
- [08:35]
Jamie Napoli
That's Dr. DeBakey's eldest son, Michael, who recalls Cooley's efforts to always keep his wits about him in the presence of his new boss. Even in relaxed social settings.
- [08:45]
Michael DeBakey's Son (Michael DeBakey Jr.)
My parents frequently gave small dinners or cocktail parties for the staff. And I always remember Denton would come in and he said, fix me a glass of club soda with ice. And then he'd say, pour me a little bit of Coke in there so that it looked like scotch and soda. And then he would wander around drinking that.
- [09:04]
Jamie Napoli
With Dr. DeBakey, however, Cooley's charisma hit a brick wall.
- [09:10]
Michael DeBakey's Son (Michael DeBakey Jr.)
I forgot who it was. It said that Dr. DeBakey puts Tabasco on everything, including his words. And that's probably true. He was hell on wheels in the hospital. He could look at you and melt you.
- [09:25]
Jamie Napoli
Debakey biographer Craig Miller recounted the story of Denton Cooley's first day at Baylor. As Cooley pulled into the hospital park parking lot, Debakey spotted the golf clubs in the back of his car. Get rid of Those things, son, DeBakey snapped in his Louisiana drawl. You're not going to need them while you're here. Later that afternoon, as the Houston heat climbed into the 90s, Cooley followed the chief of surgery on patient rounds. At 6 foot 4, Cooley towered over the short stairs, statured DeBakey, and yet he found it difficult to keep up with the man. DeBakey was tireless power walking from room to room and building to building, jogging upstairs rather than stopping to wait for an elevator. He was perpetually in a race against the clock. God help the young doctor who got in his way.
- [10:21]
Dr. Denton Cooley
There is an aspect of me that maybe can be described as intolerant. I'm intolerant of, of stupidity.
- [10:28]
Jamie Napoli
That's an archival recording of Dr. DeBakey.
- [10:31]
Dr. Denton Cooley
There is just absolutely no place for carelessness and there's no place for making mistakes, because even the smallest mistake can lead to a bigger mistake and bigger complication.
- [10:43]
Jamie Napoli
Debakey's temper was legendary. He would hammer his staff with insults for the slightest error, from blocking his light during an operation to hitting the wrong button on an elevator.
- [10:55]
Dr. Denton Cooley
It chewed me out one time we were going to the eighth floor on Methodist and I was tired. Instead of punching eight, I hit seven.
- [11:04]
Jamie Napoli
That's Houston cardiac surgeon Dr. Bud Frazier.
- [11:07]
Dr. Denton Cooley
I said it was just a mistake, Dr. Bacon, he said, you're a mistake. You've been here is a mistake.
- [11:15]
Jamie Napoli
For Denton Cooley, who had world famous surgeons practically lining up to mentor him, DeBakey's attitude was an unwelcome surprise. Cooley followed behind as the entourage of doctors headed into the black section of the racially segregated Jefferson Davis Hospital, named for the president of the short lived Confederacy. They arrived at the room of a 46 year old patient.
- [11:41]
Dr. Denton Cooley
We had this African American guy named Joe Mitchell who had a lewitic aneurysm in his ascending aorta.
- [11:50]
Jamie Napoli
The aorta is the largest of the blood vessels. It's an artery that carries oxygen rich blood directly from the heart out to the rest of the body. An aneurysm occurs when the aorta begins to bulge at a weak spot. Its wall grows thin and frail. Imagine an overinflated balloon. If the balloon bursts, blood rushes out into the chest cavity, oftentimes killing the patient. In 1951, one of the only accepted treatments was to simply delay the aneurysm's eventual rupture by wrapping it in cellophane. But this was not a permanent solution.
- [12:34]
Dr. Denton Cooley
It was bulging out through the chest. You see the pulsations knocked at a bake. He said, well, we have a, a new member here of our staff, Dr. Cooley, what would you do to that aneurysm? And he expected me to say I'd put some wire in there, try to cover it with cellophane. And I said, I think I would just excise the aneurysm.
- [12:58]
Jamie Napoli
To excise or surgically remove the aneurysm, as Cooley suggested, was unheard of. Cooley had improvised similar procedures during his residency at Johns Hopkins, but this was his first day at a new hospital. He didn't have the team or the tools to execute what he just suggested. The young hotshot surgeon was showing off and DeBakey called him on it.
- [13:24]
Dr. Denton Cooley
He said, well, you do it tomorrow morning if you want.
- [13:27]
Jamie Napoli
Just like that. The operation was scheduled for the following day. Cooley was keenly aware of the fact that he'd just been handed the rope to hang himself. But he wasn't one to back down from a challenge.
- [13:46]
Jasper AI Narrator
This show is about modern mavericks, risk takers, builders and rule breakers pushing new frontiers. At Jasper, we know that spirit. We're doing for marketing what these cardiac cowboys did for medicine. Throwing out the old playbook and building something radically better. Jasper is the agentic content automation platform that helps marketing teams move fast and stay in control. Whether you're launching a product, optimizing web content for LLMs, expanding campaigns into new markets, or scaling audience personalization, Jasper gives your team a repeatable, intelligent system for orchestrating content at scale. Unlike generic AI tools, Jasper doesn't just write. With structured workflows, brand safe automation, and built in intelligence that understands your voice, audience and goals. Jasper replaces scattered tools and disconnected processes with one seamless content pipeline. It's already helping thousands of teams reduce production time, cut agency costs and publish more content that's actually on brand. If you're a marketing leader looking to transform how your team works or just trying to keep up with the pace of change, check out Jasper AI. That's Jasper AI.
- [14:49]
Jamie Napoli
At least until that moment, life had been pretty damn good to Denton Cooley. He was born into Houston high society, the son of a wealthy dentist and the grandson of a developer nicknamed the Father of Houston Heights. At the University of Texas at Austin, Cooley walked onto the varsity basketball team and then led the Longhorns to win the Southwest Conference basketball championships. Buckwheat Cooley, as his teammates called him, was blessed with movie star looks and a confident charm. He might have been mistaken for a Kennedy, if only he were a few inches shorter. At Johns Hopkins Medical School, Cooley worked hard to shed the jock stereotype and graduated first in his class. And yet it was his jock side that opened the first of many doors for his career. Career. Here's Cooley's daughter, Dr. Louise Cooley Davis.
- [15:57]
Jasper AI Narrator
There was a tennis court in the quadrangle of the hospital, and daddy decided.
- [16:02]
Jamie Napoli
To go out and play tennis instead of going on rounds with Blalock. In 1943, a year before the first blue baby operation, Dr. Alfred Blalock was already renowned for his innovative research into the circulatory conditions, condition of shock.
- [16:19]
Jasper AI Narrator
And out comes Blalock with his entire entourage following behind him and stop and watch my father play tennis. And my father's first thought was, I'm in deep trouble here. He's going to know that I cut.
- [16:30]
Jamie Napoli
Out of my rounds and I'm going to be kicked back to Texas.
- [16:35]
Jasper AI Narrator
And instead, Blalock asked him if he knew how to play ping pong. Because Blaylock had a lake house and really wanted someone to play ping pong. So instead of it turning into a disaster, it turned into a really lucky introduction.
- [16:51]
Jamie Napoli
Cooley's friendship with Blaylock put his career on a fast track. After the landmark Eileen Saxon operation, Blaylock began letting Cooley take the lead on some of his Blue Baby cases. And for good reason. It turned out Cooley's dexterity on the basketball and tennis courts translated to the orange.
- [17:10]
Dr. Denton Cooley
He would tie knots inside of a matchbox with his fingers and he had no wasted motion whatsoever.
- [17:18]
Jamie Napoli
That's trauma and cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Kenneth Maddox.
- [17:22]
Dr. Denton Cooley
So smooth, fast, precise, it was a symphony to watch.
- [17:30]
Jamie Napoli
With a potent mix of ambition, once in a generation, talent and undeniable good luck, Cooley's rise was meteoric. His mounting successes brought him in 1951, into the orbit of Michael DeBakey. On the morning of July 12th, DeBakey strode quickly toward the ORs at Jefferson Davis Hospital. It was now Cooley's second day at Baylor and he'd already begun operating on 46 year old Joe Mitchell. DeBakey knew the young surgeon was in over his head and would need a more experienced hand to take over. The only question was how deep a hole Cooley had dug for himself. It was entirely possible DeBakey was already too late. DeBakey went straight for the scrub sink. And then he stopped. There was no sign of panic in the OR. As DeBakey turned and stepped toward the operating table, he found the handsome, drawling young Texan with A big smile on his face. What was the status of Mr. Mitchell's aneurysm? DeBakey wanted to know.
- [18:38]
Dr. Denton Cooley
Well, that aneurysm, Dr. DeBakey said. There it is over there in the specimen basin.
- [18:44]
Jamie Napoli
The excised aneurysm lay in a bucket several feet away, and Cooley was already sewing up the patient's aorta.
- [18:52]
Dr. Denton Cooley
That was, I think, the first time that he really appreciated the fact that we could operate directly on the aorta.
- [19:00]
Jamie Napoli
For most of Michael DeBakey's life, he'd been the best at everything. He pursued. A genius academic and surgeon with an unparalleled work ethic. He struggled to maintain a staff that could measure up to his expectations. But this was new. A young, overly confident surgeon showing debakey up on his second day of work. Cooley was claiming this was the first aneurysm repair of its kind anywhere in the world. In that moment, DeBakey had to make a decision whether to treat Cooley as a peer or as a threat. In stark contrast to Houston native Denton Cooley, the good old boy, the ultimate insider, Michael DeBakey's life was largely defined by his outsider status. Born to Lebanese immigrants in Lake Charles, Louisiana, he quickly picked up on the fact that his family didn't look or act like their neighbors.
- [20:03]
Michael DeBakey's Son (Michael DeBakey Jr.)
Well, I do think that growing up, dad as well as his brother and his sisters all felt left out. They were essentially immigrants into South Louisiana, and they certainly weren't part of the old Louisiana.
- [20:18]
Jamie Napoli
Rather than trying to fit in, DeBakey resolved to stand out. He worked nearly 20 hours a day, seven days a week.
- [20:28]
Michael DeBakey's Son (Michael DeBakey Jr.)
He was gone every morning from 6am and he was back at the house 8:30 or 9 at night, sometimes later. And when he was at home, he was locked in his study working on papers or dictating. I know that, that my mother was very upset frequently, and I overheard her say, maybe your children would be better off as patients because then they'd get more time with you.
- [20:53]
Jamie Napoli
When DeBakey was offered to head up the surgical department at the Baylor College of medicine in 1948, he'd already cemented his reputation as an unstoppable force. As a medical student at the prestigious Tulane University, he invented a roller pump that would become an essential component of the heart lung bypass machines of the future. During World War II, DeBakey developed the auxiliary surgical groups to improve medical treatment for soldiers on the front line, which would later evolve into the MASH units that would play a key role in all army operations for the next 60 years. And he co authored a series of papers on the correlation between smoking and lying, a position that made him deeply unpopular within the tobacco growing south. But DeBakey had little interest in popularity. The result of his fanatical work ethic was that by 1948, DeBakey's future shone blinding bright. And he didn't imagine the swampy oil town of Houston, Texas would have any part of it. Here's Dr. DeBakey again.
- [22:01]
Dr. Denton Cooley
At that time, Baylor College of Medicine had no teaching hospital, no service, no NIH grants, and was really living almost from day to day.
- [22:13]
Jamie Napoli
The first two times DeBakey was offered a position at Baylor, he turned it down.
- [22:18]
Dr. Denton Cooley
I thought it was a pretty third rate school and I'd already turned down three jobs up in the east from good schools.
- [22:26]
Jamie Napoli
The Bakey's mentor at Tulane urged him to reconsider. Balor may have been a medical backwater, but it was something else too. A blank canvas. Like the crude oil being guzzled up from beneath the Houston dirt, Balor was raw material waiting to be refined however DeBakey saw fit. In Houston, DeBakey could build an empire, and he would be its sole sovereign.
- [22:54]
Michael DeBakey's Son (Michael DeBakey Jr.)
At that time, oil and gas and construction were the big money makers in Houston. There were people who were making money that they didn't know what to do with.
- [23:04]
Jamie Napoli
The first step in building an empire is raising the funds.
- [23:07]
Michael DeBakey's Son (Michael DeBakey Jr.)
Dan had a bedside charm that he used to turn on. He wouldn't send a bill to a very wealthy guy and the guy would call up and say, Dr. DeBakey, I haven't gotten your bill yet. And he would say, well, don't worry about it. Well, no, I want you to send me a bill. He said, well, look, if you want to make a donation, fine. Instead of, you know, a bill for $2,000, the guy ended up with a donation for 20, 30,000.
- [23:34]
Jamie Napoli
Thanks to his military contacts from the war, DeBakey began rapidly expanding his domain. Long before his first day on the.
- [23:41]
Dr. Denton Cooley
Job, the Veterans Administration was about to build a hospital right next door to the old Navy hospital. So I spotlighted it as a complete waste of money. And I got a call from the director of the VA saying that, can you organize personnel to take it over?
- [23:59]
Jamie Napoli
I just moved in a few days after taking over the old Navy Hospital, DeBakey convinced the board of trustees chairman to bring the local city county hospital under his authority as. As well.
- [24:11]
Dr. Denton Cooley
So I had two teaching hospitals right away. That's what, that's what kept me here.
- [24:16]
Jamie Napoli
Rather than settling for the doctors, Houston had to offer. Kubake looked elsewhere. He was openly elitist, a fact that didn't win him many friends within the local medical community. He traveled the country using money and charm to lure the best American surgeons to Houston. Surgeons like Denton Cooley. Over the next two decades, DeBakey would come to see Cooley as a rival and as a threat to the empire he'd built at Baylor. But on July 12, 1951, as he watched the young surgeon swiftly and gracefully stitch up a patient's damaged aorta, Saving his life, DeBakey saw something else in Cooley. He'd found a workhorse, A man who could operate faster and better than any surgeon he'd ever met. Together, DeBakey and Cooley began repairing aneurysms which, treated at any other hospital in the world, would have proved fatal. The following year, they took their technique one step further by patching damaged blood vessels with tissue taken from corpses called homographs.
- [25:29]
Dr. Denton Cooley
Dr. DeBakey was always looking at different approaches. He would sometimes call biomedical engineer into the room and say, this needs an upside down backwards approach. And so he might pause to look.
- [25:45]
Jamie Napoli
For a better way. After treating scores of aneurysm cases using human tissue, DeBakey recognized that this too was not a permanent solution. Houston had no shortage of corpses. Throughout the 50s, it was known as the murder capital of the country. And yet maintaining a ready supply of differently sized homographs proved difficult. Once again, DeBakey needed to find a better way.
- [26:18]
Dr. Denton Cooley
As soon became apparent that we really needed something that was sort of on the shelf, so we began doing experimental work on some substitute.
- [26:29]
Jamie Napoli
DeBakey liked to tell the story of his discovery of the ideal fabric for the first synthetic aortic graft. He was shopping for nylon at a department store when he stumbled upon a new material called Dacron.
- [26:43]
Dr. Denton Cooley
I looked at the material, you know, and felt it and it felt good and I liked it. And I would take two sheets and cut them to the width I wanted, and I saw each edge. When you do that, you got a tube.
- [27:00]
Jamie Napoli
Debakey brought his Dacron tube back to the lab where it would soon replace the need for human tissue. Jump starting the field of reconstructive arterial surgery and saving countless lives. At least that's the way debakey told the story. His son Michael has a different recollection.
- [27:18]
Michael DeBakey's Son (Michael DeBakey Jr.)
That's not true that, that, that's a story that was propagated by a lot of the people who work with dad. I was upstairs in my parents bedroom watching television, and dad came in and he said, by the way, do you happen to have any wash and wear material?
- [27:34]
Jamie Napoli
At his father's urging, Michael retrieved a pair of boxer shorts he'd recently purchased at Brooks Brothers.
- [27:40]
Michael DeBakey's Son (Michael DeBakey Jr.)
He said, this is Dacron. And he literally pulled my mother's sewing machine out of the closet, took a pair of shears, and he cut two Y shaped objects out of the shorts and he sewed them together and he had it prepared for the following day to have it used in a dog. And I never got those shorts replaced.
- [28:02]
Jamie Napoli
Boxer shorts or no. DeBakey's Dacron graft was a game changer. In the summer of 1955, he and Cooley took their wives across the Atlantic for a lecture tour to share their groundbreaking techniques with some of the top surgical minds in Europe. The two men were diametrically opposed in nearly every way, which meant that for a time, they complemented each other perfectly. Cooley churned out operations with machine like speed and precision, while DeBakey innovated, fundraised, and promoted their work tirelessly. As a result, by the mid-1950s, Baylor's reputation was exploding. Here's Dr. Maddox again.
- [28:45]
Dr. Denton Cooley
Prior to this era, we really didn't have any way to treat aneurysms. And suddenly we had some tools, we had some instruments, and there were a.
- [28:55]
Jamie Napoli
Lot of backlog of people.
- [28:57]
Dr. Denton Cooley
So it was an exciting time.
- [29:00]
Jamie Napoli
If you had a heart defect, you went to Minneapolis, and if you had a problem with your arteries, you came to Houston. When Albert Einstein's aortic aneurysm began to rupture in 1955, it was Michael DeBakey who got the call. Working as a team, DeBakey and Cooley were rapidly transforming Baylor into the aneurysm repair center of the world. Pine Bluff, Arkansas. 1954. A 13 year old boy fell from an ice truck and was crushed underneath. Miraculously, Calvin Richmond survived, but he was left with a rare traumatic heart defect. The force of the truck tore three holes in the boy's heart. The largest of them was the size of a nickel. If Calvin was to have any chance of reaching adulthood, he'd need to have these holes patched up. And there was only one doctor in the world who could help him.
- [30:12]
Dr. Denton Cooley
At the University of Minnesota, Dr. C.W. lillehe, the surgeon who captained the research team and actually performed the operation that spells hope at last for the children formerly so doomed.
- [30:24]
Jamie Napoli
In the years since the tragic case of Gregory Glidden, Walt lillehei had performed 35 more open heart operations using controlled cross circulation with about a 75% success rate. Once the object of derision and scorn for his radical ideas, Lillehei had become his department's golden boy.
- [30:44]
Dr. Denton Cooley
Walt's Land was the only place that was doing open heart surgery at that time.
- [30:50]
Jamie Napoli
That's an archival recording of Dr. Gilbert Campbell, who worked alongside Lillehy at the University of Minnesota. In March of 1955, thanks to a Little Rock fundraising campaign, Calvin and his mother Maddie were flown to Minneapolis on an Arkansas Air National Guard plane.
- [31:09]
Dr. Denton Cooley
This lady came up from Find Love with Calvin Richards. He was just a teenager. He was a nice looking kid and a nice person.
- [31:19]
Jamie Napoli
The Richmonds were African American. Unlike Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Minneapolis was not legally segregated. However, the city's population was over 98% white. Calvin and Matty suddenly found themselves in an extreme minority. Their race would come to play an outsized but unstated role in Calvin's medical treatment.
- [31:45]
Dr. Denton Cooley
I think she was just a little bit fearful of what might happen. A lot of black people, and certainly some white people too, are not too anxious to undergo general anesthesia and operations and so forth.
- [32:01]
Jamie Napoli
American medicine is stained by a horrific legacy of white doctors exploiting people of color. And so it's little surprise that Maddie Richmond, A mother of 12 and a widow, didn't trust the U of M doctors to risk her life for the sake of Calvin's operation. Without Mattie acting as her son's heart lung donor, Lillehei turned to the Minneapolis prison population. He'd convinced inmates to volunteer for operations in the past, but in the case of Calvin Richmond, he had no such luck. With the boy's time running out, Lillehy came to Maddie with a last resort, a procedure never before tested on a human patient. Here's Minnesota heart surgeon, Dr. Sarah Shumway. Gilbert Campbell had done a number of.
- [32:50]
Dr. Denton Cooley
Studies in animals, and they used a.
- [32:52]
Jasper AI Narrator
Dog lung, and the dog lung acted.
- [32:55]
Dr. Denton Cooley
As an oxygenator so they could see.
- [32:57]
Jamie Napoli
Exactly where the holes were located.
- [33:00]
Dr. Denton Cooley
It was a wild thing to try to do. I'd never used it on a human. Once during some other operation, I tapped into a vein and returned it just to make sure it would work. Don't expect to find an interstate in the wilderness. You know we're plowing new ground.
- [33:22]
Jamie Napoli
Lillehy's personal motto was ready, fire, aim. In other words, act first, make adjustments. Later, he began preparing to attempt Gilbert Campbell's dog lung technique on 13 year old Calvin.
- [33:41]
Jasper AI Narrator
This show is about modern mavericks, risk takers, builders and rule breakers pushing new frontiers at Jasper. We know that spirit. We're doing for marketing what these cardiac cowboys did for medicine. Throwing out the old playbook and building something radically better. Jasper is the agentic content automation platform that helps marketing teams move fast and stay in control. Whether you're launching a product, optimizing web content for LLMs, expanding campaigns into new markets, or scaling audience personalization, Jasper gives your team a repeatable, intelligent system for orchestrating content at scale. Unlike generic AI tools, Jasper doesn't just write with structured workflows, brand safe automation, and built in intelligence that understands your voice, audience and goals. Jasper replaces scattered tools and disconnected processes with one seamless content pipeline. It's already helping thousands of teams reduce production time, cut agency costs, and publish more content that's actually on brand. If you're a marketing leader looking to transform how your team works or just trying to keep up with the pace of change, check out Jasper AI. That's Jasper AI.
- [34:45]
Jamie Napoli
On March 23, 1955, Calvin Richmond was wheeled into the OR. His chest was cut open and his heart exposed. Rather than using a human donor to oxygenate the boy's blood during surgery, Lillehei connected Calvin's blood vessels to a dog's lung, which was suspended on a stand and heated to body temperature. Lillehei opted for a country dog because the lungs of city dogs were often coated in soot.
- [35:17]
Dr. Denton Cooley
They ran his blood through it while they stopped the heart, opened it and fixed this traumatic defect and then closed the heart.
- [35:25]
Jamie Napoli
That's cardiac surgeon Dr. Chip Bowman.
- [35:27]
Dr. Denton Cooley
That would be very controversial now. I mean, impossible. But the boy's alive because of it, you know. And that's all Wal cared about.
- [35:38]
Jamie Napoli
Trading a dog's life for a boys. The procedure was grotesque by any standard, but it worked. The day after the operation, Calvin was up and joking with the nursing staff. Within a month, he was on his way back to Arkansas, his whole life ahead of him. And Walt Lillahy, having finally earned the trust of the U of M hospital administrators, was on a roll. He was entering the most creative and wildly productive period, not just in his life, but in the life of any surgeon in history.
- [36:13]
Dr. Denton Cooley
He couldn't be bothered by what other people thought. Maybe to a fault, I guess. Genius of this type doesn't come in plain vanilla packages.
- [36:23]
Jamie Napoli
Lillehei made for an unlikely celebrity. Though he was quietly intense and introverted, the man had a flair for the dramatic.
- [36:31]
Jasper AI Narrator
He loved dressing for attention.
- [36:35]
Jamie Napoli
That's Sia Bolman. She's a nurse who worked with Dr. Lillehyde.
- [36:39]
Jasper AI Narrator
He was known for having flamboyant clothes. He would wear a dinner jacket and everybody else would be in their sports jacket.
- [36:50]
Jamie Napoli
Five years had passed since Lillehy's debilitating cancer operation. And something in him had changed. Here's an archival recording of Lillehgh's protege, Dr. Richard de Waal.
- [37:05]
Dr. Denton Cooley
He developed an incredible capacity for alcohol. He would drink enough to put four or five people under, but he never showed it. He went through a well of a lot at that time. So I think this probably changed his mental attitude of live today.
- [37:23]
Jamie Napoli
Lillehei lived and operated at a breakneck pace. He'd work in the ORs and the animal labs until late in the evenings and then often drove straight to a local jazz club. It left little time for Kay and their young family. In many ways, we were raised by my mother. She was the one who was at the football games and, you know, all the events and such. That's Walt and kay Lillehy's son, Dr. Craig Lillehei. There were resident parties or different parties and nightclubs that he'd been at. But there were times when he clearly.
- [37:57]
Dr. Denton Cooley
Wanted to be away. Up in his office.
- [38:00]
Michael DeBakey's Son (Michael DeBakey Jr.)
I don't know when he slept.
- [38:02]
Jamie Napoli
He seemed to be up at all.
- [38:03]
Dr. Denton Cooley
Hours of the night in the study.
- [38:05]
Jamie Napoli
And he'd walk in there and the lights would be on. He was wide awake now with his sudden flash of stardom. The demands on Lillehi's time were greater than ever before. In 1955, Lillehei was asked to speak at a meeting of the American Thoracic association in Houston. The conference was held at the Shamrock Hilton across the street from the Baylor College of Medicine. Denton Cooley was in the audience that day. He watched as this sharply dressed surgeon with an oddly tilted neck took the stage.
- [38:46]
Jasper AI Narrator
Walt was invited everywhere to give talks.
- [38:50]
Jamie Napoli
That's nurse Sia Balman again.
- [38:53]
Jasper AI Narrator
I thought he was a wonderful speaker, but he would always just speak a little bit longer than you would hope he would.
- [39:03]
Jamie Napoli
Walt Lillehei presented a film of his cross circulation technique. Despite the procedure's success, its unseemliness still tended to provoke a mixed reaction. But Denton Cooley was captivated. Here's Dr. Lillehy.
- [39:19]
Dr. Denton Cooley
I had the honor of showing Denton the inside of the living human heart for the first time he ever saw it. He said it was like viewing through.
- [39:27]
Michael DeBakey's Son (Michael DeBakey Jr.)
The gates of heaven.
- [39:30]
Jamie Napoli
As he watched Lillehy on stage, seemingly impervious to any and all criticism, Cooley saw something that he craved desperately for himself. Here was a man living and working on the edge. Lillehgh wasn't just breaking rules, he was writing his own rule book. By the middle of 1955, Cooley and DeBakey had performed 245 aneurysm repairs between them. And Cooley was living up to his promise as an unflagging workhorse. My father was.
- [40:06]
Jasper AI Narrator
We call him the ever ready battery man because he truly was always, always working.
- [40:12]
Jamie Napoli
That's Dr. Louise Cooley Davis again. I guess with, you know, playing basketball and knowing how to run up and.
- [40:18]
Jasper AI Narrator
Down the court, you have to be very disciplined.
- [40:22]
Jamie Napoli
But over the last year, Cooley's power dynamic with DeBakey had started to grade on him. Here's medical historian and plastic surgeon Dr. Gerald Imber.
- [40:32]
Dr. Denton Cooley
No one manipulated the press as effectively as debakey. And here is a guy named Cooley who's a far better surgeon, faster surgeon, more efficient surgeon, certainly an easier guy to get along with. And he wanted to be out of DeBakey's shadow.
- [40:51]
Jamie Napoli
Cooley always felt he was marked for greatness. He saw himself as an innovator on par with his mentors. But he would never live up to that promise if he spent the rest of his career fixing aneurysms for Dr. DeBakey. Now he was ready to make his own seminal contribution to the field. If DeBakey wasn't going to support his ascension, Cooley would have to blaze his own trail. In June, Cooley and his colleague, Dr. Dan McNamara, flew to Minnesota to watch Walt Lillehei in action.
- [41:26]
Dr. Denton Cooley
Lillehei came to pick him up. It was a custom then, as probably it is still, for the visitors to be treated the night before their visit.
- [41:35]
Jamie Napoli
That's Dr. Bud Frazier again.
- [41:38]
Dr. Denton Cooley
So they were supposed to go out to some nice restaurant, which Cooley anticipated everything. Instead of going to a nice restaurant, they go to a roadhouse outside of Minneapolis. You know, dancing girls and all of that.
- [41:57]
Jamie Napoli
Dr. McNamara took off early, leaving Cooley to party late into the night with the insatiable Lilleheim.
- [42:05]
Dr. Denton Cooley
One of the things Cooley told me, he said, you gotta always remember, never, never drink with Walt Lillihan. You can never keep up with him.
- [42:18]
Jamie Napoli
Cooley woke up late the next morning, hungover and exhausted. He and McNamara rushed to the University hospital, where Lillehy was scheduled to perform a VSD repair. At 9:30, a half hour after the appointed time, Lillehei finally turned up.
- [42:36]
Dr. Denton Cooley
He went out to the scrubber sink and was splashing cold water water in his face. And the nurse came out and broke a amyl nitrate under his nose. The old boxer routine. And he went in and did the case. And Cooley said it was the prettiest surgery he'd ever seen.
- [42:54]
Jamie Napoli
But it was what happened later that day that really left an impact on cooley. He and McNamara were treated to a tour of Lillehai's lab where they saw a prototype that would be laughed out of any medical conference. This was what Lillehgh was truly excited about. It looked like his cross circulation setup on steroids, a tangle of coiled hose, a Sigma motor pump, plastic tubes suspended on stands and a blood reservoir. The whole apparatus cost about $30. To McNamara, it looked like the work of a madman. To Cooley, it felt like looking into the future. This radical heart lung bypass machine represented everything Cooley had been waiting for. If he could just replicate it back in Houston, it would grant him access to the new and wild frontier of open heart surgery and all of its endless possibilities for innovation, innovation and glory. This was his chance to step out of Michael DeBakey's shadow, out of Alfred Blalock's shadow and onto the cutting edge. Denton Cooley and the city of Houston were about to enter the heart race.
- [44:22]
Chris Pine
On our next episode. A devastating tournament events forces Walt Villahi to rethink open heart surgery. And in Houston, Denton Cooley's swift rise plunges him into a battle of egos with his boss and mentor, Michael DeBakey. Next time on Cardiac Cowboys.
- [44:49]
Jamie Napoli
Cardiac Cowboys is a professional production of iHeart podcasts, OSO Studios and 13th Lake Media. We're presented by Chris Pine and written and narrated by me, Jamie Napoli. Our executive producers are Christina Everett for iHeart Podcasts, Dub Cornette and Jason Ross for OSO Studios. Dr. Gerald Ember, author of Cardiac the Heroic Invention of heart surgery Dr. Eric A. Rose, John Mankiewicz, Joshua Paul Johnson and myself. James A. Smith is our supervising producer. Editing and sound design by Joshua Paul Johnson. Our composer is David Mansfield. Our cover artwork is designed by Alexander Smith. Archival materials courtesy of Special Collections, University of Rhode Island Library and G. Wayne Miller, author of the Walt Lillehei biography King of the True Story of the Maverick who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery. For more information on the first cardiac surgeons, check out Dr. Gerald Imber's book, Cardiac the Heroic Invention of Heart Surgery.