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News
For any readers who have benefitted from cardiac surgery, themselves or through family members or friends, this will explain how one pioneer shaped the field.
Michael E. Debakey, M.D., died of natural causes Friday night. In 2006, he made what many called a miraculous recovery following a procedure he had himself perfected.
In every sense, he was a doctor’s doctor and a patient’s doctor, too.
“Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, whose innovative heart and blood vessel operations made him one of the most influential doctors in the United States, died Friday night in Houston, where he lived. He was 99.
“Many consider Michael E. DeBakey to be the greatest surgeon ever,” The Journal of the American Medical Association said in 2005.
“Dr. DeBakey’s pioneering surgical procedures in bypassing blocked arteries in the neck, legs and heart have been performed on millions of patients around the world. By the time he stopped a regular surgical schedule, when he was in his 80s, he had performed more than 60,000 operations.
“He was also instrumental in making Houston a major center for heart surgery and research and transforming Baylor into one of the nation’s great medical education and research institutions.
“And he was a leader in developing mechanical devices to assist failing hearts. An early invention, the roller pump, devised while he was in medical school in the 1930s, became the central component of the heart-lung machine, which takes over the functions of the heart and lungs during surgery by supplying oxygenated blood to the brain. It helped inaugurate the era of open-heart surgery.
“One of Dr. DeBakey’s innovations helped preserve his own life in 2006, when he underwent surgery to repair a torn aorta. He had devised the operation 50 years earlier. He spent months making what he called a miraculous recovery and then returned to an active schedule.”
Source: New York Times, July 12, 2008
