Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

Michael E. DeBakey, MD

148 Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery Michael E. DeBakey, MD (b. 1908) I went downtown to get nylon shirt material, and when I got there, the clerk said, “We are fresh out of nylon, but we have a new material called Dacron.” — On the first prosthetic grafts for aortic aneurysm repair Interview December 14, 1998 I was born in a small town in Louisiana called Lake Charles in 1908. My father was a pharmacist and ran two drug stores, where I worked as a boy, particularly in the summertime. In those days, the drug store was a hangout for doctors, especially in a small town, because they would come in to get their drugs. There wasn’t a great deal of surgery; most of them were general practitioners . I think they influenced me; I know that I liked and admired them. I think that was the reason I wanted to go into medicine. As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a doctor. I did my undergraduate work at Tulane. After two years of college, I had enough credits to go into medical school, but also I wanted to get my bachelor’s degree. I went around to some of my professors and asked them if I could take the rest of my college courses while I was in medical school. They were a little skeptical at first. Because I was a student instructor in zoology, the professor of zoology was a good friend of mine, and he helped me persuade the rest of the professors to approve my plan. When I finished my sophomore year in medical school, I graduated with my original college class and got my bachelor’s and MD degrees in six years. As a senior medical student, I met Dr. Alton Ochsner, who was the professor of surgery at Tulane. He was looking for some students to act as technicians in his lab. I volunteered, and he liked the work I was doing . He said to me, “You know, you ought to be a surgeon. I would like for you to come on my service when you graduate.” After that I came under his influence and worked very closely with him. I did my internship and residency under Dr. Ochsner. I went abroad for two years: one year with Dr. René Leriche at the University of Strasbourg, and one year with Dr. Kirschner at the University of Heidelberg. At that time Dr. Leriche was doing lumbar sympathectomies . He would resect a part of an artery with the idea of dilating it. He had a curious philosophy about that. He was a philosopher as well as a scientist, and he had all kinds of ideas, many of them very innovative. For example, he described the Leriche syndrome absolutely perfectly, without an aortogram. He even indicated what the surgical treatment ought to be. He said it wasn’t possible yet, but said what it should be. Later a French surgeon in Paris, Dubost, did the first bypass for the Leriche syndrome, using a homograft, just as Leriche in his 1926 article had predicted it should be done. Leriche never did the procedure himself, he only did sympathectomies. After two years in Europe, I came back to Tulane, and I was made an assistant professor . Dr. Ochsner had started the Ochsner Clinic, and I worked there for a while. The Early Years 149 Dr. Ochsner had fallen out with the governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. I knew Dr. Vidrine, who had operated on the governor after he was shot. He was not really a surgeon ; he was a general practitioner and only dabbled in surgery. A good surgeon wouldn’t have missed the bleeding problem that was the cause of Long’s death. I went into the Army Medical Corps in 1942. Fred Rankin was the chief surgical consultant in Washington. He called Dr. Ochsner when he found out that I was going into the service and said that he wanted me to come up there. I immediately went into that department and was stationed in Washington, in the surgeon general’s office. I wrote every surgical order for the surgeon general, and from time to time I would have to go to the surgeon general’s library. Since it was a wonderful library, I came to believe that it should become the National Library of Medicine, and I began working to make that happen. Of course you can imagine the objections to my proposal, because...