Medicine: Surgeon’s Progress

Michael Ellis DeBakey. son of a Lebanese immigrant who had made good in Lake Charles, La., wanted to be a physician—specifically, a surgeon. Soon after graduation from Tulane University School of Medicine, interning at New Orleans’ vast Charity Hospital, young Dr. DeBakey invented a pump that he hoped might some day relieve or replace the heart during delicate surgery. That was in 1932, and the inventive intern was about 20 years ahead of his time.

With driving intensity and singleness of purpose, Surgeon DeBakey worked all day every day and half the night (since 1948 at Houston’s Baylor University hospitals) on mechanical defects of blood vessels, especially the aorta. This great vessel, the body’s main artery, sometimes develops an aneurysm (like a ballooning blister on a bicycle’s inner tube) that is often painful and disabling, and fatal when it bursts. Daringly, Dr. DeBakey began to cut out aneurysms and replace the damaged section of aorta with a graft from an artery bank. Gradually, with improved techniques and materials, he inched closer to the heart. By 1956, with specially knit synthetic tubing (better for many cases than artery-bank material), and an oxygenator fitted to an updated model of his 1932 pump, Dr. DeBakey was able to operate within a couple of inches of the heart, and stop its beat at will.

But strokes—accidents in the brain’s blood supply—are only less common than heart attacks, and can cause more severe crippling. Dr. DeBakey tackled these, installed artery grafts in cases where the blood stoppage had occurred at an accessible site below the skull (TIME, Nov. 3).

Still pushing for further progress, Mike DeBakey gets less than five hours sleep a night, rises at 4:30 to work on reports before going to surgery at 7:30, has taken off only two weekends (to hunt deer) in four years. Lean, slightly stooped and with big, penetrating dark eyes, he is so miserly of time that he never drives when he can fly, never walks when he can drive —even the one block from medical school to hospital.

Last week, in Atlantic City, N.J. for the A.M.A. meeting. Perfectionist DeBakey phoned his secretary to check on patients, added a complaint: he had no white tie and tails with him, had to rent them for a ceremony. The House of Delegates, he explained as an afterthought, had just voted him its 1959 Distinguished Service Award. A gold medal with citation, it is the A.M.A.’s highest recognition for outstanding contributions to medical progress.