Super Medicine
At the Texas Medical Center doctors can rebuild your heart, give you new limbs, treat your cancer, save your children from affliction, and maybe even bring you back from the dead.
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Cooley was the most prominent member of a team of talented young surgeons that DeBakey brought to Baylor in the fifties. Cooley was a native Houstonian, a product of the University of Texas and the Galveston Medical Branch. He had gone on to train in Baltimore and London and to become the country’s most promising young heart surgeon. As such, he was the perfect complement to DeBakey, the great vessel man. What attracted Cooley to Baylor was DeBakey’s reputation and his volume of work, the chance to return to Houston, and the new Medical Center. E. W. Bertner was Cooley’s mother’s obstetrician and therefore (as Cooley is fond of pointing out) the first man he ever saw. Growing up, Cooley often heard Bertner talk about his grand plans for the center. “‘Not everyone appreciates what the future holds,’ Dr. Bertner used to say,” says Cooley now. “He used to say it would be the most renowned medical center in the world.” In the middle and late fifties, DeBakey and Cooley’s surgery attracted worldwide attention, and incidentally brought prosperity to Methodist, which became the Medical Center’s largest hospital and filled 20 to 25 per cent of its beds with cardiovascular patients.
Those were the years when the federal government began heavily subsidizing medical research — which before World War II had been largely the province of doctors who happened to inherit fortunes — and DeBakey was in the thick of that, too. In 1948 Congress established the National Heart Institute (now called the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute), and throughout the fifties and sixties DeBakey testified frequently on Capitol Hill. In 1964 DeBakey’s old friend Lyndon Johnson appointed him chairman of the President’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer, and Stroke. After years of making its most spectacular advances in immunizing people against acute diseases like polio, medicine was turning its attention to chronic, noninfectious diseases like cancer and heart disease. Dr. Jonas Salk was the last hero of the acute era; DeBakey was the first of the chronic era.
To the press, his patients, politicians, the wealthy, celebrities — everyone except his own employees — DeBakey is charming and impressive. As a public speaker, he is probably without equal in medicine. He speaks in a courtly Louisiana accent, explaining the most advanced concepts in language that a layman can understand, exuding dedication, sincerity, and a sense of the importance of his work. In private he must be equally winning, for he has assembled a large collection of devoted friends among the powerful and famous. He has operated on King Leopold of Belgium (Princess Lilian in gratitude erected a bronze bust of DeBakey outside Methodist), Guy Lombardo, Joe Louis, the Duke of Windsor. Howard Hughes was on his way to Methodist when he died in a plane in 1976. Jerry Lewis credited DeBakey with saving his life by breaking him of an addiction to pills last year, and has given Baylor and Methodist the Jerry Lewis Neuromuscular Disease Research Center. A large contributor to the DeBakey Medical Foundation is his friend Frank Sinatra, who gives $20,000 a year.
Nor has DeBakey ignored the prominent citizens of Houston. He has built strong ties to the business community and to several people with large personal fortunes, who have been very good to Baylor and Methodist over the years. It is easy to understand the claim DeBakey exerts on these people: he has been the great man in their midst, the good cause, the bringer of the world’s acclaim to Houston. DeBakey is particularly close to Ben Taub, a retired tobacco wholesaler and investor with whom he used to breakfast every Sunday, and to Mrs. W. W. Fondren, the widow of one of the founders of Humble Oil. Both have been extremely generous to the Texas Medical Center; both are in their nineties now and are quietly in residence at Methodist Hospital.
DeBakey is a driven man. He works seven days a week, many hours a day — it’s hard to tell how many because he prefers to conduct much of his business in secrecy. Legends about him abound: DeBakey sleeps two hours a night. DeBakey sleeps for fifteen minutes every three hours and not at all at night. DeBakey never walks, only runs. DeBakey won’t let the resident in charge of the cardiovascular intensive care unit ever leave the hospital during the two months he is on duty there. One story popular among medical students is that once the wife of one of DeBakey’s residents was having a baby and he asked permission to be at her side. Fine, DeBakey is supposed to have said, two hours off will be enough, won’t it? He is a very serious man who believes in being tough on people. He dominates those around him. The students and residents at Baylor are proud of his renown, but not many really like him.
As he was becoming more and more famous as a surgeon and medical statesman, DeBakey was also coming to dominate Baylor College of Medicine. In the sixties, in addition to mastering cardiac surgery, appearing on the cover of Time, transplanting hearts, and receiving honors around the world, he became Baylor’s president and chief executive officer. In 1969 the school severed its ties with Baylor University, mainly because, as a Baptist institution, Baylor had objections to receiving the tax funds a medical school so desperately needs. At the same time the medial school’s board of trustees was dissolved and DeBakey assembled a new one, headed by L. F. McCollum, a Methodist Hospital board member and retired chairman of Conoco.
In short order, Baylor raised $32 million in private funds for buildings and salaries; obtained from the Legislature the most generous funding that any private medical school gets from any state government, $12 million a year; built the $34 million Neurosensory Center in partnership with Methodist; increased its annual budget from $18 million to $70 million; won $26 million in grants from the National Heart and Lung Institute for its first national demonstration center, beating out thirty other medical schools; and recruited a spate of bright young department chairmen from all over the country. Now workmen are finishing the new twelve-story Michael E. DeBakey Center for Biomedical Research and Education at Baylor, and the school is kicking off another major fund drive, called the Campaign for the Eighties.
The board has played as important a part as DeBakey in all this, by raising money and helping to woo new stars to Baylor. When Stanley Appel, a hot ticket in academic medicine, came down to look at Baylor last year before accepting the chairmanship of the neurology department, the board gave a dinner for him at the Petroleum Club at which every member stood up and gave a little speech, saying how much he wanted Stanley Appel to come to Baylor College of Medicine and what he personally would do to make sure Appel’s career there would be a happy and fruitful one.
“In the next decade,” says Appel, who turned down a similar job at Harvard to come to Baylor, “it will be far easier to bring intellect to money than money to intellect. In the sixties the National Institues of Health were so bountiful that anybody could get support for his research. Now the ‘haves’ are the places where the community has the resources to support the program. When I looked at Baylor, I said, show me a commitment. They said, here’s a building, the Neurosensory Center. That’s a rather tangible commitment — thirty four million dollars. That’s damn unusual. The ambience of Houston, in addition to boomtown, is a sense in the community . . . well, it’s almost like tithing. That’s the way Houston feels about the Medical Center.”
Along with Baylor, Methodist Hospital has done very well. It now has 1200 beds and a $95 million physical plant and is building the new Total Health Care Center across Fannin Street. Cooley’s present bailiwick — St. Luke’s, Texas Children’s Hospital, and the Texas Heart Institute — has assets of $117 million and 1008 beds. By comparison, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, probably the most distinguished teaching private hospital in the country, has 1082 beds. And the daily semiprivate room rate at St. Luke’s and Methodist is about $92, compared to $189 at Mass General.
Dr. DeBakey is a very busy man, and I was never able to arrange to get more than a few glimpses of him. On the day I was supposed to interview him, I presented myself in the cardiovascular surgical suite at Methodist at 8:30 in the morning. One of his nurses led me up to the observation room above one of the operating rooms, where I could watch through a glass dome as DeBakey performed one of the four operations on his schedule that day. On the operating table was a draped body, lying with only its neck visible. DeBakey’s assistants were cutting the neck open and exposing the carotid artery, which carries blood to the brain.
Presently DeBakey strode quickly into the operating room, a deep frown on his face. At seventy, he is still wiry and erect. His hair, once graying, is not jet-black. He was wearing white leather boots with three-inch platform heels. Every other surgeon at Texas Medical Center, Cooley included, operates in a green hospital-issue scrub suit; DeBakey wears royal-blue scrubs with his initials embroidered on the breast pocket. He clapped his hands and a nurse held up a surgical gown for him to step into; then he went to work. With an air of fierce concentration, he blocked off a short stretch of the artery, which is about the width of a pencil, with clamps and routed the blood through a plastic tube past the blocked section. Then he cut open the artery, scraped out some pale yellow material, and sewed a small patch of Dacron over the incision. He removed the plastic tube, sewed up a few leaks, and sutured back together the patient’s muscles, then the fat, then the skin, his hands moving quickly and surely. This was a routine operation for him, and it took him less than half an hour.
From the observation room I went upstairs to DeBakey’s suite, which had a metal plaque outside proclaiming it to be the Michael E. DeBakey Heart and Blood Vessel Center. After a short wait, DeBakey walked in and sat down, looking preoccupied. He is not a handsome man but certainly an impressive one, with a wise, deeply creased face, a great leonine head, and big, long-fingered surgeon’s hands. He shook my hand and said he was very busy, that he had only a few minutes to spare and didn’t want to waste any time. After a few minutes of perfunctory conversation he went back into his office.
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