Millions of heart ailment sufferers may owe their lives to Dr. Michael DeBakey’s dedication to innovation. The man who would not quit finally had his body quit on him two months shy of his 100th birthday, passing away late Friday. Dr. Debakey developed the roller pump in medical school in 1932 to keep pumping and re-circulating a patient’s blood during open heart surgery (in the days before blood banks). Dr.Debakey was a pioneer with a fierce desire to learn how this most vital of organs worked.
His roller pump would be key to the development of the heart-lung bypass machine, so vital to all aspects of heart surgery today. But his greatest achievements were in the area of heart artery bypass to fix the effects of arteriosclerosis. Like Dr. Salk with polio it was his greatest obsession and ultimate disappointment. He never believed cholesterol alone was the key determinant in this disease and worked tirelessly nearly every day to find a greater understanding of how this disease forms.
Like most great inventors, he was always looking to improve his craft. Described in the New York Times by Dr. Jeremy Morton, himself a noted heart surgeon and Debakey student, “he could be sweet as dripping honey when it came to patients and medical students, but could be brutal with surgical residents.” A famous line of Dr. Debakey’s was ““If you were on the operating table, would you want a perfectionist or somebody who cared little for detail?” He remembered witnessing a student being called out for cutting a length of suture the wrong length. DeBakey always demanded perfection of them and ultimately of himself.
He had an itch that could never be scratched – a cure for arteriosclerosis – and like most driven people, the fact he, Dr. Christian Barnard and other noted heart surgeons pioneered technology that led to heart and other organ transplants, reduced the results of fatty acid build-up in arteries, it bothered him he could not definitively get to the root cause of and cure the disease.
He was a quite a remarkable man even in is 90’s he would begin with a couple of hours of study in his home office then drive a sports car to the hospital working from 10 am until 6 pm and then going home to study for another two hours before retiring. He performed more than 60,000 heart surgeries during his 70-year career. Cardiovascular surgeon Dr. George Noon in an LA Times tribute, 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.”
He has treated the rich and famous as well as not so. During difficult times in the Nixon Administration he earned his way onto the famed enemies list by visiting the Soviet Union, then sat with the President in a de-briefing session about life in that mysterious country. He later became the surgeon who extended the life of Boris Yeltsin with heart surgery.
He has operated on patients ranging 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.
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.”
