By PATRICIA SULLIVAN, WASHINGTON POST NEWS SERVICE
Michael E. DeBakey, 99, the father of modern cardiovascular surgery, who invented scores of medical procedures and instruments, developed the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital and established what became the Veterans Administration hospital system, died Friday at Methodist Hospital in Houston.
The hospital did not release the cause of death, but he had heart surgery in 2006. Over a 70-year medical career, Dr. DeBakey became one of the most influential and innovative heart surgeons in history. He changed the practice of cardiac surgery, performed the first successful heart bypass operation and is credited with saving thousands of lives.
“His legacy is holding the fragile and sacred gift of human life in his hands and returning it unbroken,” President Bush said in April, while awarding Dr. DeBakey the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
As a Tulane University medical student in 1932, Dr. DeBakey devised the “roller pump,” an essential component of the heart-lung machine that permitted open-heart surgery.
In the 1950s, he used his sewing skills, which he had learned from his mother, to patch faulty aortas by grafting.
The Dacron graft is now used throughout the world on diseased arteries. He also performed the first successful removal of a blockage of the main artery of the neck, a procedure known as an endarterectomy, which became the standard method for treating stroke.
He developed a device in 1963 that helped blood move from one chamber of the heart to another, and in 1966 he created a partial artificial heart.
One of his inventions, the DeBakey Ventricular Assist Device, is an apparatus implanted into the heart to increase blood flow.
Although Dr. DeBakey stopped performing surgery at age 90, after more than 60,000 operations, his legacy lives on among the thousands of surgeons he trained, many of whom now lead hospital and medical school departments.
Dr. DeBakey’s renown was such that the Duke of Windsor turned to him in 1964 to have an aneurysm removed. He was called on in 1996 when Boris Yeltsin, then running to be the first Russian president in the post-Soviet era, had a heart attack and needed quintuple bypass surgery. Russian doctors were afraid he would not survive an operation.
Dr. DeBakey examined him and declared him fit for surgery, as long as it was performed by one of the doctors he had trained. Renat Akchurin did the surgery, and Yeltsin survived another 11 years.
On New Year’s Eve 2005, Dr. DeBakey suffered a dissecting aortic aneurysm and became the oldest survivor of an operation he devised to repair torn aortas. In a stunning account in The New York Times almost a year later, the physician who had saved so many lives admitted that the pain of the initial incident was so searing that he accepted death as a better alternative.
“It never occurred to me to call 911 or my physician,” he told the Times. “As foolish as it may appear, you are, in a sense, a prisoner of the pain, which was intolerable. You’re thinking, what could I do to relieve myself of it. If it becomes intense enough, you’re perfectly willing to accept cardiac arrest as a possible way of getting rid of the pain.”
Michael Ellis DeBakey was born Sept. 7, 1908, to Lebanese immigrants in Lake Charles, La. His father was a pharmacist.
His mother, who tailored handmade clothing and embroidered linens, was enlisted by neighbors to teach their daughters to sew. Her son, the eldest of five children, sat in.
He graduated from Tulane in 1930 and received his medical degree two years later.
His innovations in surgery were not limited to the heart. He revolutionized treatments for strokes and aneurysms, replacing damaged blood vessels with a segment of the intestine. The once- risky procedure later became a standard surgical practice.Survivors include his wife of 33 years, German actress Katrin Fehlhaber, and their daughter, Olga-Katarina DeBakey; and two sons from his first marriage, Michael DeBakey Jr. and Dennis DeBakey.
(c) 2008 Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Comments