Posted on 12/01/2016 2:24:42 PM PST by Red Badger
Remarkable. Using liquid nitrogen, or with some sort of edged instrument?
He was a bit too young to have studied under Harvey Cushing, I suppose. Do you know if he ever met him?
I think Cushing was gone by the time Cooper came along. Cooper trained at Mayo. LOL. Cooper was like Rush. I never heard him mention another neurosurgeon. I never heard him mention Mayo. I didn’t know he trained there til years later.
He was very controversial. The relief provided by his procedure was derived clinically and the Neurologists of his day could not understand how it worked. In fact they accused him as a fraud and insisted the procedure didn’t work. He didn’t help things. He was like Trump in a way. He had a big event at St Barnabus in NYC where he did cases and invited the big shot Neurologists. He opened the presentation with a hired magician that he had carefully instructed. He presented the guy as a successful case. He knew the big shots didn’t want to believe so in the middle of the presentation the guy starts “having symptoms” so they would think “aha! He is a fraud!”. Just as he instructed the magician to do, as they start murmuring and people are shaking their heads like this is a professional catastrophe the guy starts pulling scarves from his sleeves and balloons out of his pockets. Cooper was still laughing years later and you have to admit it is pretty funny. The big shots never forgave him for humiliating them so when L Dopa came along they were only too happy to bury him.
It is unfortunate because he never really got the recognition he should have. He went on with the presentation and showed about twenty before and after movies with live patients and they grudgingly had to admit it worked. I almost got a PhD trying to show how.
He's not the same Irving S. Cooper who wrote books on Theosophy, Reincarnation, and The Secret of Happiness, is he?
I spent a fair amount of time with Cooper for a few weeks. The only historical figure I ever recall him mentioning was Schaltenbrand. He said the old German visited him in the 60s . He said they both had young wives and Cooper had them out to his place in White Plains. He remembered, he said watching the girls in their bikinis by the pool through the window with Schaltenbrand.
True story. Years later when I was in the Army I saw an E5 named Schaltenbrand. I laughed and said I bet you don’t know about the Atlas. He laughed and replied, “You would be wrong. I know all about the Atlas.”. I said, surprised, “Your kidding!”. He went on to explain that he was his uncle and he remembered the trip his uncle made to visit his family in NYC in the sixties when he was a boy and he also knew who Cooper was.
He then went on to say, “I can tell you something about that Atlas that no one knows.”. No one ever mentioned it because it was “not helpful” and it is a valuable work that can’t be replicated but the brains used were Jewish...
To quote Gandalf the Grey, "there are things that are best not spoken of after sundown." I may not have the words exactly, but the sentiment is true.
As you can imagine, I was horrified. But then I had to say, and I may have even replied to him that it was inconceivable that some good could not come out of what had taken place but I could never think about that Atlas again without remembering.
Copper had been complaining about back pain the day we were in the OR. He got a set of T spine films afterward and he had spine mets. I never saw him again. He called me a month or so later and asked me to look up some research on treating lung cancer with a new thing I had never heard of, anti-TNF. I sent him some papers, as I recall. He died a couple months later. Remarkable man. Thoroughly despised by the Neurologists and Neurosurgeons of his time. I never met a neurosurgeon that had a good word to say about him. In fact, that was how I discovered he trained at Mayo. I commented to a neurosurgeon at Northwestern that it was a shame he was so hated and he said they loved him “out there”. He said he visited The Mayo and they had a big picture of him there.
He wrote several books, I saw a spy novel once.
There was only ever one Irving Spencer Cooper. LOL. Larger than life.
The Secret of Happiness says 1913. Cooper was born in 1922, so that has to be a different IS Cooper.
Cooper did invent the cryoprobe and IIRC owned the company. The story of the development of the thallamotomies is fascinating. According to Cooper he discovered it himself. LOL. There were several groups working on it concurrently, as I recall. A Canadian Group and a French group. The Canadians actually had a different target, the pallidofugal tract and they would section this through an open ventriculostomy which is, as you can imagine, a HUGE craniotomy. Cooper started out placing a foley by hand through a burr hole and then gradually inflating the bulb a little more every day until it created a cavity of a centimeter or so and then instill a few cc. of glycerol. He invented the cryoprobe pretty quickly and “the rest is history”. He told a story about observing a patient after an aneurysm operation that gave him the idea. I don’t know if it was true or not. I think most folks who heard him tell it thought he made it up because he could never acknowledge that there were others working on it as well. Lars Leksell in Sweden being one.
I think Cooper pulled the magician thing to rub their noses in it. He knew, at that point, they would have to concede that what he was doing DID work. You do have to admit, it is pretty damn funny. He sure loved telling the story.
Little known fact. Did you know the Gamma Knife was invented to do thallamotomies?
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