Word: debakey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Every other day in the week, breakfast is no more than coffee and a banana. By 5, DeBakey is at work in his den, the one room in his comfortable Regency house to which not even his wife or the maid has a key. The huge horseshoe-shaped desk (like almost everything else that DeBakey owns, it is the gift of a grateful patient) is crammed with stacked lantern slides of diseased arteries, patients' histories, statistical analyses of the results of thousands of operations, reprints of reports by other surgeons, masses of correspondence, and a tiny portable...
...usually the case, DeBakey is in a jam between journeys to far cities or foreign lands, he spends the dawn hours writing scientific papers in longhand. He finds that the time it takes to write makes him use words with the precision that is so precious to him. If he has a day or two to spare before a speech or manuscript is due, DeBakey dictates to a tape recorder and later revises the typed draft. His professional bibliography now numbers no fewer than 619 scientific reports...
...Post-Op. Houston's normally seething traffic is mercifully light when DeBakey takes off for Methodist Hospital in his Alfa Romeo Sprint (a gift from a grateful Italian patient) at an unpredictable speed and in no particular gear. A man who never walks if he can drive, he gets his exercise by refusing to wait for elevators. He lopes up and down stairs and covers the hospital's labyrinthine corridors at a brisk pace. Professor DeBakey has a handsome, spacious, blue-carpeted office in Baylor's College of Medicine, and rarely uses it. In Methodist Hospital, Surgeon...
After the staggering schedule of operations, the afternoons are for staff conferences, with internists, cardiologists, radiologists and his chief assistants. Many an oldtime surgeon thought his job was done when he had laid down the scalpel and the last suture was in place. Not DeBakey. He belongs to the latter-day school typified by Harvard's Dr. Francis D. Moore (TIME cover, May 3, 1963), which insists that no less important than the operation itself are the study and preparation of the patient beforehand, and his care and study while he is recovering. DeBakey interrupts pre-operation conferences...
Nearly every day there are other hospital or medical meetings to take DeBakey's time. And always there are long-distance telephone calls about patients, or plans to further medical progress. Even when DeBakey promises his long-suffering wife that he will be home for dinner, he is usually so late that she eats alone, then gives him a tray at his desk in the den while he is making phone calls. He takes work into the den and stays until midnight...