One of the most well-known stories of Houston lore — yet not discussed publicly much — is the long-time rift that has existed between two giants of cardiovascular surgery and of Houston’s amazing Texas Medical Center, Dr. Michael DeBakey of the DeBakey Heart Institute and the Baylor College of Medicine, and Dr. Denton Cooley of the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital. That rift has resulted in Dr. DeBakey and Dr. Cooley rarely speaking to each other over the past 40 years.
As a result of the major announcement of this past Wednesday that Baylor College of Medicine is changing its primary teaching facility from Methodist Hospital to St. Luke’s, Dr. DeBakey (of Baylor) and Dr. Cooley (or St. Luke’s) are being forced to speak to each other again, at least to a limited extent. As this Chronicle artice reports, the first meeting occurred yesterday when both Dr. DeBakey and Dr. Cooley attended a meeting in which the historic agreement linking Baylor and St. Luke’s was consummated. Cooley, 83, and DeBakey, 95, shook hands and greeted each other, then sat down at a table where institutional leaders signed contracts making St. Luke’s the primary teaching hospital for Baylor. As the Chronicle report notes:

The pair’s relationship dates back to 1951, when DeBakey offered Cooley a job at Baylor, allowing the Houston native to return home after completing his training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. For the next decade the two would collaborate closely.
Cooley left in 1962 to found the Texas Heart Institute, acknowledging that directly competing with DeBakey in the same hospital became problematic. The two remained friends and were both still on the Baylor faculty, but no longer operated together.
In 1965, DeBakey participated in a federally funded program to design an artificial heart. Within a few years he had a device that some physicians felt was ready for human trials, but DeBakey believed it needed more work.
Then, to international acclaim in 1969, Cooley performed the first artificial heart implant in the chest of 47-year-old Haskell Karp, a dying heart surgery patient. Karp lived with the heart in his chest 65 hours before dying shortly after a heart transplant.
But Cooley’s notoriety was quickly tarnished after DeBakey said the heart was identical to one under development in the Baylor labs, and that Cooley had used it without permission.
Cooley said he and Dr. Domingo Liotta, who also designed artificial hearts in DeBakey’s lab, had built the heart privately, and that he had no choice but to use the heart because the patient’s life was in jeopardy.
In a 2004 interview, Methodist heart surgeon Mike Reardon said the episode “stole DeBakey’s shot at a Nobel Prize. What Mike needed was one crowning event to make him a candidate. And that was going to be the artificial heart.”
After the incident the American College of Surgeons voted to censure Cooley and, amid a dispute with the trustees of Baylor, Cooley resigned from the institution. DeBakey changed his focus and decided funds would be better spent developing pumps to assist failing hearts. Such devices became the mainstream treatment for patients with failing hearts.

In a move that has been expected for over a year but nevertheless shakes the foundation of Houston’s huge Texas Medical Center community, Baylor College of Medicine announced yesterday that it is ending its 50 year primary affiliation with Methodist Hospital as its main teaching hospital and entering into an agreement to make St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital its primary teaching hospital.
Baylor (which has no affiliation with Baylor University in Waco) is one of two medical schools in the Medical Center (the University of Texas Health Science Center is the other) and the older of the two. In addition to the financial considerations that induced Baylor to make the move, the affiliation with St. Luke’s now gives Baylor a direct relationship with two of the Medical Center’s best hospitals, St. Luke’s and its world-renowned affiliate, Texas Children’s Hospital.
Although the severing of the Baylor-Methodist relationship is unfortunate in several respects, it may turn out to be a good thing for the Medical Center as a whole if Methodist and UT agree that Methodist would become UT’s main teaching facility in the Medical Center. Such a relationship would give Methodist a direct relationship with another of the Medical Center’s world recognized hospitals — UT’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and would either supplement or replace UT’s existing relationship with the Memorial Hermann Hospital System. UT’s relationship with Memorial Hermann has always been hindered by Memorial Hermann’s relatively limited presence in the Medical Center, where its only hospital is Hermann Hospital, which is much smaller than either Methodist or St. Luke’s.