Word: debakey
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Michael Ellis DeBakey. son of a Lebanese immigrant who had made good in Lake Charles, La., wanted to be a physician-specifically, a surgeon. Soon after graduation from Tulane University School of Medicine, interning at New Orleans' vast Charity Hospital, young Dr. DeBakey invented a pump that he hoped might some day relieve or replace the heart during delicate surgery. That was in 1932, and the inventive intern was about 20 years ahead of his time...
With driving intensity and singleness of purpose, Surgeon DeBakey worked all day every day and half the night (since 1948 at Houston's Baylor University hospitals) on mechanical defects of blood vessels, especially the aorta. This great vessel, the body's main artery, sometimes develops an aneurysm (like a ballooning blister on a bicycle's inner tube) that is often painful and disabling, and fatal when it bursts. Daringly, Dr. DeBakey began to cut out aneurysms and replace the damaged section of aorta with a graft from an artery bank. Gradually, with improved techniques and materials...
...strokes-accidents in the brain's blood supply-are only less common than heart attacks, and can cause more severe crippling. Dr. DeBakey tackled these, installed artery grafts in cases where the blood stoppage had occurred at an accessible site below the skull (TIME...
When it comes to treatment after the damage is done, the researchers were more tentative in their reports. Most positive was Houston's famed surgeon, Michael E. DeBakey, who reported that in a random series of 150 stroke victims examined by arterial X rays, no fewer than 43% were adjudged capable of getting substantial relief from prompt surgery...
...DeBakey and his team actually performed operations on 69 victims. In some cases they reamed out carotid and other arteries leading to the brain, in others they bypassed a completely shut-down stretch of artery with a Dacron tube to carry blood from a lower stretch of healthy artery to a higher one. Among the 69 cases they found 13 for whom they could do nothing, and had five failures, but in 51 cases they reported success. In some instances this was as great as relief from a substantial degree of paralysis, or loss of speech, or partial blindness...