biography
| name: |
DeBakey, Michael (Ellis)
|
pronunciation:
[debaykee]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1908– )
|
| biography:
| Cardiologist and surgeon, born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, USA. While he was still a medical student, he invented a major component of the heart-lung machines (1932) that made open heart surgery possible. He joined the faculty at Tulane University in 1937. During World War 2 he helped the Surgeon General develop mobile army surgical hospitals (MASH units). He returned to Tulane for two years and then joined Baylor University's medical school (1948). In the early 1950s he became proficient in treating aortic aneurysms by replacing the section with a graft of blood vessels. He performed the first of 12 heart transplants in 1968, but the procedure was stopped until 1984 when controls on organ rejection were improved. He became president (1969) and then chancellor (1978) of the Baylor College of Medicine in Waco, TX. A prolific writer, he published The Living Heart (1977) and The Living Heart Diet (1984). |
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