Remembering Dr. Denton Cooley, Ralph Branca

Dr. Denton Cooley was one of the greatest heart surgeons of the 20th Century. After the first generation of heart surgeons performed primarily closed heart operations, Cooley pioneered open-heart surgery. He did the first heart transplant in America, inserted the first artificial heart in a patient (which caused years of friction with his colleague, Michael DeBakey) and his team in Texas performed at least 120,000 operations. Ralph Branca was the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who surrendered one of the most famous home runs in baseball history, the ninth-inning “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” by Bobby Thomson that won the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants.