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.
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.