Dr Michael E. DeBakey

Pioneer profile. This is a commemorative entry in the World Elite Doctors hall of pioneers and is not a listing for consultation or referral.

A surgical career of seventy-five years

Michael Ellis DeBakey was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in September 1908 to Lebanese immigrant parents, and died in July 2008 at the age of ninety-nine. He performed or devised a substantial proportion of the operations that define cardiovascular surgery, and he was still working into his late nineties.

The roller pump, and what it made possible

As a medical student in 1932 he designed the roller pump, a device of considerable simplicity that later became a component of the heart-lung machine and so of open-heart surgery itself. It is an unusual example of a student’s invention outliving nearly everything built after it.

Grafts, aneurysms and the arterial tree

DeBakey resected and grafted the thoracic and abdominal aorta when both were widely regarded as beyond surgical reach, and pioneered the use of Dacron for arterial grafts — famously sewing the first ones himself on his wife’s sewing machine after the fabric he wanted proved unobtainable. He performed one of the first successful carotid endarterectomies in 1953, and the DeBakey classification of aortic dissection remains in daily use in every emergency department that receives one.

Mechanical support and transplantation

In 1966 he achieved the first successful clinical use of a ventricular assist device, establishing that a failing circulation could be supported mechanically — the ancestor of contemporary LVAD therapy and of the bridge to transplantation. His unit was among the earliest to perform heart transplantation in the United States.

Public medicine and the teaching of surgeons

His influence extended well beyond the operating theatre. He proposed the mobile army surgical hospital concept during the Second World War, helped shape the Veterans Affairs medical research system, and led Baylor College of Medicine for decades, training surgeons who went on to lead departments across the world. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007. At ninety-seven he survived an acute type A aortic dissection repaired by the operation he himself had described.