Word: debakey
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...incredible drive for perfection, the unending concern for his patients, the utter domination of his life by his profession, have won Michael Ellis DeBakey the nickname of "the Texas Tornado." The TV scriptwriter who created such a character would sooner or later conjure up flashbacks to a boyhood in the family drugstore and an early love for medicine. In DeBakey's case, his life outdoes such fiction...
...father, Shaker Morris DeBakey, 80 this week, came to the U.S. from Lebanon when he was 15. By the time his son Michael was in high school, Shaker DeBakey owned a drugstore where the boy helped out and nourished the desire-acquired years earlier-to become a doctor. From his father, says Mike DeBakey, he learned his early-rising habits, the absolute abhorrence of wasted time that has marked his en tire career. His mother, whom DeBakey remembers as "the most compassionate and sweetest person I've ever known," also contributed to his career. She taught her two sons...
Banana Breakfast. A straight-A student, DeBakey raced through Tulane for both his B.S. and M.D. degrees, stayed to get an M.S. for research on peptic ulcer. He got appointments to the universities of Strasbourg and Heidelberg, where he also continued courting Diana Cooper, a pretty nurse whom he had met in New Orleans before she went to the American Hospital in Paris. After Europe and marriage, it was back to Tulane to the department of surgery under Dr. Alton Ochsner.* During the '30s, young Dr. DeBakey became an expert in blood transfusions and invented a roller pump...
Wartime service in the Army surgeon general's office gave Colonel DeBakey a chance to become an exacting critic of the quality of surgery, and in 1948 he moved to Houston with misgivings. Baylor's College of Medicine was just sorting itself out from the shambles of a wartime move from Dallas, and it was difficult to find a hospital surgical service with enough patients for DeBakey's practice and teaching. But he found a powerful ally in a retiring millionaire, Ben Taub, and soon got a major hospital program rolling. DeBakey and Taub are still fast...
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...