Dr. Michael DeBakey of Greatest surgeon of the 20th century dies
Dr. Ellis Michael DeBakey, internationally renowned as the father of modern cardiovascular surgery - and regarded by many as the greatest surgeon ever - died Friday night at Methodist Hospital in Houston. He was 99.
Methodist DeBakey said officials had died of natural causes. They gave no further details. State Medical, chancellor emeritus of Baylor College of Medicine and a surgeon at Methodist Hospital since 1949, DeBakey trained thousands of surgeons over several generations, achieving legendary status decades before his death. During his career, he felt he had flown more than 60000 operations. His patients included the famous - Russian President Boris Yeltsin and film actress Marlene Dietrich among them - and uncelebrated. "Mr. DeBakey alone has raised the quality of medical care, education and research throughout the world," said Dr. George noon, a cardiovascular surgeon and long-time partner DeBakey. "He was the greatest surgeon of the 20 th century, and doctors throughout the world are indebted to him for his contribution to medicine." DeBakey nearly died in 2006, when he was the victim of an aortic aneurysm, a condition for which he has pioneered the treatment. It is considered the oldest patient to have suffered both survived and surgery. He recovered well enough to go to Washington earlier this year to receive the gold medal of Congress, one of the nation the two highest civilian awards. He remained strong and was a player in medicine and sound of 90 years, performing surgery, travel and publication of articles in scientific journals. His large hands are stable, strong in the hearing. His regime personal health including the stairs at work and a single cup of coffee in the morning. DeBakey mourning the death Friday evening by leaders of Methodist and Baylor. Methodist President Ron Girotto said, "It has improved the human condition and touched the lives of generations to come. We missed a lot." And Baylor President Dr. Peter Traber said "it has established a standard for pre-eminence in all areas of his life that those who knew and worked with him are obliged to follow. And it was a very visible reminder of the importance of leadership and give back to those communities. " DeBakey was born in Lake Charles, La., in 1908, one month before began to Ford Model T and one quarter of a century before the discovery of bacteria fight against drugs. His genius helped shape the surgery and health care as we know it. While still in medical school, he developed a roller pump for heart-lung machine. DeBakey invented many of the procedures and devices - more than 50 surgical instruments - used to repair the heart and arteries today. It is widely credited with laying the groundwork for the Texas Medical Center in Houston recruiting pre-eminent doctors and researchers, and the city with an international reputation for cutting edge of health care. He was a maverick, running against the Harris County Medical Society for insisting that surgeons be certified by the American Board of Surgery. At the time, it was common for doctors to operate. "DeBakey built a department of surgery at Baylor and Methodist Hospital, which was to become one of the most famous in the world, a galaxy of young stars," the late author Thomas Thompson wrote in 1970 in the hearts: surgeons and transplants, miracles and disasters heart along the border. "In a city where 25 years ago, it was practiced medicine for more mediocre way, it emerged in a marshy area six miles south of downtown ... one of the handful of distinguished medical centers in the World. " He invented and perfected ways to repair or weakened clot-obstruction of blood vessels using replacements to preserve the blood vessels of man, and later, with artificial. He is credited with the first successful surgical treatment potentially lethal aneurysms in various parts of the aorta. He co-authored one of the earliest documents linking smoking and lung cancer in 1939. During the World War II, serving in the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, DeBakey's work has led to the development of the mobile surgery hospital, known as MASH units. He helped President John F. Kennedy lobby for Medicare, he recommended the creation of the National Library of Medicine, subsequently authorized by Congress. In 1963 DeBakey won the Lasker Award for clinical research, considered the American equivalent of a Nobel Prize. "Sometimes, it could act as the meanest man in the world. It does let you breathe," said Dr. John L. Ochsner of New Orleans, which under DeBakey trained and whose father, Dr. Alton Ochsner was the mentor DeBakey at Tulane University School of Medicine. DeBakey Ochsner baby-sitting four children, John, and let them do chin-up on his arm. A John Ochsner said, "What makes him so mad all the time he was trying to conquer the world and every minute is so important to him. He did not have time for frivolity at all. " Patients and their families have seen otherwise. For them, DeBakey is a healer with quiet authority which seems to work miracles. Enfolding a patient in his hands, face patient to relax, some recalled. He was saddened by the breakup in 2004 of the history, 50 years of marriage between Baylor and Methodist, which dissolves over disagreements over the future of institutions. DeBakey said that the failure has no meaning and wounded two parties. Friends described as "broken heart" on the division and in an interview earlier this year, he said that the description was not inaccurate. In 2003, the MicroMed DeBakey LVAD is implanted in a 10-year-old girl, the youngest patient in the world to receive the device. In 2004, a child-sized version became available for children as young as 5. DeBakey developed the device, which strengthens the heart of the main pumping chamber, in collaboration with the cardiac surgeon Dr. George noon and NASA. "The man has an incredible spirit and an incredible mastery of details," said the former CEO Travis Baugh MicroMed. "It is also never stopped inventing. We are working on a project with him a new way of sutures fix the heart. " The power to intimidate and awe In his first - and it was the first one exceptionally long - DeBakey, with its nose high profile and dark brown eyes, had the power to intimidate and its acolytes admiration. In surgery, DeBakey was famous for his withering remarks, delivered in a velvety Louisiana drawl, made in haste and ambitious residents operating alongside him. John Ochsner recalled how, if an operation is going slowly, DeBakey may wonder,''I am the only one to do anything here? " Or a resident could inspire DeBakey awkward to say,''Do you have two left hands? " If DeBakey was dissatisfied with the progress of a procedure, he noticed with an air of disgust low,''I am surrounded by incompetence. " DeBakey trainees cringed at his critics, but among them, told the barbs sometimes in a dead on imitation of the venerable surgeon. Ochsner, now chairman emeritus of the Department of Surgery at Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, said DeBakey has come back so as a desire to prepare its students for demanding career ahead. ''It is not difficult to work if things are done right, "said Midi, DeBakey colleague more than three decades, in a 1995 interview.''It was hard on those who slacked off or errors . But he was so busy. He had to depend on people, and it could be difficult. But it was still difficult for a reason. " Family roots in Lake Charles, La. DeBakey was the eldest of five children born to Lebanese immigrants and Raheehja Shaker Morris DeBakey. Shaker DeBakey Morris was a well-to-do pharmacist and businessman in Lake Charles, who has invested in real estate and rice cultivation. Michael DeBakey grew up with his brother and three sisters in a big house two blocks from the public school with maids, gardeners and Butlers. The DeBakeys eating healthy foods - fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, seafood, rice and beans. They did not smoke or drink. They encouraged their children to consult books from the library each week. At dinner, the family chatted about things that happened to the pharmacy or the actions of politicians who sought the advice of Shaker. "We could not get a word in edgewise until one of our parents who have announced the floor," DeBakey told a journalist in 1997. "It is very exciting." Every Sunday after services at their Episcopal church, DeBakeys take clothes near an orphanage. Once, the give-away bundle included DeBakey preferred course. When the youth protested, his mother sat down and told him: "You have a lot of hats. These children do not. " "It makes a big impression on me," he said. DeBakey's mother also taught him one of his future career essential skills - sewing. It would help repair toward the orphanage. He also learned to TAT, using some cans to lace. Years later, in 1950, DeBakey introduce artificial arteries made of Dacron, it sewn on the prototype of his wife sewing machine using fabric purchased in downtown Houston, Foley. He went to medical school at Tulane after graduating as a farewell to its high class. During his high school years medicine, he developed the roller pump, a device that two decades later became an essential component of the heart-lung machine used on patients during open-heart surgery. As a surgical resident at New Orleans Charity Hospital, DeBakey made his first glimpse of a living human heart - pink and pulsating in the chest of a knifing victim. ''I saw him fight and it is beautiful, a work of art,''said DeBakey in 1987. ''I have an almost religious sense when I work on the heart. It is something that God made, and we have yet to duplicate. " Later, at Charity Hospital, DeBakey experienced a potentially catastrophic quasi - he accidentally punched through the patient's aorta - which gave him an appreciation for stabilizing influence of his mentor, Alton Ochsner . It Ochsner and operated in an amphitheater with an audience of visiting surgeons. DeBakey is on one side of the patient, Ochsner, on the other. DeBakey has tried to raise the aorta, which had been weakened by infection "when I realize all of a sudden, with a striking terror, that I had entered the aorta." DeBakey whispered to this Ochsner, who calmly instructed DeBakey to leave his finger over the hole. Ochsner sewn it, and nobody achieves a near-fatal accident had occurred. During the late 1930, DeBakey married his first wife, Diana, a nurse he met in New Orleans. They have four son: Michael, Ernest, Barry and Denis. When he arrived in Houston in 1948 to head Baylor department of surgery, he moved his family in a house near Rice University, only five minutes from the Texas Medical Center, not to lose time. He never moved from this house. DeBakey Diana died of a heart attack in 1972. They had been in Mexico for a meeting medical, living with a close relative of President of Mexico. They ate well and stayed till the end, and when the DeBakeys return home, Diana complained of a stomach upset. At that time, gastrointestinal problems have not been widely recognized as a symptom of heart attack among women. When her discomfort worsened, DeBakey's admitted to the hospital to find out what was wrong. Although DeBakey is surgery on someone else, he received a call that there was an emergency. When he arrived at his wife's bedside, she died. Three years after his death, DeBakey married German film actress Katrin Fehlhaber, where he met with Frank Sinatra. They have a daughter, Olga. In 1978, DeBakey was hospitalized for smoke inhalation sustained to rescue his daughter after a Christmas tree caught fire at his home, he told the New York Times. A discipline, working hard life The worker DeBakey rarely slept more than five hours a night, waking up at 5 most mornings to write research papers or read medical journals. He rarely drank, never smoked, eaten in moderation - for most salads, at the end of life - and not watching television. Lean and nearly 6 feet tall, he weighed the same as he did in 1926 when he graduated from high school - about 160 pounds. He spent much of his adulthood in the light blue-brush, and wearing a pair of shiny white boots-cowboy for the operating room. He liked to say he has conducted the presidency of Baylor between cases. In 1948, when DeBakey came to Houston, he had transformed the Baylor job twice. The new school has moved to Houston from Dallas just five years earlier, and Baylor students were dispersed throughout the city to do their clinical rotations, a situation that did not appeal to DeBakey. It was finally brought to Hermann come when the hospital has promised a school of 20 beds for surgery, according to Ruth Sorelle the history of Baylor, the quest for excellence. Hermann has decreased due to be addressed, and around DeBakey left. But the Truman administration asked to transfer DeBakey Houston's Navy hospital to hospital aVeterans Hotel, an idea advocated by DeBakey that has evolved in the national VA. Here, students DeBakey the city began the first residency program in surgery. DeBakey program was legendary for its participants cut off from any contact with the outside world. As an intern DeBakey, Dr. Edward Lefrak once spent 91 consecutive days of service in the cardiovascular intensive care unit, the absence of the birth of one of her children, sleeping when he could, in the recovery room patients. Lefrak rotation was to last only 30 days, but DeBakey has a tendency, when things were going well, maintain the same arrangements. ''It was like a compliment, dit''Lefrak, medical director of cardiac surgery at Inova heart and vascular Institute of Falls Church, Va''Mais then, on the other hand, it was another 30 days. " From colleagues rivals One of the most talked-about events of life DeBakey was his legendary feud - plus freezing Arctic hot tempered spat - with Dr. Denton Cooley, his one-time close associate. DeBakey Cooley hired in 1951 after the Houston native has completed his training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. In 1965, DeBakey participated in a program funded by the federal government to design an artificial heart. Within a few years, he has a device that some doctors felt was ready for human trials, but DeBakey felt it needed more work. Then, to international acclaim in 1969, Cooley performed the first implantation of an artificial heart in the chest 47 years, Haskell Karp, a cardiac surgery dying patient. Karp lived with the heart in the chest 65 hours before dying shortly after a heart transplant. Cooley's fame was quickly tarnished after DeBakey said the heart was identical to one being developed in the laboratories of Baylor, and that Cooley had used without authorization. Cooley said he and Mr. Domingo Liotta, who also designed artificial hearts in DeBakey's lab, built the private heart, and he had no other choice but to use the heart because the patient's life is in danger. After the incident, the American College of Surgeons voted to censure Cooley, and amid a dispute with the administration of Baylor, Cooley resigned from the institution. The two men never worked again and rarely spoke. DeBakey changed direction and decided funds would be better spent developing pumps to help failing hearts. Such devices has become the main treatment for patients not hearts. The épisode''volé the DeBakey opened fire on a Nobel Prize, "Methodist heart surgeon said Mike Reardon in 2004.''What Mike needed was a coronation to make him a candidate. And who would be the artificial heart. " But the two buried the hatchet last year. Cooley DeBakey inducted in his surgery and society, in a surprise, DeBakey agreed, saying his former colleague, he was touched by the gesture. Earlier this year, DeBakey returned the favor, granting Cooley his membership in the society surgery. In April, when DeBakey has received the gold medal of Congress, Cooley made the trip to Washington. For a man who survived most of his peers, he seems surprisingly unphilosophical of death, appearing to be seen as an enemy personnel. The loss of a patient put in a black mood and put his mind spinning with thoughts of what he could have done differently. You fight''(death) all the time, and you never really can accept it, "he said.''You know, actually, that everybody will die, but you try to fight , To push out, hold the gap with their hands. " DeBakey was preceded in death by his son, a Houston lawyer Ernest O. DeBakey, who died in 2004, and Barry E. DeBakey, who died in 2007. In addition to his wife, Katrin, and their daughter, Olga, DeBakey is survived by son Michael DeBakey Lima, Peru, and Denis DeBakey, Houston; brother Dr. Ernest G. DeBakey, Mobile, Ala., and sisters Lois and Selma DeBakey, two medical publishers and linguists at Baylor. |
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