Pioneering heart doctor Michael DeBakey dead at 99
Dr. Michael DeBakey, the world-famous cardiovascular surgeon who pioneered such now-common procedures as bypass surgery and invented a host of devices to help heart patients, has died. He was 99.
DeBakey died Friday night at the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, from "natural causes," according to a statement issued early Saturday by Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital.
The doctor counted world leaders among his patients and helped turn Baylor from a provincial school into one of the great medical institutions of the United States.
"Dr. DeBakey's reputation brought many people into this institution, and he treated them all: heads of state, entertainers, businessmen and presidents, as well as people with no titles and no means," said Ron Girotto, president of the Methodist Hospital System.
While still in medical school in 1932, DeBakey invented the roller pump, which became the major component of the heart-lung machine, beginning the era of open-heart surgery. The machine takes over the function of the heart and lungs during surgery.
It was the start of a lifetime of innovation. The surgical procedures that he developed once were the wonders of the medical world. Today, they are commonplace procedures in most hospitals.
He also was a pioneer in the effort to develop artificial hearts and heart pumps to assist patients waiting for transplants, and helped create more than 70 surgical instruments.
In early 2006, at the age of 97, DeBakey underwent surgery for a damaged aorta — a procedure he had developed.
'A miracle'
"It is a miracle. I really should not be here," DeBakey said in a rare interview published later that year in the New York Times.
In 1953, he performed the first Dacron graft to replace part of an occluded artery. In the 1960s, he began coronary arterial bypasses.
In 1966, he was the first to successfully use a partial artificial heart — a left ventricular bypass pump.
A tireless worker and a stern taskmaster, DeBakey literally had scores of patients under his care at any one time. He performed more than 60,000 heart surgeries during his 70-year career, the Methodist Hospital said.
His patients ranged from penniless peasants to such famous figures as the Duke of Windsor, the Shah of Iran, King Hussein of Jordan, Turkish President Turgut Ozal, Nicaraguan leader Violetta Chamorro and U.S. presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
In 1996, he flew to Moscow to help examine ailing Russian President Boris Yeltsin and served as a consultant when Yeltsin underwent surgery.
But DeBakey said celebrities didn't get special treatment on the operating table: "Once you incise the skin, you find that they are all very similar."