Word: debakey
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That was the tribute paid to Drs. William Kouwenhoven of Johns Hopkins University and Paul Zoll of Harvard Medical School by Heart Surgeon Michael DeBakey, chairman of the jury that last week selected them as winners of the annual Albert Lasker research awards.- The two researchers were chosen for their development of techniques and devices that save or prolong more than 150,000 lives a year. Between them, they have made it possible to control a variety of heart rhythm disorders, to restart a stopped heart, and to convert a faulty pulse into a steady beat...
Died. Diana Cooper DeBakey, 62, wife of Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, the pioneer in cardiac surgery and transplants; of a heart attack; in Houston...
Okay, Groucho. As Thompson presents them, DeBakey and Cooley each possess a politician's cunning and a financier's wizardry. Both are men of great physical dexterity and enormous ego, disciplined and unforgiving. One Houston pediatric surgeon said of them: "You take these guys out of surgery and put them in business or industry, and they'd be Ross Perot or Bernie Cornfeld. Wait, make that Tom Watson or Henry Ford...
...DeBakey apparently plays his role unmercifully as a minor deity among the residents who work for him, testing them almost beyond endurance. In the operating room, he is given to exasperation: "With a third hand I could do it all myself!" Both men, naturally, are fantastically skillful. In surgery, Cooley once joked: "You practice for this procedure by circumcising gnats." But they are also driven by an almost compulsive devotion to work and a kind of superb arrogance. Each has appeared in surgery while ill and insisted upon operating...
Thompson's sketch of Cooley is not as vivid as his picture of DeBakey; the author confesses that Cooley remained an enigma to him. But he offers a nice account of the slow falling out between the two surgeons during their ten-yearlong collaboration. One surgeon told Thompson: "Denton felt that every time he did something important, Mike got credit for it. Denton had become the best heart-cutter in the world and nobody outside the medical societies knew his name." Another hospital official added: "Basically it was the incompatibility of two enormous egos. One day after some bickering...