Search Results for Medical Obituaries - Narrowed by: Cardiovascular surgeon - Cardiothoracic surgeon

First Title value, for Searching Borst, Hans Georg (1927 - 2022)

2024-05-09T20:11:05Z

by Sarah Gillam
Publication Date 2022-10-13
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E010000-E010999/E010100-E010199
Occupation Cardiovascular surgeon Thoracic surgeon Cardiac surgeon Cardiothoracic surgeon
Details Hans Georg Borst, head of the division of cardiothoracic and vascular surgery at Hannover Medical School, Germany was an internationally renowned cardiovascular surgeon who made major contributions to the surgical treatment of aortic aneurysm and aortic dissections, and to the development of cardiac transplantation. He was born on 17 October 1927 in Munich, the son of Max Borst, the influential chairman of pathology at Munich University, and Margarete Borst. Borst attended school in Munich until early 1945, when he joined the Luftwaffe and subsequently spent six months in a British prisoner of war camp. On his return home, he finished his schooling, taking his final examinations (abitur) at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria in 1947. He then worked as a labourer on a construction site for six months, a prerequisite for matriculation at the faculty of medicine, Munich University. After finishing his pre-clinical training in Munich, he transferred to Harvard Medical School in 1950, entering the second-year class and graduating in 1953. He was an intern in Emile Holman’s department of surgery at Stanford Hospital in San Francisco and then, from 1954 to 1956, a fellow in the department of physiology at Harvard School of Public Health, working with James L Whittenberger, Stanley Sarnoff, Erik Berglund and Jeremiah ‘Jere’ Mead. Here he produced seven papers on the developing fields of invasive cardiology and cardiac surgery. In late 1956 he returned to Germany and joined Rudolf Zenker at Marburg University. He applied his knowledge of the pathophysiology of extracorporeal circulation and was responsible for setting up extracorporeal circulation for the first open-heart procedures performed in Germany. His research resulted in two experimental papers on the combined use of the heart lung machine and moderate as well as deep hypothermia. In 1958 he moved to Munich University, following Zenker, who had been appointed chair of surgery, and completed his general surgical as well as thoracic and cardiovascular residencies there. In 1962 Borst presented his dozenten thesis on ‘The combination of extracorporeal circulation and hypothermia’, which was honoured with the von Langenbeck prize by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Chirurgie (the Germany Society for Surgery). While completing his residences, his interest was focused on thoracic aortic aneurysm. In 1963 he was the first surgeon to operate on the aortic arch in deep hypothermia and circulatory arrest. His laboratory work at that time dealt with myocardial blood flow during assisted circulation and induced ventricular fibrillation. In April 1968 he was appointed chairman of the department of surgery at the newly founded medical school of Hannover, and in 1971 he became head of the division of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery there. During the succeeding years, Borst and his department focused on several research topics, including: the consequences of temporary coronary occlusion; the effect of collateral blood flow in conjunction with cardioplegia; coronary and cerebral air embolism; the use of fibrin adhesive in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery; studies of the spinal cord during aortic cross clamping; and the preservation of the heart and lung in conjunction with transplantation. At Hannover he developed a large-scale operative programme in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery. Aside from the by then conventional surgery for valve and coronary heart disease, he and his department published extensively on: oesophagectomy for carcinoma of the oesophagus; thoracic aneurysms, especially new technologies in arch surgery; total correction of congenital anomalies in infancy; antiarrhythmic surgery; and clinical heart, heart lung and lung transplantation. In 1983 he and his colleagues introduced the ‘elephant trunk’ technique, a surgical aortic replacement for patients suffering from extensive aortic diseases. The technique helped to reduced complications during the repair of aortic aneurysms by performing a staged procedure. He was a founding member of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Thorax-, Herz- und Gefäßchirurgie (the German Society for Thoracic, Cardiac and Vascular Surgery) and cofounded the European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery (EACTS). The EACTS Hans G Borst award for thoracic aortic surgery is named in his honour. From 1978 to 1987 he was editor of *Thoraxchirurgie*. Under his leadership the journal was renamed *The Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeon*, was published in English and expanded to include cardiac surgery. In 1987 he was appointed as the founder editor of *The European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery*, the official journal of EACTS. He wrote more than 400 peer-reviewed papers and contributed to nearly 50 books. He was a member of many international associations and societies, including the British Cardiac Society, the Cardiothoracic Society (Pete’s Club, London), the Sociedad de Cardiocirujanos, Spain, the Société de Chirurgie Thoracique et Cardio-Vasculaire de Langue Française, the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, the American Surgical Association, the International Society for Cardiovascular Surgery and the International Society for Heart Transplantation. In 1987 he received the Erich Lexer prize of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Chirurgie for his work on cardiac transplantation. He became an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1989. Borst was married to Petra Angelika. They had four children – Mathias, Verena, Stefanie and Valerie – and nine grandchildren. Borst died on 8 September 2022. He was 94.
Resource Identifier RCS: E010163
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset

First Title value, for Searching Cooley, Denton (1920 - 2016)

2024-05-09T20:11:05Z

by O H Frazier
Publication Date 2019-12-18 2020-03-10
Asset Path Root/Lives of the Fellows/E009000-E009999/E009600-E009699
Occupation Cardiovascular surgeon Cardiothoracic surgeon
Details Denton A Cooley was an innovative cardiovascular surgeon and founder of the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, Texas. He was born in Houston on 22 August 1920 to Mary Fraley Cooley and a prominent local dentist, Ralph Clarkson Cooley. His grandfather, Daniel Denton Cooley, was a successful Houston real estate developer. After graduating from Houston’s San Jacinto High School in 1937, Denton Cooley received his undergraduate training at the University of Texas at Austin. Being 6’4” and a talented basketball player, he was a key contributor to the team’s Southwest Conference championship win in 1939. Cooley would later say that basketball taught him the importance of practise, which later helped him develop his surgical skills, and of improving dexterity (as a surgical trainee, he would practise tying knots inside a matchbox), as well as ‘skills for coping with loss and disappointment,’ which he felt were important to his success as a surgeon. Cooley began his undergraduate studies intending to become a dentist like his father, but while visiting a doctor friend working at an emergency room, he learned to stitch wounds, and he subsequently changed his course of study from predental to premedical. In 1944, he received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins Medical School, where he then became a surgical intern for the pioneering congenital heart surgeon Alfred Blalock and participated in the first Blalock-Taussig ‘blue-baby’ operation – a successful treatment for an otherwise fatal condition. Later, after losing a patient to ventricular fibrillation during an emergency operation, Cooley designed a defibrillator that was used clinically at Johns Hopkins for almost a decade. Cooley went to London in 1950 to serve as a senior surgical registrar at the Brompton Hospital under the tutelage of Lord Russell Brock and Oswald Tubbs. There he participated in several ‘Brock operations’ – beating-heart procedures performed to treat congenital pulmonary valve stenosis. Cooley considered this an invaluable experience. He returned to Houston in 1951 to take a faculty position at Baylor College of Medicine’s department of surgery, under the leadership of Michael E DeBakey. While at Baylor, Cooley made many contributions to the field of cardiovascular surgery. Prominent among them was his groundbreaking work (with DeBakey) in repairing aortic aneurysms. He also, in 1957, performed the first successful carotid endarterectomy. Cooley had the opportunity to observe open-heart surgery for the first time in June 1955, when he visited pioneering heart surgeon C Walton Lillehei at the University of Minnesota. Lillehei was the first to perform meaningfully successful open-heart surgery, using cross-circulation to support paediatric patients undergoing repair of congenital heart defects (by connecting the patient’s circulatory system to that of a parent, which supported the patient during the operation). Upon returning to Houston, Cooley built a cardiopulmonary bypass machine from parts salvaged from a restaurant-supply store and performed Houston’s first successful open-heart operation in April 1956. That year, Cooley’s results in 95 open-heart surgery cases were the best in the world. This resulted in a large influx of patients, making Houston, Texas a leading centre for cardiovascular surgery. This success was attributable to Cooley’s speed and precision as a surgeon; he told his trainees that when a patient goes on the heart-lung machine, they begin to die, stressing the importance of speed in applying this technology. Because of his unparalleled experience, Cooley made many technical contributions to the field of cardiovascular surgery, participating in as many as 33 ‘firsts’. In 1961, he became the first surgeon to perform open-heart surgery on a Jehovah’s Witness. Initially, heart-lung machines were primed with blood, but in this case, Cooley substituted a 5% dextrose solution. By avoiding the use of blood as a prime, and thus reducing the amount of donated blood required, the number of open-heart procedures that could be performed increased exponentially. After the introduction of heart transplantation, Cooley performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States in May 1968. He performed 20 more such transplants – more than any other surgeon in the world at the time. Importantly, Cooley successfully implanted the first total artificial heart as a bridge to transplant in April 1969. His pioneering work in cardiac replacement continued with implanting the first left ventricular assist device as a bridge to transplant in 1978 and a second total artificial heart as a bridge to transplant in 1981. Cooley was also one of the initial premier heart valve surgeons. He developed his own heart valve in the mid-1960's, and he worked closely with Lillehei to introduce the standard-of-care bileaflet valves that are in widespread use today. Stemming from his many technical contributions to the field of cardiac surgery, he published more than 1,400 peer-reviewed articles in the medical literature. Cooley’s contributions to cardiovascular surgery were not solely technical. He was instrumental in introducing managed healthcare plans to cardiovascular services billing, which was an important step toward addressing the high cost of cardiac surgical procedures in the US. In 1962, while still a member of the Baylor faculty, Cooley founded the Texas Heart Institute: a dedicated research and education institution that was affiliated with St Luke’s Episcopal Hospital and Texas Children’s Hospital. Cooley believed that establishing the Institute was among his most important contributions to the field of cardiac care. A source of great pride to Cooley was his work in educating surgical fellows and residents. During his career, he trained 136 cardiothoracic surgery residents and 927 cardiovascular fellows. He was also a great supporter of the universities he attended and of his home city of Houston. As a result, many facilities have been named for him, including the Denton A Cooley Recreation Center at Johns Hopkins, the Denton A Cooley MD Hall at the Texas Medical Center Library, the Houston Zoo’s Denton A Cooley Animal Hospital, the Denton A Cooley Basketball Pavilion at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Denton A Cooley MD and Ralph C Cooley DDS University Life Center at University of Texas’ school of dentistry in Houston. He received many honours for his work. In 1967, he was awarded the René Leriche prize, the International Society of Surgery’s highest honour. In 1984, US President Ronald Reagan presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. And in 1998, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Bill Clinton. The Royal College of Surgeons of England made Cooley an honorary fellow in 1988. This was a source of great pride to him, particularly because of his training and experience under Lord Brock and Oswald Tubbs. With his wife of 67 years, former Johns Hopkins nurse Louise Goldborough Thomas, Cooley had five daughters, 16 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren. Outside of Houston in Orchard, Texas, he built Cool Acres Ranch, a vacation home that became the site of many family gatherings. He continued performing open-heart operations until his early eighties. In his lifetime, his surgical group at St Luke’s completed more than 120,000 procedures with the use of cardiopulmonary bypass – more than any other team in the world. Lillehei, considered by many to be the premier cardiovascular surgeon of his time, once said that it was Cooley who deserved that title because of his early success with using cardiopulmonary bypass, rather than the cross-circulation technique Lillehei used, to support patients during the surgical correction of intracardiac defects. Denton Cooley died on 18 November 2016. He was 96.
Resource Identifier RCS: E009678
Collection Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format Obituary
Format Asset