Cooley, Denton Arthur

Cooley, Denton Arthur

(1920–  ) surgeon; born in Houston, Texas. He studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University, where he also did his surgical internship and residency (1944–50). He spent the next year in England at the Brompton Hospital for Chest Diseases. In 1951 he joined the Baylor University medical faculty and began performing heart surgery at Texas Children's and St. Luke's Episcopal Hospitals. A pioneer in open-heart and heart-transplantation surgery, he left Baylor University (1954–62) to found the world-renowned Texas Heart Institute in Houston (1962) where he became surgeon-in-chief.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.