By Robert Davis and Steve Sternberg
From the soldier wounded on the battlefield to the medical student digging for answers, the legacy of pioneering heart specialist Michael DeBakey will be felt across the world of medicine today, tomorrow and beyond.
DeBakey died Friday in Houston at age 99 at the hospital where he worked, Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital.
But because of his lifelong, perfectionist’s passion to help patients, DeBakey leaves behind a huge imprint on modern medicine. Clamps, pumps, tubing, techniques, protocols, scientific breakthroughs, a vast medical library and entire health care systems and approaches all bear his mark — and often his name.
“Medicine is an extremely complex system, and he contributed to every part of it,” says Norm McSwain, a surgery professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, where DeBakey studied medicine. “If you look at it from the big perspective, he is the best surgeon who ever lived.”
DeBakey operated on 60,000 people, including the Duke of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich and comedian Jerry Lewis. But whom DeBakey treated did not change how he treated them.
Fellow surgeon Kenneth Mattox says DeBakey treated patients who came into the trauma center “just as specifically as he treated the royalty who came to see him from around the world.”
DeBakey’s values, Mattox says, came from the childhood lessons learned in Lake Charles, La.
Michael Ellis DeBakey was born Sept. 7, 1908, to Shaker Morris and Reheeja Zorba DeBakey, who had emigrated from Lebanon to the USA as children.
They were self-educated and successful, with a drugstore and investments in rice farming, real estate and construction.
“Every Sunday when he was growing up, they would go to an orphanage,” Mattox says. One day DeBakey’s mother forced her son to give another boy his baseball cap. “He said something back to her and she said, ‘Michael, you have many caps. This child you have just given your cap to has none.’ That kind of value stayed with him all of his life.”
DeBakey went on to help create entire systems to help others.
After World War II broke out, DeBakey went to work in the U.S. Army Surgeon General’s Office. With childhood friend Gordon Holcombe, he set up the first M.A.S.H. units and a network of health services for returning veterans. That network evolved into the Veterans Administration.
After the war, while serving on a Hoover administration medical task force, he persuaded President Hoover to use the collection from the shabby, neglected library of the U.S. Surgeon General as the basis of a new, independent National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md.
In 1948, DeBakey also began lobbying for the creation of the research center now known as the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
DeBakey loved to learn.
He recalled in a 1998 interview with USA TODAY how, as a child, “we were virtually required to go to the library each week, borrow a new book and read it.”
One week, DeBakey said, he came home from the library in a funk because “the best book they had, they wouldn’t let you take home. I told my father about that. He asked what book it was. It was the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
His dad bought a set.
As a surgeon, DeBakey applied his problem-solving skills to everything from clogged arteries to lung cancer to surgical infections. He also made it possible for thousands of other surgeons to cure people. He invented many of the tools now used routinely in heart surgery, even stitching the first synthetic blood vessels using his wife’s sewing machine.
One of his favorite accomplishments was the DeBakey Left Ventricular Assist Device, which he created with help from NASA. The pump supports failing hearts. “Thank God, I’ve lived to see this,” DeBakey said in 1998.
In recent years, Mattox says, DeBakey was particularly concerned about more money going to the management of health care systems than to patient care.
Antonio Gotto, dean of Cornell University School of Medicine in New York and a DeBakey collaborator for 25 years, says, “I know of no one who has made a greater contribution, not only in cardiovascular medicine, but also as a medical statesman and leader.”
<>
Comments