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t m c » p u l s e | m a y 2 0 1 8 22 June had been asked by the school doctor to pass out medication to students in their dorms and that is how she met her future husband. They were married in the fall of 1959. In 1960, the newlyweds made their way to Houston after Mattox was accepted to Baylor College of Medicine. To help her husband through medical school, June took a job as the head nurse on the pediatric oncology unit of what is now The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. "It was a busy time, the first few years," June recalled. "We lived close by in a garage apartment and I was usually working on weekends and he would be studying all the time." DeBakey days While Mattox was making rounds as a Baylor student at Jefferson Davis Hospital on Allen Parkway, history was in the making at the Texas Medical Center. Cardiac and vascular surgery were still somewhat primitive, but Mattox has a saying about things like that: "Go to the heart of danger and there you find safety." At that time, Michael E. DeBakey, M.D., was doing cardiothoracic surgery like nobody else and creating a training program that was the most disciplined in the country. That's just what Mattox was looking for. "The biggest challenge was what was emerg- ing—cardiac transplantation, development of cardiac pulmonary bypass, sewing of vessels together. It required knowledge, judgment, tech- nique," Mattox recalled. "I wanted the toughest, hardest, highest road, the most complex training program I could find. That's the way I'm wired." In 1965, Mattox was drafted into the Army to serve in the Vietnam War. When he returned in 1967, the race was on for the artificial heart. That year, a South African surgeon successfully completed the first human heart transplant. "DeBakey was working on the artificial heart in his labora- tories at Baylor when Christiaan Barnard transplanted the heart and the world went crazy and everybody started playing the 'me too' game," Mattox said. "The laboratories, limited in size, were switched from doing artificial hearts to doing trans- plants. Dr. Domingo Liotta, who was doing the work with the artificial heart, was kicked out of his lab—not fired, but he didn't have a place to work." As Mattox recalled, Denton Cooley, M.D., acclaimed heart surgeon and former protégé of DeBakey, bumped into Liotta one day and asked, "Why do you have such a long face?" Liotta, who had been working closely with DeBakey, answered, "Because they kicked me out of my lab." Cooley responded: "Well, you know I am a member of the department of surgery. I have extra space over at St. Luke's Hospital. Why don't you come work with me and bring your equipment?" On April 4, 1969, Mattox was still a resident training in general surgery when he was called in by Cooley to observe one of history's most ground- breaking surgeries. Cooley had found a patient who needed an artificial heart: Haskell Karp, a 47-year-old man dying of heart failure. DeBakey and Liotta had been developing an artificial heart through funding from the National Heart Institute. They had tested the heart in four calves, but all of them died within hours of their surgeries. Nonetheless, Cooley was determined. DeBakey was out of town, and Liotta went to the lab and procured the artificial heart for Cooley's patient. Cooley and Liotta became the first surgeons to implant a total artificial heart in a human body. "I'm probably the only one left who was in the room that day," Mattox said. Mattox said he was one of the first people to see DeBakey after he got back to Houston and dis- covered, from a newspaper article, that Cooley had Mattox relaxes in his office at Ben Taub Hospital.