Dr. Michael DeBakey, Hear Surgeon From Texas, 99
DGH
Dr. Michael DeBakey Is Dead at 99
[New York Times]
HOUSTON [Texas] (AP) -- Dr. Michael DeBakey, the world-famous
cardiovascular surgeon who pioneered such now-common procedures as
bypass surgery and invented a host of devices to help heart patients,
has died. He was 99.
DeBakey died Friday night [July 11, 2008] at The Methodist Hospital in
Houston [Texas] from ''natural causes,'' according to a statement
issued early Saturday [July 12, 2008] by Baylor College of Medicine
and The Methodist Hospital.
DeBakey counted world leaders among his patients and helped turn
Baylor from a provincial school into one of the nation's great medical
institutions.
''Dr. DeBakey's reputation brought many people into this institution,
and he treated them all: heads of state, entertainers, businessmen and
presidents, as well as people with no titles and no means,'' said Ron
Girotto, president of The Methodist Hospital System.
Girotto said the surgeon ''has improved the human condition and
touched the lives of generations to come.''
While still in medical school in 1932, he invented the roller pump,
which became the major component of the heart-lung machine, beginning
the era of open-heart surgery. The machine takes over the function of
the heart and lungs during surgery.
It was only a start of a lifetime of innovation. The surgical
procedures that DeBakey developed once were the wonders of the medical
world. Today, they are commonplace procedures in most hospitals.
He also was a pioneer in the effort to develop artificial hearts and
heart pumps to assist patients waiting for transplants, and helped
create more than 70 surgical instruments.
In early 2006, DeBakey underwent surgery for a damaged aorta -- a
procedure he had developed.
In a rare interview published later that year, DeBakey gave The New
York Times details of the operation, performed when he was 97.
''It is a miracle,'' DeBakey said. ''I really should not be here.'' He
said he at first gambled that his aorta would heal on its own and
refused to be admitted to a hospital, and was unresponsive and near
death when his doctors and his wife decided to proceed, despite his
age. He then spent several months in the hospital.
As he recovered, DeBakey told his doctors he was glad they had
operated, despite his earlier refusals.
''If they hadn't done it, I'd be dead,'' he said.
Dr. William T. Butler, a colleague of DeBakey's at Baylor, said in
March 2006 that DeBakey established himself with his surgical firsts
as the ''maestro of cardiovascular surgery.''
''Dr. DeBakey was never afraid to challenge the status quo, often
going against the tide,'' Butler said. ''Some times his colleagues did
not really accept his visionary ideas, particularly as he propelled
beyond the boundaries of existing scientific dogma.''
But the accolades poured in Saturday as news of the death spread.
Baylor College of Medicine President Dr. Peter G. Traber recorded a
taped webcast for the college community saying DeBakey ''created the
foundations of modern surgical practice,'' and always looked for new
ways to treat patients ravaged by heart disease.
Cardiovascular surgeon Dr. George Noon called his longtime partner
''the greatest surgeon of the 20th century'' who ''single-handedly
raised the standard of medical care, teaching and research around the
world.''
In a 1985 Associated Press interview, DeBakey said, ''I'm accused of
being a perfectionist and, in the way it's usually defined, I guess I
am. In medicine, and certainly in surgery, you have to be as perfect
as possible. There's no room for mistakes.''
DeBakey was the first to perform replacement of arterial aneurysms and
obstructive lesions in the mid-1950s. He later developed bypass pumps
and connections to replace excised segments of diseased arteries.
A tireless worker and a stern taskmaster, DeBakey literally had scores
of patients under his care at any one time, helping to establish his
name as a leading cardiovascular surgeon. He performed more than
60,000 heart surgeries during his 70 year career, The Methodist
Hospital said.
''Man was born to work hard,'' he said.
His patients ranged from penniless peasants from the Third World to
such famous figures as the Duke of Windsor, the Shah of Iran, King
Hussein of Jordan, Turkish President Turgut Ozal, Nicaraguan Leader
Violetta Chamorro and Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.
But he said celebrities don't get special treatment on the operating
table: ''Once you incise the skin, you find that they are all very
similar.''
He made headlines again in 1996 when he flew to Moscow to help examine
ailing Russian President Boris Yeltsin and served as a consultant when
he underwent surgery.
DeBakey served as chairman of the President's Commission on Heart
Disease, Cancer and Stroke during Johnson's administration and helped
establish the National Library of Medicine. He was author of more than
1,000 medical reports, papers, chapters and books on surgery, medicine
and related topics.
DeBakey also trained hundreds of cardiovascular surgeons who now are
practicing throughout the world. Among them was famed heart surgeon
Dr. Denton Cooley, who later became DeBakey's chief rival in the Texas
Medical Center.
''I like my work, very much. I like it so much that I don't want to do
anything else,'' DeBakey said.
Baylor University College of Medicine was a fledgling medical school
when DeBakey joined it in 1948, five years after it moved from Dallas
to Houston.
The Waco-based university later cut its ties to the school, but
DeBakey, as the medical school's president and later chancellor, had
helped to establish its own identity.
In 1953, DeBakey performed the first Dacron graft to replace part of
an occluded artery. In the 1960s, he began coronary arterial
bypasses.
In 1962, DeBakey received a $2.5 million grant to work on an
artificial heart that could be implanted without being linked to an
exterior console. In 1966, he was the first to successfully use a
partial artificial heart -- a left ventricular bypass pump.
It was the first implantation of a complete artificial heart by Cooley
in 1969 that led to the famous feud between the two surgeons that
lasted until the two publicly made amends in 2007. The patient,
Haskell Karp, 47, lived on the artificial heart for nearly five days,
then received a heart transplant, but died 36 hours later.
Cooley was censured by the medical school and the National Heart
Institute for using the experimental device, and he and DeBakey traded
accusations about their research. Cooley, who contended Karp was so
ill he had no choice but to operate, left Baylor and established the
Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in the Texas
Medical Center.
Meanwhile, the effort to save lives through heart transplants was
stalled. Dr. Christiaan Bernard in South Africa had performed the
first human heart transplant in history in late 1967. In the United
States, DeBakey and Cooley were among those who began performing the
transplants, but death rates were high because the recipients' bodies
rejected the new organs.
The advent of a new anti-rejection drug, cyclosporine, gave new
impetus to organ transplants in the 1980s. In 1984, DeBakey performed
his first heart transplant in 14 years.
His work as an inventor continued. In the late 1990s, DeBakey brought
out a ventricular assist device touted as one-tenth the size of
current heart pumps that helped ease suffering for patients waiting
for heart transplants.
In the late 1990s, he took an active role in creating the Michael E.
DeBakey Heart Institute at Hays Medical Center in Hays, Kansas.
DeBakey was born September 7, 1908, in Lake Charles, La., the son of
Lebanese immigrants. He got interested in medicine while listening to
physicians chat at his father's pharmacy.
''I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. I just didn't know what
kind,'' DeBakey once said.
He received his bachelor's and medical degrees from Tulane University
in New Orleans.
He recalled in 1999 that the time he finished medical school in 1932,
''there was virtually nothing you could do for heart disease. If a
patient came in with a heart attack, it was up to God.''
Early in his career, DeBakey invented a new blood transfusion needle,
a new suture scissors and a new colostomy clamp. He began teaching at
Tulane in 1937.
During World War II, DeBakey worked in Europe as director of the
surgeon general's surgical consultants division, helping develop
mobile army surgical hospitals (MASH units) and specialized treatment
centers for returning veterans.
He returned to Tulane after the war and joined Baylor University
College of Medicine in Houston in 1948.
DeBakey's first wife, Diana Cooper DeBakey, died of a heart attack in
1972. Three years later, DeBakey married a German film actress, Katrin
Fehlhaber.
She survives, along with their daughter, Olga-Katarina, and two of his
four sons from his first marriage, Michael and Dennis. Two other sons,
Ernest and Barry, preceded him in death, a Baylor spokeswoman said.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obit-DeBakey.html?scp=1&sq=debakey&st=cse