World-Renowned Cardiac Surgeon: Michael DeBakey

Years ago, while I was working on a travel assignment in Houston at the Texas Medical Center, I would pass Baylor College of Medicine on my way to the hospital. I always saw a sign for DeBakey Library and Museum. One night, I looked it up online and saw you could go and see all that was the life and career of world-renowned cardiac surgeon Michael Ellis DeBakey, MD. I wasn’t doing cardiac surgery at the time, but having a love for all things OR, I knew of Dr. DeBakey and that he had invented instruments still used in today’s surgery.

I was in absolute awe when I toured the museum. There were replicas of the ORs where Dr. DeBakey first performed cardiac surgery, walls containing the hundreds of instruments he had invented, and a gallery of all the prestigious people he met over the years. There was so much more to the Father of Cardiac Surgery than I ever knew.

Today, you’ll hear “DeBakeys!” called out in ORs all over the world. Any scrub tech or nurse will know these are pickups, but who is the man behind this commonly used instrument? Allow me to introduce to you a cardiac surgeon, medical educator, inventor, chair of surgery, president and chancellor of Baylor College of Medicine, father of four, and one of the most prolific surgical minds in history.

His Early Life

Dr. DeBakey was born on September 7, 1908, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His businessman father owned several drug stores, and it was here that Dr. DeBakey met many physicians who piqued his interest in medicine. His seamstress mother would later help him perfect his sewing skills during medical school.

The College Years

He attended Tulane University and enrolled in a 6-year program that saw him earn a bachelor’s degree in science in 1930 and then a medical degree in 1932. During his years in medical school, he did research and eventually designed a roller pump that was used for transfusing blood from person to person. This would later be used as a component of a heart/lung machine he would help develop. After graduating medical school, Dr. DeBakey began his surgical training at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

Surgical Training

During his surgical training, DeBakey turned to Alton Ochsner (inventor of the Ochsner clamp) for mentoring. Dr. Ochsner encouraged the young and ambitious Dr. DeBakey to finish his surgical training in Europe, which was the leader of medicine at the time. He heeded this advice and went to the University of Strasbourg in France and trained under French vascular surgeon Rene Leriche and then at the University of Heidelberg in Germany under Martin Kirschner, inventor of the Kirschner (K-Wire).

Surgical Faculty, the Army, and His Research

On completing surgical fellowships in Europe, Dr. DeBakey returned to New Orleans and joined Tulane Medical School as surgical faculty. He would be in this role from 1937 to 1948. During his tenure, Drs. DeBakey and Ochsner would conduct research and, in 1939, proved the correlation between smoking and lung cancer, a finding many other medical providers and researchers would promote. 

During his time at Tulane, World War II broke out and Dr. DeBakey served his country in the Office of the Army Surgeon as a consultant. After the war had ended, and before he headed back to New Orleans, Dr. DeBakey continued the ongoing care of wounded soldiers and helped established the Veterans Administration (VA), which focused on the care for these wounded men. There are still numerous active VA hospitals around the country today, including the Micheal E. DeBakey VA Hospital in Houston.

Figure 1. Dr. DeBakey, Medical Corps US Army in 1945. (" File:7410062962 e303caa6fe Michael DeBakey.jpg" by Otis Historical Archives of “National Museum of Health & Medicine” (OTIS Archive 1) is licensed under  CC BY 2.0.)

After caring for the wounded in the war, Dr. DeBakey decided to join the faculty at Baylor University College of Medicine in Houston in 1948. He would serve as chair of the surgical department for 45 years. He served as president of the college from 1969 to1979 and its chancellor from 1979 to1996. The Department of Surgery at Baylor is named in his honor. During his first years there, he set up a surgical residency program in the newly opened VA hospital and the local charity hospital, upgraded the medical curriculum, established surgical research labs, raised funds for the medical school, and recruited qualified staff and faculty, all while still actively practicing as a cardiothoracic and vascular surgeon.

The Pioneer

Dr. DeBakey pioneered dozens of cardiac procedures over the years. In 1954, he repaired an aortic aneurysm in the aortic arch with a graft and a year later performed a successful resection of an aneurysm from the aorta to the chest and abdominal wall. We may know these as abdominal aortic aneurysm repairs today. He was one of the first surgeons to perform coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) in 1964. In 1966, he was the first to successfully use a left ventricular bypass pump using a similar concept to the roller pump he developed in medical school. In 1968, he was part of the team to do the first heart transplant surgery and, by 1970, would perform 12 of these procedures.

Although he was the father of many firsts in the cardiac field, Dr. DeBakey also made many notable discoveries in the world of vascular surgery. In the 1950s, he made observations of atherosclerotic blood vessels that led him to perform the first carotid endarterectomy in 1953. The idea to make a device that could be used in blood vessels led him to design the first vascular grafts. He headed to a store one day in pursuit of some nylon and, when he was told they were out of that material, he opted for some polyethylene (you may know it as Dacron). Using his wife’s sewing machine and the sewing skills he had learned from his mother, he invented the first arterial graft. After a successful implantation, Dr. DeBakey collaborated with the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science to design a machine to make these grafts for use across the surgical world.

Other Notable Contributions

Dr. DeBakey would go on to serve on many advisory boards during his career, including the Hoover Commission (the President’s Commission on heart disease, cancer, and stroke) under President Johnson. He spent much time trying to improve medical standards globally, focusing specifically on heart health, and served three terms on the Heart, Lung, and Blood Advisory Council for the National Institutes of Health. His list of accolades and awards could go on for miles. Some of them include the U.S. Army’s Legion of Merit in 1945; the Rudolph Matas Award in Vascular Surgery in 1954; the American Medical Association’s Distinguished Service Award in 1959; the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Research in 1963; the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969; the National Medal of Science in 1987; the United Nations Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999; and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2008. He received more than 50 honorary doctorates and was commemorated in the naming of departments, laboratories, and buildings at Baylor and elsewhere.

Figure 2. " Dr. Michael E. DeBakey" by  Dliotta is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

His Own Health

In 2005, Dr. DeBakey had an aortic dissection. Years earlier he had designed the treatment for dissection, an operation that now bears his name. He became the oldest patient to undergo the surgery he was responsible for creating. Dr. George Noon repaired Dr. DeBakey’s aorta with a Dacron graft similar to the one Dr. DeBakey made on his wife’s sewing machine in the 1950s. After a complicated 8-month postop course, Dr. DeBakey left Houston Methodist in September of 2006 and remained in good health until his death.

Conclusion

Dr. DeBakey’s medical career spanned nearly 80 years. He was a notoriously demanding perfectionist in the OR, but calm and attentive with patients and their families. Dr. DeBakey practiced medicine until his death in July 2008 at the age of 99. He performed more than 60,000 operations and trained thousands of surgeons. Dr. DeBakey left an astonishing legacy of surgical innovation, medical education and research, and health care policy, as well as thousands of patients whose lives were saved by his skills.

References

Michael E. DeBakey. National Library of Medicine. Accessed May 4, 2024. https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/fj/feature/biographical

DeBakey Library and Museum. Baylor College of Medicine. Accessed May 4, 2024. https://www.bcm.edu/about-us/our-campus/debakey-museum