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Dr. Herbert “Herb” McCoy becomes a centenarian this week in a town he credits with enabling his passions.
McCoy, a resident of La Jolla’s Country Club neighborhood, was born Dec. 18, 1920, in Montclair, N.J. He graduated from Cornell University’s medical school in New York.
While on the residency staff and teaching at Cornell in the 1940s, McCoy was the member of a team who performed the first human cardiac catheterization, a procedure that involves injecting an opaque solution to outline the circulation to major organs in an X-ray.
“This led to our pioneer research in angiography,” he said. “These procedures are performed daily in large volume in institutions now all over the world.”