[Dr. Marc L. Boom:] All right, good afternoon, everybody.
Good afternoon, and welcome to our Centennial Physicians Lecture, uh, it's...
It's been so fun watching people watch the video or the slides here,
and all sorts of people catching up who haven't seen each other in years.
Today we are celebrating our Marquee Physician Honoree,
of course Dr. Michael DeBakey.
We obviously remember him for his tremendous achievements
in his field, his groundbreaking achievements in his field.
But we also remember him because he was the individual who famously called Houston Methodist Hospital
a hospital with a soul.
Even before we introduced our I CARE values,
Dr. DeBakey realized the importance of values as part of an institution and how this was and is
a values based institution.
We're proud of those values.
We're proud of our faith basis, as well as our focus on always putting the patient at the center of everything we do.
Today, in addition to honoring Dr. DeBakey,
we're going to take the opportunity to recognize many physicians who worked alongside him
and trained under him.
And we'll meet some of them later.
But for now, I'd like everybody to join me in a round of applause for all those who are keeping Dr. DeBakey's legacy alive today.
[Applause]
Today's lecture is also extra special because we will follow it with a reception
and dinner in the Barbara and George H.W. Bush atrium in the Paula and Rusty Walter Tower.
So we hope you can join us for that immediately following this program this afternoon.
And while you're in Walter Tower, I encourage you to check out, just down the hall from there,
the Methodist Centennial Wall of History.
It's an interactive exhibit that you can actually go up to and really pick almost any year
and see some of the historical figures and some of the things and milestones that have happened
in Houston Methodist in this 100 years.
Today we also have the pleasure of hearing from author and physician Dr. Craig Miller.
Um, I'll commend... Miller...
I'll commend... uh, ah... his biography to you in your program here,
and we'll be introducing him in a few minutes.
He's working on a book about Dr. DeBakey and is very excited I know to spend time with many of you
who have worked alongside him in... on the units and in the operating rooms.
One of those physicians here today is Dr. William Winters,
who will also have a brief conversation with Dr. Miller at the conclusion of that talk.
Before we then hear from Dr. Miller, I'd like to recognize some very special guests.
So if I may ask them to stand.
First, one of my predecessors actually, the former Houston Methodist president and CEO,
Larry Mathis.
Let's give him a round of applause.
[Applause]
And also Tony Gotto, former chair of Internal Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and Houston Methodist...
[Applause]
...Dean Emeritus of Weill Cornell,
and continuing as a member of our research institute and a member of the board of our research institute as well.
So he continues to be so dedicated to this institution... institution.
I'd al... I'd also like to single out... I think we have four members of our board of directors here today.
We have Elizabeth Waering, Juliet Ellis, Faisal Masud, and Kelty Baker.
Did I get everybody? I hope... I didn't see anybody else...
So if they would stand for a quick round of applause.
[Applause]
And finally, if you're a leader of any one of our other boards,
for instance, our foundation, our research institute, members of one of our... of our President's Leadership Council,
or one of our many task forces, councils, committees,
would you quickly stand for recognition please?
[Applause]
Don't be shy.
I know there's a bunch of you here.
There's a bunch of shy people, 'cause there's more than that in here.
But please thank all of those wonderful leaders.
They really help propel this institution forward and help this institution continue to advance and lead medicine.
So I want to thank all of you also for honoring us and Dr. DeBakey and our physicians with your presence today.
Now, before I bring Dr. Miller... ah... actually Dr. Reardon to introduce Dr. Miller to the podium,
I want to introduce you to one more element of these six lectures that we are having,
and we call that the Center of Excellence Spotlight.
So at each of these six lectures, we're highlighting one of our six centers of excellence, and
it was a tough choice this time to figure out which one to do, but we...
we arrived on the Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center for obvious reasons.
And, um, obviously, you know... the... the... uh, spectrum of heart disease and, um,
disorders and everything that the people here in this institution treat,
you know, are too numerous to count and way too long to talk about.
So we thought we'd talk a little bit, as we've been doing with the others,
a little bit about what it was like a hundred years ago, what it's like today,
where we've come, and maybe a little bit about where we may go.
I'm going to talk just a little bit about myocardial infarction, or heart attack, for the lay people in the room.
If you go... if you rewind back to the early days of Houston Methodist, we founded in 1919,
that was only less than 25 years after the electrocardiogram was even invented,
and it wasn't really even in much use at the time.
In fact, it wasn't until about 1954 that the 12-lead EKG that all of us clinicians in the room know and love understood.
And in the beginning at that time, you know,
a heart attack, if you survived it, and that was a big huge "if,"
basically was a significantly then shortened lifespan, and a life many times in bed, many times barely able to move.
But by the 1930s and '40s, and really led by this institution, obviously led by the great Michael DeBakey and his team,
we began to really rethink that and really treat heart disease very differently.
And, of course, today... [clears throat]
with everything we do non-invasively, and all of the work that's done continuing in the operatingrooms, but also in the cath labs,
and very importantly with all of the prevention that's done, all the great work that Dr. Gotto led, it's a very different story.
In fact, just in the last 20 years alone, deaths from heart disease, and including deaths from heart attacks,
have gone down by more than half in just that 20 year period, let alone if you were to rewind back through the decades.
And so the work of people like Dr. DeBakey and everybody here continues on today.
In fact, as a result, our Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center currentlyranked number fourteen in the country
in US News and World Report.
They keep getting that wrong 'cause it's definitely number one in the country, but we'llget them straightened out.
And, you know, we bring things that others still can't bring.
For instance, we have Dr. Huie Lin, one of only two cardiologists in the entire city of Houston,
who takes care of adult survivors of congenital heart disease.
A perfect match for Dr. Tom MacGillivray,
who we wrested out of Mass General to come down here and be our chief of cardiac surgery,
and who participated with others in the team last year in our thousandth heart transplant.
So think back, and we'll hear some of that history I'm sure today,
50 years ago, and Dr.... more than 50 years ago now,
when Dr. DeBakey did that and now here we have transplanted over a thousand.
And, of course, we hope that there'll be no need for heart transplants,
that there'll be no damage from the heart attacks in the first place, or the cardiomyopathy, or whatever else leads to that.
We believe we'll be able to regenerate hearts.
We believe that the future will not be about transplant.
The future will be about regenerative or restorative medicine.
And so those are the kinds of things that we will help lead into the future.
So, I think there are advances hopefully that would make Dr. DeBakey immensely proud
to see what all of you are accomplishing here in this institution today.
So, with that as background, I'm going to introduce Dr. Michael Reardon.
Dr. Reardon is going to introduce our speaker today.
Dr. Reardon did his residency actually under Dr. DeBakey,
got locked into our ICU and everything else associated with that,
and is currently a professor of cardiothoracic surgery.
He holds the Allison Family Distinguished Chairof Cardiovascular Research within our Houston Methodist
Department of Cardiovascular Surgery.
He... One of the many things he is known for is he's operated on more cardiac sarcomas than anyone else in the world,
and has led our TAVR program, and many other things.
Dr. Reardon, thanks for being here today.
[Applause]
[Dr. Michael Reardon:] Well, thank you, Dr. Boom.
As somebody who spent considerable time with Dr. DeBakey,
including two months in the ICU, which was fun as his residents,
I'm delighted to introduce Dr. Craig Miller.
Dr. Miller got his medical degree from Ohio State University College of Medicine,
and he did his residency of surgery at Ohio State University Medical Center,
or as my friends there call it, The Ohio State University Medical Center. I'll get that right.
Dr. Miller completed a fellowship in vascular andendovascular surgery at the University of California at San Francisco,
and was a fellow at UCSF's GI Research Lab.
His research has been published in numerous journals.
He's the author of two books, and his new book coming out will be a comprehensive biography of Mike DeBakey.
It's slated for publication later this year.
I told you I'll trade you my Crawford book for your new DeBakey book when it comes out.
And Dr. Miller joined the Pardee Hospital in North Carolina as a vascular surgeon in November of 2015.
He's currently the chief of the vascular surgery service there,
and he's also a fellow at the American College of Surgeons.
Dr. Miller is one of the five and honorable Michael DeBakey Fellows named by the US National Library of Medicine in 2017.
So please join me in welcoming Dr. Craig Miller.
[Applause]
[...]
[Dr. Craig Alan Miller:] Well, thank you very much for that very kind introduction, Dr. Reardon.
It's a tremendous thrill and honor to speak at the Houston Methodist Hospital,
and I'd like to thank the Centennial Committeefor inviting me to participate in this historic celebration.
There are a number of individuals and institutions I would also like to thank for their
support in my efforts to chronicle the life of Dr. DeBakey.
I would start with the National Library of Medicine
for the magnificent work and cataloging and preserving the priceless DeBakey collection in Bethesda,
and of course Mrs. DeBakey for making those materials available to posterity.
I'm deeply indebted also to the Baylor College of Medicine
for allowing me to conduct research on their archives here in Houston.
The DeBakey Medical Foundation has been extraordinarily generous in many forms of support for this project.
In particular, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. McCullum and Dr. Noon,
as well as Dr. Winters, and also Dennis and Michael DeBakey, whose help has been invaluable.
Last but far from least, I want to thank my wife Mandy, who is here today.
Someone once said that writing a biography of a person is like living with them,
and I can't thank her enough for allowing Dr. DeBakey to move into our home for the last three years.
When I was initially asked to give this talk, I was told I'd have 25 minutes.
25 minutes to cover the life of Michael DeBakey is preposterous. Um...
It'd be like trying to tell the story of Gone with the Wind in 20 words or less. It just simply can't be done.
So I elected to take it a different tack,
and that is to cover the period of his life that may not be so well known by those of you here in Houston,
that is the 40 years that he spent before he came here, establishing himself.
And so with that in mind, let's get started because we don't...
we still don't have very much time to cover all this material.
So this photogenic couple is Shiker and Raheeja DeBakey.
They both were born in Jdeidet Marjayoun in Lebanon,
what, at the time of their birth in the 1880s, was a... uh...
province of Ottoman Turkey called Syria.
They were Maronite Christians, and in fact, Raheeja's father, Moses Zorba, was a clergyman.
Shiker's father, whose name was Marcus, we don't know exactly what his profession was,
but the DeBakeys were known in law and medicine there.
They both emigrated to the USA right around the turn of the 20th century.
We have a little more information than just that though.
This, I believe, is the first extant picture of Raheeja with her cousin Martha,
and I believe this is at the time when they emigrated to the US.
This is their record from Ellis Island, the passenger manifest,
and you see Raheeja and Martha, both 14 years of age,
and they came to Ellis Island on August 7, 1898.
I have not been able to find Shiker's Ellis Island records,
but we do have this, which is a passport application from March of 1921,
at which point he indicated that he left Beirut on February 14th.
Given the transit time, I think that makes it clear that he was probably in the US in March of 1901.
He started as a peddler.
By 1907, we know that he was in Lake Charles, Louisiana. That's the first documented evidence.
He was already buying land there, interestingly enough.
Shiker and Raheeja met, according to family tradition, in Oklahoma, which is where she lived.
She had owned some land there too by this time.
And it was probably about 1907. They then were married,
and in September of 1908, this young fellow was born.
[Laughter from audience]
That, I'm sure, is the Dr. DeBakey that you all remember very well.
[Laughter from audience]
By 1910, we know that they had purchased a storefront home,
so Shiker DeBakey was a very successful businessman.
I had this picture for about two years and puzzled as to what it was.
It's, uh, Shiker, and what I thought was something he might have constructed for his children.
He was a good woodworker and had lots of tools.
You can see on the bottom there is a... what appears to be a wagon, and there's a track.
And I had, other than that, no real clue as to what this was until a few weeks ago in fact.
Dennis emailed me this, which is a patent that he had successfully applied for, for a home store.
And once I saw this picture, I immediately recognized the connection there.
He designed a home store for dry goods, which was the main business that he was in at this time.
And I don't know if any of these were ever built, but the idea was the customer would come in here,
take the wagon, come around here and pull what they needed off the shelves, then go up to the checkout.
So now the mystery is... is answered.
This is Lake Charles in the early 20th century.
What I want to point out here is these numbers in the red circles.
These are the buildings that were either lived in or owned by the DeBakey family
during the time when Dr. DeBakey was living in Lake Charles.
They started on Railroad Avenue here.
And in the 1910 census, we can see...
I don't know why they recorded... His middle name was Marcus, but that may have been the problem here.
But here's Raheeja, Michael, age two, Ernest, who's just a few months old,
and then this is Helena Zorba, who was Raheeja's mother living with the family at 1004 Railroad Avenue.
This picture is after they moved to the next block a few years later,
opened another store and moved into a storefront home...
let's go back just a bit here...
at, uh, 1114 Railroad Avenue.
And Shiker DeBakey then built this building,
which he built in 1912, and it's 1112 Railroad Avenue,
which he then rented out as a drugstore really for decades afterwards.
Later, Ernest worked as a pharmacist here before he decided he wanted to go back for medical school.
So that's 1114 Railroad Avenue, 1112, and then he also built this building, which is 1110 Railroad Avenue,
and you can see it's got their name on the front of it.
These were all dry goods businesses or pharmacies, or even a restaurant at one point in time.
Unfortunately, none of them are still standing. Those photographs that I showed you were from 1997.
Well, this is I believe the only existing photograph of the entire family. This shows...
Michael DeBakey at the top center, of course the parents, and then his five siblings.
[...]
Ernest was born in 1910.
The first of four daughters, Goldie, at the top left was born in 1912.
Then came the other three, Selena, Selma, and Lois in 1920.
This picture was taken as part of the passport application,
and they were just getting ready to go on a trans-Atlantic trip.
They went to France and then over to the Middle East and spent about six months there,
and this was the passport photo application.
Everybody looks relatively mirthful, with the exception of Raheeja.
I think it's just starting to dawn that she's going to have an eight-month-old on a trans-Atlantic trip in 1921.
[Laughter from audience]
Of course, Dr. DeBakey was an excellent student, but he was by no means a bookworm.
I found this in a Lake Charles newspaper. I thought it was fascinating.
Here is a track and field city-wide event,
and the 50 yard dash first place goes to Michael DeBakey.
He also played, um...
football and baseball. In fact he suffered a significant eye injury, and they almost thought they're going to have to anucleate his eye,
but eventually of course that didn't happen.
He was also into a... a... sport of another age,competitive gardening.
But as you might imagine, he got first place,
and Ernest there got third place. So the DeBakey's made their name known in gardening,
and here he is laying out a very straight line with the plow I would think.
[...]
Shiker's businesses were definitely very successful.
After all, we now know on Railroad Avenuehe had four different ones all running.
And that's the France and Middle East trip that I told you about.
But the other thing that they did was purchase a home down on Broad Street.
And we're looking at... we're standing in thestreet in this picture looking at the corner of Broad Street and Bank Street.
This is a fantastic residence that unfortunately, is also no longer still standing.
Wraparound porch.
Dr. DeBakey had his own room with a ceiling fan that was the envy of all of his friends in those hot summers.
This is a view from the side porch. That's Bank Street behind them there,
and we can see the extent of the gardening thatwent on there with a tremendous haul here of eggplants and whatnot.
Shiker, Michael, Ernest.
[...]
If we zoom in, we can see Dr. DeBakey a little more clearly there with the overalls.
[...]
And interestingly, he returned to this spot, even though the house was now gone,
and took a photograph there in the late 1970s in almost exactly the same spot where he'd been about 60 years before.
That house, by the way, is still standing.
This is the Boy Scouts of Calcasieu Parish at the quote, old fishin'... old swimmin' hole there is what it says, isn't it?
And there is young Michael.
This picture you've probably seen over at the library.
It's the Lake Charles High School Band with
Dr. DeBakey with the saxophone underneath the Dutch Masters there.
That was his senior year of high school, eleven grades,
and he graduated top of his class,
valedictorian.
He shared the valedictory with Ruby Raines.
I don't know whatever happened to Ruby.
But the other interesting thing on this is before the speech,
he got together with his friend Morris Hinds, whose nickname was Pee Wee,
Pee Wee Hinds was his best friend at the time,
to play the classic "Laf-N-Sax."
He then matriculated to Tulane,
and this is his initial application.
I think the most remarkable thing about this is the tuition fee per semester
was $90 at Tulane.
Now, I don't know what it is now, but I suspect it's probably more than that.
[Laughter from audience]
This is the dorm where he lived.
It... That building still stands.
It's no longer a dorm, and the inside has been gutted out,
so if you go there to try and find his dorm room, as I did, you'll be disappointed.
It's not there.
But he and his colleague there are standing in front of Gibson Hall, which is still standing there.
We have some more images from his undergraduate days.
These pictures were, I believe, taken in the Audubon Park across St. Charles Avenue from Tulane.
This certainly was. That statue's still there of... of, uh, Audubon.
His first semester, Dr. DeBakey was not completely focused on academics.
He had hardly had to do a thing in order to achieve success in high school,
and like a lot of people for whom that's the truth, he thought that that would move over nicely right into college,
but it turned out not to be the case.
These pictures obviously show some sort of a hunting expedition.
I think that's Ernest, but I can't prove it.
But I'm very confident that these two people are classmates of his,
both in undergraduate and then in medical school,
and that would be Guy and Charles Odom.
He actually... after... He couldn't take living in that dorm because there was too much noise and he couldn't study.
So he asked his father to... if he could live in a boarding house, which he did,
and then he subsequently moved in with the Odom family, who lived across the river.
Uh, they were... Their... uh... parents owned a pharmacy, so they had a lot in common, and they remained friends.
But it had an impact on his academic performance.
This is his first term grades.
And even though... in an age before grade inflation, this was a pretty good performance.
He wasn't happy with it at all, and neither was Shiker, who after all was paying $90.
He didn't want to see a grade like that.
[Laughter from audience]
So at this point, Dr. DeBakey became, as he put it, much more serious.
He stopped going to the French Quarter. He only went down there to listen to the jazz music.
But he stopped doing that, focused on intramural sports,
and on playing in the stage band, but mainly stuck with academics from this point on.
This is his second term grade, and we can see that his grades have marched up considerably.
One thing I'd call your attention to is that he was in the pre-medical curriculum there at Tulane.
At that point, Tulane had a six-year sort of honors degree in... in medicine,
two years of undergraduate and four years of medical school,
and about 30 of his classmates also were in this program.
[...]
This picture I put in really apropos of nothing, just because it's kind of cool.
If you zoom in on that, I think you can get a sense of how well that car ran.
See what it says on the [INAUDIBLE]:
"True love never runs smoothly."
[...]
Then after two years of undergraduate, he begins medical school.
And this is his report card from the first two years, really quite... quite excellent.
He ends at AOA, which is the top 10% of his class at Tulane.
But there is one sort of striking score that you see here, and that is in the second column. We'll zoom in...
"Minor Surgery."
[Laughter from audience]
This is really... It's actually Introduction to Surgery, it's not...
I mean, you look at the course description, it wasn't really minor surgery. It was Introduction to Surgery.
And this is literally the lowest score that he ever got at Tulane, um...
which is fantastic if you think about it.
But the instructor, who was the really key part of this, 'cause that was the instructor.
That's Alton Ochsner, who became a tremendous mentor for him and recognized early on his remarkable genius.
Really took him under his wing.
So, because of that pre-medical course in 1930 after four years at Tulane,
Dr. DeBakey is twice in the 1930 yearbook,
first as a graduate in the senior class, and then as a third-year medical student.
But he finishes his medical degree in 1932,
and then, now firmly under the wing of Ochsner, he becomes an intern, and uh, uh...
at Tulane and at the Charity Hospital there.
Now, this is where, in his internship year, that he develops this device.
That's a sleeve valve transfusion syringe.
I wish I had more time to get into it,
but if you're interested, in this spring's issue of The Journal of the Southern Associationof the History of Medicine,
you can read all about it in an article I wrote.
But it was a fascinating, uh... device
that is based actually on a cylinder of a car that he had taken apart as a teenager.
Next came the roller pump, and I think there's a little bit of confusion about this, although the... the um...
library and museum across the street has the story exactly right.
Dr. DeBakey did not invent the roller pump.
That had been around for a long time, and so I think there's a little bit of confusion about that.
This shows quite well, and I believe those are his hands holding it.
This is from his book on transfusions from 1942,
and this clearly shows what the real advance was that he got patented.
Roller pumps have been around, including for transfusion, for a while,
but the big problem with them was that as you cranked this, or later used a machine,
the friction from the bearings against the hub would cause the whole tubing to creep forward,
which was very inconvenient to say the least.
What he devised was a flange on the outside of the tubing,
and then a C-clamp which went over it.
You would clamp down the C-clamp on the flange so it wouldn't inhibit the flow through the tube,
and the tube wouldn't creep anymore when you rolled it. That was the advance.
Now, a few years later, at... really at the... I now know it was at the AMA meeting in St. Louis in 1939,
he runs into John Gibbon, who was working on a prototype of the heart-lung machine,
and... so probably a little bit tough, but...
This is the pump that he was using, which is called a finger cu... pump that squeezed,
and he was very unhappy with it, Gibbon was,
because it... it destroyed the blood cells as they went through, and you had to put a valve in,
which was also not physiologic.
And by the way, the destruction of blood valves and artificial pumps is a theme throughout Dr. DeBakey's life,
so he recognized early on exactly what was going on.
He recommended that Gibbon try a roller pump,and this is actually from only six months later, another publication of Gibbons.
This time you can see the DeBakey roller pumps have been incorporated.
And fourteen years later, it comes to fruition with an actual functioning heart-lung machine
clearly featuring the DeBakey roller pumps.
Well, in 1935, Ochsner sends him to Europe for specialized training in vascular and thoracic surgery
and, by this point... Uh, sorry, uh... University of Strasbourg,
where Professor Rene Leriche is probably the world's expert in vascular surgery for what it was at the time,
and he spends September '35 to May of '36 there.
Just before this, he had met on the wards this young lady,
who was Diana Cooper, sometimes called Dolly, as on this. This is... These are their passports, as you could gather.
She actually went over to Europe before he did. She was working in the American hospital in Paris,
and he was coming to Strasbourg 200 miles away.
I don't know whether it was a coincidence or not. I have not found anything to indicate otherwise.
But they went over separately, and they definitely came back together.
This is Professor Rene Leriche on the steps of his clinic, which now a dental building in Strasbourg.
Leriche, who Dr. DeBakey said looked like a cross between Beethoven and a portly French chef...
[Laughter from audience]
with some of his trainees.
Most of them are from foreign countries, what he would call "assistants étrangers."
Dr. DeBakey, young...
This is Jean Kunlin, who will go on about fifteen years later to do the first saphenous vein femoral popliteal bypass graft in Paris.
This up here is Joao Cid dos Santos,
who will do the first endarterectomy in 1946 in Lisbon.
So, they had some pretty heavy hitters there at the time.
More images from Strasbourg.
After that, Dr. DeBakey goes to Heidelberg, not too far away,
to work with Martin Kirschner, who's probably the leading thoracic surgeon in the world at that time.
He only stays there from May to August in 1936.
He was supposed to stay longer, but his father, who was footing the bill for all of this,
got very nervous about the political situation in Europe, and the Spanish Civil War had just broken out.
So he said, "Look, you need to come back." So this was actually foreshortened, and that's the reason why.
But while he was there, he enjoyed the sights of Heidelberg.
And he looks like he stepped right off of the cover of GQ with that double-breasted suit.
I mean, you could wear that today with anything.
This is an interesting picture. You'll...
This has been published before, and you'll see it from time to time, and it's always
captioned as being Dr. DeBakey and Dianain Paris, but it's not Paris.
This is German written on a... the card there.
And that's not Diana either. If...
[Laughter from audience]
I had wondered who that might be, um...
I found this picture, which is also in Heidelberg.
Clearly this is one of his, um, compatriots, a colleague named Schanz who he'll actually... later met again in 1983.
Another picture of the two of them and this beautiful BMW.
And it occurred to me that I had some information, that the Odom brothers, who you saw,
that their sister had come to Europe on a trip in 1936,
and it may have been that she crossed paths with Dr. DeBakey.
So I found in the Tulane yearbook this picture of Veda Odom.
And I think that confirms that that's who this. This is the Odoms' sister.
As... She was clearly in what the kids would today call "the friend zone," you know?
That was not a romantic relationship.
He returned to the US in September of '36, and a month later got married.
This is a wedding telegram, congratulations from Alton Ochsner and his wife.
And shortly after that, well, three years,
they're celebrating the imminent arrival of their first child.
Those baby bottles, I was told by John Ochsner, do not contain soda.
[Laughter from audience]
Son Michael was born in 1939, and here are some pictures with his mother and newborn son, or infant son,
and that's his brother Ernest with Michael a little bit older.
I don't know if I have enough time to tell this story, but I will.
He wrote many important papers with Alton Ochsner during the late 1930s.
In hindsight, this is probably the most important one because it is the first real medical paper of any consequence to
posit the idea that smoking may be... inhaling smoke may be related the... ah... to lung cancer.
At the American College of Surgeons meeting the following year, they presented this diagram,
which shows a correlation between lung cancer and the production of tobacco.
They didn't have any data for smoking, but
Dr. DeBakey had the idea to look at the Department of Agriculture's
data regarding tobacco production and found the correlation there.
When they did that presentation at that meeting,
Evarts Graham, of the... Washington University, he was... of St. Louis... He was a prominent thoracic surgeon.
In fact, he did the first successful pneumonectomy for lung cancer.
Said to Ochsner, who was doing the presentation, "Al,
I can show you the exact same graph with the production of silk stockings
and lung cancer, indic... implying that the correlation did not necessarily mean causation, which is true as far as it goes.
Graham was a heavy smoker and later died of lung cancer.
Interestingly, his first pneumonectomy patient, who was a physician, outlived him.
Dr. DeBakey finally becomes assistant professor in October of 1940.
And shortly after that, of course, World War II breaks out.
He wanted to join the Tulane...
General Hospital... Base Hospital, from World War I is what they would have called it...
but Ochsner wouldn't let him. He called him indispensable to the program,
and he complained.
And it's not as if he did nothing. He... he traveled the country doing what was called American College of Surgeons war sessions,
which were to familiarize the physicians with trauma surgery.
But eventually, he got his way and entered the army.
He started off in the Air Force, actually, in Gulfport, Mississippi.
But he was only there for about three months before it was recognized in Washington that
DeBakey was being sorely misused.
And he was brought to the Army Surgeon General's Office where he
became a member of the Surgical Consultants Division at this building, the Maritime building, 1818 H Street.
World Bank is there now.
And there it's hard to overstate the... what the surgical consultants did,
but I will try and summarize it because the amount of work was enormous.
They collected and analyzed all of the data that came in from the field regarding medical care of the troops.
They coordinated with the National Research Council regarding all research that was done,
including antibiotics, transfusions, and so forth.
Every article that was written by any member of the Army Medical Corps for publication
had to be reviewed and then assigned as to whether it was able to be published,
and if it were able to be published, could it be published... um... without violating secrecy?
He also wrote policy directives, and every speech that was written...
Every speech that was written by the Army Surgeon General was written by Michael DeBakey.
He also, and this is probably the biggest thing, assigned physicians the equipment and supplies to every hospital unit in the military.
That is easy to say and very difficult to comprehend.
During that period, he became very interestedin this place, which is the Army Medical Library. Old red brick on the old mall.
It's, of course, not standing anymore, but eventually, he would be an essential ingredient in
transitioning the Army Medical Library to the National Library of Medicine.
He did go to Europe in addition to travelingall over the United States in his capacity with the Surgical Consultants Division.
He went to Europe for a trip between January and March. These are the... his orders.
This is a very interesting document. This is called "a short snorter." I don't know if anyone's familiar with that term.
A short snorter is a dollar that is given to somebody for their first trip on a plane across an ocean.
In this case, it was the Atlantic Ocean. He'd been across the Atlantic, but not on a plane before.
And you can see written onthe side there, it says,
"This is to certify Lieutenant Colonel Mike DeBakey. Short snorter January 29."
And it shows the path they took, Newfoundland to the Azores, then Casablanca.
Now, the people that signed this...
Edward Churchill is the Head of Surgery atMassachusetts General Hospital
and at this point Chief Consultant in Surgery for the Mediterranean Theater of Operations.
We have Richard Miling, who would later be Assistant Secretary of Health and the Deanof the School of Medicine at Ohio State,
where I graduated from.
We have Howard Rusk, who is the father of rehabilitation medicine.
So, he's got some... some, ah, heavy hitters along with him on this flight.
By the way, the way it worked was that anybody who... who was given one ofthese,
if they ever encountered any of those peopleand couldn't produce the dollar bill, then thedrinks were on them.
[Laughter from audience]
So if anybody ever gives you a short snorter, now you know why.
Well, it wasn't just inspections.
He also got to witness some real history.
North of Florence, and Churchill related this,
they both watched the 10th Mountain Division and its epic, legendary, really
successful attack on the German positionat Mount Belvedere.
They got to witness that firsthand.
And during the inspection tour after he'd gone to France,
he was one day after the taking of the Bridge at Remagen,
over the Rhine River, which was a critical part at the end of World War II. Dr. DeBakey was there.
He crossed the river one day after it was taken by the American forces and was still underattack, by the way.
Lots of stories there. He spent a week with this fellow.
That, of course, is General George S. Patton, Jr.
Patton liked to live well, and this was his headquarters,
the Fondation Pescatore in Luxembourg.
He was only there for a few weeks, but DeBakey happened to be there on his inspection tour with the Third Army,
and they got to stay there in Patton's inner circle.
The reason why he got to stay with Patton's inner circle there was because Patton'ssurgical consultant
was Charles Odom from the hunting expedition, back in a... a picture that I saw.
So when he... when DeBakey showed up here,he said, "Hey, stay with me. I know Patton."
Interestingly, we have his PX cards, the ration cards.
So you can see what, as an officer, he was entitled to and, as an officer, what he actually selected.
This one is from the Mediterranean Theater when he was in Italy, and this is the European Theater when he was in France and Germany.
And it's sort of interesting to note that he didn't have any real interest in the beer, no interest in the soft drinks...
The candy, he got it every time.
The gum, got it every time,
and Alton Ochsner would have been really horrified to see how many times he filled the tobacco ration.
[...]
Different era, though.
After the war, he stayed in the army for one more year because he recognized that the job wasn't done.
There were still thousands and thousands of troops who were in hospitals.
And so all the physicians at the end of the war with the armistice wanted to go home, but there was more work to be done.
And to his enormous credit, Dr. DeBakey was able to convince one hundred physicians
to stay in the Army for that full extra year along with him to take care of those people.
No one said no.
He became Chief Consultant in Surgery at that point, full colonel,
continued to compile, analyze, and publish data, both in articles and in this book.
Pivotal book on military vascular surgery, and also,
perhaps even an more pivotal book, on logistical considerations in management ofbattle casualties.
He was instrumental, of course, in development of the VA system in ways that are far too complex to talk about right now,
and the Medical Follow Up Agency, which still exists, was his idea.
Most of these things, of course, will come across as committee ideas and plans and things of that nature,
but the Medical Follow Up Agency was literally only his idea,
and he shepherded into true existence within three months, which is almost unheard of.
So, the professional significance I think of the wartime years, apropos of him in Houston, can be summarized this way.
He became friendly with many of the leaders, as we saw on that short snorter, of American medicine and politics,
honed his already very good skills in medical data gathering and analysis,
learned the inner workings of Washington, which would come in very handy in the years to come,
and became very adept at strategy and tactics of administration.
He returned to Tulane at the end of the war
and then received a letter from this place,
a building in the woods,
asking if he might be interested in comingand being the Chair of Surgery,
and in this letter from July 14, 1948,
he accepts the position of Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery 1948.
And as you know over the next 60 years, he did a thing or two.
So thank you very much for your attention. It's been a real pleasure.
[Applause]
[Marc L. Boom:] Wasn't that amazing?
I just love hearing that history, and let's give himanother round of applause.
[Applause]
And just think of how lucky we were as a city,
as a medical center, as Baylor College of Medicine, and ultimately as Houston Methodist,
that Dr. DeBakey did accept that offer and came here, and as many say, the rest is history.
You know, one of the funnest part of history that followed that is, uh,
Dr. DeBakey famously went to our little hospital at the corner of San Jacinto and Rosalie,
last hospital in Houston to not have air conditioning,
and called down the administrator Josie Robertsand said, "Hey, um, would you bring me air conditioning?"
And she took a look at him and said, "Give this man anything he wants," and got out of his way.
And I think the rest is a wonderful, beautiful history.
So, I now want to introduce to you Dr. William Winters.
Dr. Winters moved... ah, of course, known and beloved by so many here in the room, moved to Houston in 1968,
established our first echocardiogram... echocardiogr... echocardiography laboratory... Ican't get that out...
in the... in the entire southwest in the following year.
He's the past president of the American College of Cardiology.
He's Emeritus Professor of Cardiology at Houston Methodist.
He also is a historian, co-authoring Houston Hearts,
which is a history of cardiology and cardiovascular surgery at Houston Methodist.
He has also interviewed literally dozens and dozens and dozens of
our physicians and other leaders through the years and chronicling our history
and has served such a beautiful role for that.
Bill enjoyed a 40-year friendship with Dr. Michael DeBakey,
and we couldn't think of a better person today to have a brief conversation with Dr. Miller.
So come on up, Dr. Winters.
[Applause]
[...]
[Dr. William L. Winters, Jr.:] They worked hard in developing the biography of Dr. DeBakey.
Dr. DeBakey managed to become involved in a great many activities:
medicine, research, politics, administration, education.
How in the world... What attributes did he have that allowed him to do those many things?
[...]
[Miller:] Well, you knew him for 40 years! I'd like to ask you that question!
[Laughter from audience]
I had time to think about that.
It's almost superhuman, um...
Before I started this research, as a vascular surgeon, I had an understanding, I thought,
of what his... Dr. DeBakey's accomplishments and contributions were.
I didn't have a clue.
His contributions just from a... from the standpoint of cardiovascular surgery are legion.
But the ones that are less easily, uh... perhaps... grasped, are just what you've described.
The contributions as a statesman were profound.
His contributions as a researcher are...
I mean, I think it's... it's... it's a ridiculous oversight that he did not win the Nobel Prize.
I don't... I don't have an answer to your question because I don't think any of us can answer that.
It... it... it was preternatural.
There was... There was something about this individual that was not really explainable in typical human terms.
Just to give you an idea,
I have spent this morning, as I've spent a number of days over the past few years, atthe
collection of the archives from his office that are over in the Nabisco building there.
They've been partially catalogued, but only partially so.
The finding aid, which is like an index at the back of a book, is 500 pages.
That's the finding aid, which means that every file that you will...
may contain five documents or a hundred, is just one line.
So it... it's almost inhuman the amount of work that he was capable of.
[Winters:] I think it's... I think it's always interesting, I've...
I found him to be able to move almost, um, uh, without any problems from one position of importance to another.
He seemed to have an ability to adapt to whatever the situation was almost seamlessly.
Dr. Miller is going to produce a book. Um...
Some of us, several of us, have had the privilege of seeing some of the drafts as he's produced them.
It's going to be an extraordinary book.
I think it will be a winner. I think it will bean award winner.
Dr. Miller is no... uh, uh... has already had the occasion of award winners for books that he's written, and the most one I've...
The one I know the most of was Dr. Robert Zollinger,
who was a gastroenterology surgeon of great note at Ohio State.
So it's going to be really something that we are all going to treasure for the rest of our lives.
One of the things that I've noticed when reading these drafts that have come forward:
Dr. Miller has been able to capture the contributions of other cardiovascular surgeons along the way
that have added historic context to Dr. DeBakey's legacy.
For example, one of them, uh... was your description in 1950... of doctor... Dr. Walton Lillehei in 1953
doing a cross circulation operation on a young... a youngster, young child, who had a congenital heart disease,
using the patient's parent as the source of oxygenation and the...
and the patient being so... provided oxygen by the parent's circulation.
This was just ahead of the development by John Gibbons of a heart-lung machine.
But examples like that are prolific throughout the... his... his writings.
So talk a little bit about how you... how you came to be doing that.
[Miller:] Putting things in context?
Well, I think it's... it's essential because if... if you describe the contributions of a Dr. Zollinger or a Dr. DeBakey in a vacuum,
then it doesn't give the reader a sense of what the world was like at the time
so you can see why what he did was such an advance.
So in other words, you have to give... you have to set the scene before you can have the player come on.
[Winters:] Well, he's done that exceedingly well, and I think you will find this a most interesting... uh... um... uh... book to read, and I...
and to find other examples like that we'll just have to read the book!
Um, Dr. Miller, thank you again for participating today and in the production of Dr. DeBakey's biography.
[Miller:] Well, thank you. It's been an honor.
[Applause]
[Boom:] Well, thank you again, Dr. Winters, Dr. Miller, um, just absolutely fascinating.
Now we have actually a video that's going to tell some more stories about Dr. DeBakey. So stay tuned.
[Walter Cronkite:] This is Walter Cronkite reporting from the observation dome of an operating room in the Methodist Hospital,
Houston, Texas.
Below me, a delicate operation is taking place, an operation on the human heart.
The surgeon is Dr. Michael Ellis DeBakey.
[Dr. Richard L. Harper:] The person who turned Methodist from a general hospital... a local general hospital
and started making it into a world class institution
was undeniably Dr. DeBakey.
[Dr. Barbara L. Bass:] Dr. DeBakey set the expectation for what a leading academic medical center should be.
It's a place that constantly pushes the envelope relative to discovery and applied discovery and innovation.
[Dr. Mark L. Boom:] Dr. Michael DeBakey'slegacy, uh, is almost beyond words.
Houston Methodist, Baylor College of Medicine, and in fact the entire Texas Medical Center
wouldn't be nearly what they are today without his very lasting impact.
[Ron Girotto:] Dr. DeBakey was always onethat would push the envelope.
That's who we are. That's just ingrained into our culture.
[Michael DeBakey, Jr.:] He told me it really was important in life to develop something to better people's lives.
Whatever you do, create something that makes things better.
[Music]
[Harper:] In the 1950s, Dr. DeBakey started doing blood vessel surgery at a time when no one in the whole world did it.
He invented the technique that made an aneurysm go from a totally lethal disease to a totally curable disease.
[Dr. William Winters, Jr.:] He did the first carotid endarterectomy.
He developed a homograph to repair aneurysms of the aorta.
He wasn't able to get enough homographs, so he was looking for something else to replace human veins.
[Announcer:] This morning, Dr. DeBakey will remove the whole artery and replace it with this.
It is a tube of knitted plastic called Dacron.
No one has attempted such a major replacement before.
[Harper:] He went downtown to one of the department stores and he wanted to get some nylon cloth.
[Dr. Alan B. Lumsden:] The store dress clerk said, "Sorry, Dr. DeBakey, but we're out of that. But we got this new stuff called Dacron."
[Dr. Michael DeBakey:] And then I would actually cut these in two sheets in the sizes I wanted to use,
and on my wife's sewing machine, I would sew the edges to make a tube, you see.
[Lumsden:] And sterilize that and use that to repair the first aortic aneurysm.
[Gregory V. Nelson:] Who thinks like that? Only Dr. DeBakey thinks like that.
[DeBakey, Jr.:] He was kind of a tinkerer with everything, and he really enjoyed learning how something worked.
I remember when he gave us an electric train for Christmas.
He spent more time trying to figure out how it made smoke in this... this train
and how it worked than I got to play with it!
[DeBakey:] The way it works, of course, is that the blood is pumped, is brought up into this chamber,
and if you'll watch here, you'll see when I blow into this...
[Music]
[Bass:] Dr. DeBakey was a translational scientist par excellence.
He saw a problem, and he sought to create a solution and innovate it.
[Interviewer:] Where do you view this pump as leading us, midway, or is this the final step?
[DeBakey:] Not at all. This is the first step.
[Music]
[Dr. William A. Zoghbi:] I think Dr. DeBakey hadhis touch all over medicine.
[Dr. A. Osama Gaber:] Dr. DeBakey helped create the National Cancer Institute.
[Zoghbi:] He wrote about jetlag.
[Dr. Charles H. McCollum:] He invented a sleeve valve for doing blood transfusions.
[Harper:] He was, uh, responsible for developing roller pumps.
[Denis DeBakey:] He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his work on what would eventually become the MASH units.
[Dr. Michael Reardon:] He organized the VA.
He organized the first intensive care unit.
[Gaber:] In 1968, Dr. DeBakey's disciples did the first multi-organ donor.
[Winters:] In one operation, they transplanted a heart, a lung,
a kidney, and a pancreas.
[Dr. George Noon:] Not only were we developing new procedures, w had to developnew instruments.
[McCollum:] It's pretty standard, all around the world I think, for the DeBakey instruments,
whether they're forceps or clamps or whatever.
[Cronkite:] Houston, the Texas Medical Center, and Methodist Hospital,
where Dr. Michael Ellis DeBakey, installer of spare parts in the heart and arteries,
professor of surgery, Baylor University,
has his command and control center in a war on heart disease.
[Girotto:] I mean, he put Methodist on the map on a worldwide basis.
[Duke of Windsor Undergoes Surgery in Houston, commentary by Peter Roberts, News of the Day]
[Peter Roberts:] The Duke of Windsor, the 70-year-old former King of England,
is here for surgery to remove an abdominal aneurysm.
[Dr. Antonio Gotto:] He was asked by a reporter,why did he come here,
and he said he came to see the maestro.
[McCollum:] Many people know about his surgery and the role in education.
I think less well known is his role as a medical statesman.
[Dr. Gerald Lawrie:] Dr. DeBakey flew to Russia and put the first pacemaker in one of the politburo members.
We were doing trips overseas all the time.
[McCollum:] He did surgery in, uh, China.
He would frequently come back through Washington to be debriefed.
He was providing more information than the government intelligence agencies could provide.
[Music]
[DeBakey Jr.] Dad was called the Texas Tornado.
[Denis DeBakey: And my dad did everything in high gear.
[DeBakey Jr.:] It was, "Charge ahead." And if you didn't charge ahead with him,
you'd better get out of the way.
[DeBakey:] Let me have this. So, you... you... You're too slow, you know?
I can't stand that. You're too slow.
[Vidal G. Martinez:] Dr. DeBakey would work 20 hours a day,
go home and sleep for four, and be back at four or five in the morning.
[McCollum:] He would do twelve, fifteen cases a day frequently.
[Lumsden:] Most people were in awe of the kind of procedures that were being done
and in fear of the environment.
[Lawrie:] I didn't think I was going to make it.
Oh, he'd get in here around six, 6:30 in the morning, and we'd often keep operating till one or two in the morning.
So now that we stop at eleven or 12:00 at night, we feel like we're slacking.
I'm sorry, but, uh...
[Boom:] But everybody... to a person who's told me those stories from those days will also then tell me,
"But it was because he cared so deeply about the patient."
[Denis DeBakey:] And he would not tolerate anything that might be to the detriment of the patient.
Everyone who worked around him knew that they had to have things done properly.
[Lawrie:] The reward is when you see hundreds and hundreds of patients who either would have got a bad result
or wouldn't have been able to be treated at all end up with a much better result.
[Music]
[Dr. Patrick Reardon:] He did have a reputationas a stern taskmaster,
but nobody devoted as much effort, as much thought,
as much emotion to the care of their patients as he did.
[Gotto:] Our middle daughter spent many days at Methodist Hospital, and, well he would visit her.
And one day... uh, he came by, and my wife was in the room
sewing a dress for her to wear to a party.
[Nelson:] But he kept glancing over at this sewing that was going on,
and he was getting very distracted by the sewing, and finally he couldn't stand it any longer, and...
[Gotto:] He said, "Let me have your scissors."
So he started cutting every stitch out,
and she said, "Dr. DeBakey, what do you know about sewing?"
And then it dawned on her who she was talking to, and
so he proceeded to re-sew every stitch.
[Music]
[DeBakey Jr.:] I ask him one time, "What... What's the thing that makes you most proud of?"
And there wasn't a second hesitation.
He said, "The thousands of surgeons I've trained."
[Boom:] Dr. DeBakey trained, collaborated with,
worked hand-in-hand with countless amazing individuals throughout his career.
People like John Overstreet, E. Stanley Crawford, George Noon,
Tony Gotto, Gerald Lawrie, to name just a few.
[Speaker:] He trained that next generation, which is now training that next generation,to do it the DeBakey way,
to do it with excellence and with unparalleled care.
[Patrick Reardon:] He was such a remarkable man.
It was humbling to me to be in his presence as a junior doctor.
It's still pretty humbling now to... to say that, you know, I trained under him.
[Nelson:] He referred to us as the hospital with a soul,
and he was part of that. He was the physician with a soul.
[Boom:] He knew that the greater spiritual environment, the values that embrace that individual,
looking at holistically the whole person, were critically important.
And he knew that every... uh, every day of his life, and I think that has informed who we are
just as much as medical excellence, research having formed who we are through his work.
[Music]
[Applause]
[Boom:] Well, I certainly hope Dr. DeBakey's looking down on us today with a big smile at everything that's been accomplished
and all that the people in this room continue today, um, to carry on in his legacy.
And on that note, we are very pleased today to be joined by family members,
to be joined by colleagues and to be joined by physicians
that have worked alongside or been trained by Dr. DeBakey throughout the years.
So we'd love to recognize them today.
As I call their names, we'd love for them to come down to the front.
Before we do that, uh, I want to mention we've obviously had conversations with a number of individuals like that
who just couldn't be here with us today as well,
but we have a group of amazing luminaries,
kind of in random order here as they gave them to me,
so I'm going to call you to the front here.
Dr. Miguel Quiñones.
Dr. Nadim Zacca.
Dr. Jim Harrell.
Dr. Pat Reardon.
Dr. Tony Gotto.
Dr. DeBakey's son, Denis DeBakey.
I think Dr. Neal Kleiman might still be caught up in the cath lab, I believe.
Um, Dr. Mike Reardon.
Dr. Bill Zogbhi.
Nurse Henny Banning.
Dr. Mohammed Attar.
Dr. Bernard Barrett.
Dr. Richard Geiss.
Dr. William Winters.
Dr. Samuel Weber.
Dr. John Roane.
Dr. Joe Naples.
Dr. Antoinette Ripepi.
Dr. Alan Cramer.
George Noon.
Dr. DeBakey's wife and daughter, Katrin DeBakey and Olga DeBakey.
[Applause]
Dr. Charlie McCollum.
And Dr. Gerald Lawrie.
If there's anyone I've missed, I apologize,
but you also... would you also please come forward if I've missed any.
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
Let's give them all a big round of applause.
[Applause]
Well, thank you to everybody.
You all are just amazing members of our Houston Methodist family.
We thank you for everything you've done, everything you do.
To Dr. DeBakey's family members here, thank you for sharing with him... er, him with us for 60 years that he worked at Houston Methodist.
Um, this is a hospital that was built on his legacy and carries on his legacy very proudly.
So God bless each and every one of you. Thank you so much.
[Applause]
And Dr. Neil Kleiman, you got here just after we finished! He was in the Cath lab.
Congrats, Neil.
Maybe we get him squeezed in. Let's take a quick picture with Dr. Kleiman in there as well.
[...]
[Music]
Wonderful. Well, Dr. Kleiman, I know Dr. DeBakey would be proud, as we heard him talking about putting the patient first.
Thank you for doing that.
And so, uh, with that, that concludes this part of our event today.
I'd like to invite you to join us in the... uh, uh... Barbara and President George H.W. Bush Atrium of the Walter Tower
and to visit the Centennial Wall that I mentioned there as well.
It is a short walk. We're going to have people guiding the way.
For anybody who'd like a ride over, we also have some golf carts that can scooch on over there as well.
Thank you so much for being here at this tremendous event. God bless.
[Applause]
[Houston Methodist, 1919-2019, 100 Years of Leading Medicine]
[This production is produced by:Houston MethodistLeading Medicine]