Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

John L. Ochsner, MD

Coronary Artery Surgery 391 John L. Ochsner, MD (b. 1927) I spent three months in the hospital without leaving. The only time I saw my wife and children was when they would come over for Sunday lunch. — On being the resident on Dr. DeBakey’s service Interviewed May 1, 2000 I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1927. Shortly after my birth, my father, who was a prominent surgeon, was invited to join the faculty at Tulane Medical School in New Orleans. He was probably the youngest professor of surgery in history, twenty-nine years of age when he took Dr. Matas’s place, so I grew up in New Orleans. In fact, my father was king of carnival in 1948, and I was king of carnival in 1990. In the old days there were quite a few instances of sons succeeding fathers as king of carnival, but it has not been common recently. I think my dad and I were the only two people who were not born in the state of Louisiana who have been king of carnival. When I was in the first grade, the teacher asked the kids where they were born, and I got up, gave my name, and told them that I was born in Madison, Wisconsin , but of course, in New Orleans that wasn’t anything to be proud of, so I hastened to add that my father and mother were there on their honeymoon. When I was king of carnival, I told that story and said that the moral of the story is that I would rather be a bastard than a Yankee. As a child, it wasn’t a proud thing to be a Yankee; mythically we were still fighting the Civil War. I went to public high school for a while in New Orleans, and then I went away to prep school, at Darlington in Rome, Georgia. I came back to New Orleans to go to Tulane, but I got caught up in the war and joined the Naval Reserve at age seventeen. I had to get permission from my dad to join. I went through eighteen months of that war never seeing any action, thank God, and then came back to Tulane to finish my undergraduate education. I graduated in 1948 and went into medical school there at Tulane. I graduated in 1952 and was doing my internship at the University of Michigan when I got drafted into the Korean War. Not many people served in both wars, but they had a separate draft act for doctors in the Korean War. If you served in the Second World War, you were normally exempt from the draft, but because I was a doctor, I was subject to a different draft act. I was in the service then for two more years, and when I left Michigan to go in, I realized I didn’t really want to stay there to finish my residency. I knew I wasn’t smart enough to get the kind of education that the residents received there. Dr. Collier never turned down anybody coming back from the war, so he would take the normal four to six residents per year, plus all of the people coming back. There were probably sixteen senior residents the year I left, and that meant that each resident was operating no more than one or two months out of the year. I couldn’t learn that way; I wanted to go where you were thrown into the trenches. In Houston, at the Baylor-affiliated hospitals, the chief resident spent his time at Jefferson Davis 392 Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery Hospital, the city and county hospital. You could operate to your heart’s content, so I went into Dr. DeBakey’s program in 1956, and it was the smartest thing I ever did. Dr. DeBakey’s mentor had been my father . Dr. DeBakey spent eighteen years working closely with my father, and he described my father as the principal guiding light of his life, so I had a close relationship with him. He was first a student, then a resident, and then on the faculty at Tulane as my father’s young associate, and he held my dad in great esteem. He always referred to my dad as Dr. Ochsner, just as I would always refer to Dr. DeBakey as Dr. DeBakey. When I was a child, he was frequently our babysitter. In fact, he and his wife, Diana, spent their honeymoon...