Dr.Jimale Specialist Hospital

11/12/2025

…Here is the true story of America's other super left-handed cardiac surgeon, Dr. Denton Cooley. His rivalry with fellow Texan cardiac surgeon, Dr. Michael DeBacky, has left an epic legacy in the history of medicine, especially surgery… I appreciate and respect both pioneers of cardiac surgery, who helped build the glory of success, progress, and supremacy of American medicine. May God bless them for their supreme healthcare services, helping to save millions of lives… MJ

Denton Cooley performed a human heart transplant in 1969 knowing it would ignite the most bitter feud in American medical history — and he did it anyway.

Denton Cooley stood in a Houston operating room on May 3, 1969, preparing to transplant a human heart without the blessing of the man who helped design the machine keeping that patient alive. The surgery was not just medical. It was political. Personal. And guaranteed to fracture his career.

To the public, Denton Cooley was a polished Texas surgeon with steady hands and confidence under pressure. Inside the profession, he was something more dangerous. He was ambitious in a field that hated open ambition. He trained under the legendary Dr. Michael DeBakey at Baylor College of Medicine, forming one of the most effective surgical partnerships of the century. Together, they pioneered cardiovascular techniques that saved thousands.

But power splits partnerships.

By the mid 1960s, artificial heart research became the most sensitive race in medicine. DeBakey led the federally funded program. Cooley ran the operating rooms at St. Luke’s Hospital. The technology existed. The ethics were unresolved. What mattered was who would move first.

On April 4, 1969, Cooley implanted the first total artificial heart in a human patient, Haskell Karp. The device had been designed by Domingo Liotta, an engineer working under DeBakey’s program. Cooley claimed the situation was terminal and time critical. DeBakey claimed the heart was used without authorization. What followed was open war.

When Karp’s artificial heart failed three days later, Cooley performed something unprecedented. He transplanted a donor heart as a rescue procedure. It briefly worked. Karp died soon after from complications. The headlines exploded. So did the professional fallout.

DeBakey accused Cooley of ethical violations and theft of intellectual property. Baylor severed ties. Institutional doors closed. Surgeons took sides. For nearly four decades, the two men stopped speaking.

Cooley kept operating.

He founded the Texas Heart Institute and performed more than 100,000 open heart surgeries over his career. Patients lined up. Results mattered more than resentment. While the feud became legend, Cooley’s operating rooms stayed filled.

In 2007, after 38 years of silence, Denton Cooley and Michael DeBakey appeared together at a medical conference and shook hands. DeBakey was 99 years old. Cooley was 87. No speeches. No apologies. Just acknowledgment.

Denton Cooley did not step into history because consensus invited him in. He stepped because medicine advances when someone accepts the cost of acting first.

The operation saved few lives that day.

The decision changed heart surgery forever.

05/12/2025

When Michael DeBakey picked up a length of Dacron fabric in a Houston department store and told the clerk he needed it to rebuild a human artery, the man laughed. DeBakey did not. He walked out with the material because he knew the future of vascular surgery depended on something no manufacturer was willing to supply.

DeBakey lived in a world where medicine still surrendered to limits.
Heart patients died in operating rooms because surgeons did not yet have the tools or the techniques that could keep them alive.
DeBakey refused to accept that.
He believed the body could be repaired the same way a craftsman repaired a delicate machine: with precision, invention, and calm hands.

He designed a roller pump at 23 years old, a device that later became a core component of the heart-lung machine.
It kept blood moving outside the body during surgery, a breakthrough that opened the door to procedures once considered impossible.
Surgeons around the world adopted it.
DeBakey treated it as only the beginning.

In the 1950s, when no company produced grafts strong enough to replace damaged arteries, he went to a store, bought Dacron fabric, brought it back to the lab, and stitched prototypes on a sewing machine.
He tested them, refined them, and implanted them successfully.
Patients who had once been given weeks to live left the hospital walking upright.

Then came the era of open heart surgery.
DeBakey performed some of the first aortic aneurysm repairs ever attempted.
He operated on soldiers, senators, and ordinary people who arrived at the edge of death.
His team described his focus as almost unnerving.
He moved with a steadiness that made the room feel anchored even in moments when the stakes were measured in seconds.

In 1966, he helped develop the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital units.
Those MASH units brought advanced surgical care closer to the battlefield and dramatically increased survival rates.
DeBakey saw war not as a theater of heroism but as a place where medical innovation had to move faster than destruction.

He advised presidents.
He chaired committees that reshaped medical education.
He built one of the world’s leading cardiovascular centers.
But for all the influence and accolades, the moments that defined him happened in silence, in operating rooms where a surgeon’s mistakes had consequences no lecture hall could address.

Near the end of his life, he underwent the very aortic surgery he pioneered.
He survived it at age 97, a living contradiction who owed his life to his own ideas.

Michael DeBakey did not wait for the future of medicine.
He stitched it by hand, piece by piece, until the impossible became routine and the operating room became a place where hope could finally outrun fear.

08/09/2025

…A few days ago, L.A. a 12-year-old Somali patient, came to our Jimale Specialized Hospital for Surgery and Family Medicine in Mogadishu, Somalia, with her parents for a five-year follow-up visit following chest surgery. I have operated on L.A. when she was 7 years old for chronic empyema of the left chest. The patient appeared healthy, robust, and energetic. The patient's growth is considered full for her age. Her family reported that she is in the fifth grade of middle school and is doing well. All prescribed tests, including spirometry, flowmetry, and a standard chest x-ray, were normal. I recommended that the patient undergo regular check-ups at least every two to three years… MJ

15/07/2025

20/06/2025

…Doing the right things to save lives (limbs) and taking the right steps to alleviate pain and human suffering—

…The purpose of presenting my case here is to demonstrate our commitment to using the best evidence-based approach available in current surgical protocols. In other words, it is about preventing the loss of life or limb, often achieved through timely and appropriate medical care, high-level surgical interventions… Furthermore, it involves addressing both the physical pain and emotional distress associated with illness or injury. Our perioperative team which I had led as Chief Surgeon and Medical Coordinator at Keysaney Field Hospital, Mogadishu City, Somalia meticulously achieved pain relief through medications, physiotherapy and psychological support, following the surgical principles established by the International Committee of the Red Cross for War Surgery… During the “period” of high and low intensity of the Somali civil war, which unfortunately and sadly lasted for many years – almost a generational era in my country with unnecessary, unthinkable and premature loss of life, killed or maimed and costly destruction – physical destruction, for example of buildings or infrastructure; destruction and loss of historical sites… MJ

…On my return to Somalia 7 years ago, I have run into an elderly Somali patient whose life and right leg I had saved in 1992. The patient had a severe gunshot wound to the right thigh. A high velocity bullet had severed his right femoral artery, and had subsequently lost a lot of blood. I had corrected his hemorrhagic shock and successfully repaired his right femoral artery with the interposition of a saphenous vein graft. The femoral artery is still functioning and patent...after 26 years. MJ

17/06/2025

"...A successful surgeon should be a man who, if asked to name the three best surgeons in the world, would have difficulty choosing the other two..."
-By Dr. Denton Cooley, one of the world's most renowned heart surgeons; with his fellow surgeon and rival, Dr. Michael DeBakey, a major medical figure at the height of the Houston era, the epicenter and pioneer of heart surgery...“ MJ

19/05/2025

“The Man Who Gave the World a Second Chance at Life”

At a time when a diagnosis of diabetes was a slow march to death, one man’s quiet determination rewrote the fate of millions. Sir Frederick Banting, born in 1891 in Ontario, Canada, was not born into prestige, but his work would become one of the most life-saving medical breakthroughs in history. A surgeon with a restless mind and deep compassion, Banting was haunted by the suffering of diabetic patients—especially children—who wasted away despite their families’ desperate care. Back then, Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence. The body starved from within, and doctors could do little but ease the decline.

But in 1921, in a humble lab in Toronto, Banting—alongside his assistant Charles Best, and later working with John Macleod and James Collip—unlocked the medical miracle the world so desperately needed: insulin. It was not discovered in fanfare but through sleepless nights, tireless research, and boundless belief. By isolating insulin from the pancreas, Banting made it possible to regulate blood sugar—and suddenly, those once-doomed patients could live. Children who had been wasting away began to thrive again. It was as if he had handed the world a new dawn.

In 1923, Banting was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, becoming the youngest recipient to date. He humbly shared his prize money with Best, reflecting the same selflessness that had driven his research. Unlike many, Banting was uninterested in wealth or fame—his reward was in the lives he saved. Throughout his life, he continued to serve, even as a medical officer during World War II, where he tragically died in a plane crash in 1941.

Though Sir Frederick Banting is no longer with us, his legacy endures every time a diabetic child laughs, grows, and lives a full life. From hospital wards to homes around the world, his gift keeps beating—quiet, constant, vital. “He didn’t seek to change the world. He sought to heal it—and in doing so, he gave it hope.”

05/02/2025

Head and Neck Surgery

22/01/2025

https://bbc.com/news/articles/c20k5wrgz13o

War appears to have accelerated the spread of pathogens resistant to antibiotics in the country.