Dr. Michael DeBakey died last week. He was the last of a generation of famous physicians — doctors whose accomplishments advanced the practice of medicine in such astonishing ways that their names became household words.
DeBakey, Christiaan Barnard, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin became famous for their accomplishments.
Salk and Sabin developed the vaccines that stopped the dreaded disease polio in its tracks and freed the children of the nation and the world from the specter of crutches, leg braces and the iron lung.
Barnard developed the techniques for and performed the world’s first human heart transplant, a seeming miracle of surgery that has saved thousands of lives. Today the operation is performed by skilled surgeons around the world.
DeBakey was the most versatile of the medical innovators. During World War II, he developed the pattern for what became the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals, the famous MASH units that brought the skills of modern surgery much closer to the battlefield and reduced dramatically the numbers of soldiers who died from traumatic injuries.
After the war, he helped develop a program for medical care of the nation’s veterans.
But DeBakey was best known for developing the techniques and equipment for heart bypass surgery, an operation that has extended and improved millions of lives. He also, in spite of the medical establishment’s skepticism, developed the Dacron grafts that are now used to repair damaged arteries. Using the skills his mother taught him, he sewed the first experimental models himself.
DeBakey’s accomplishments made him — like Barnard, Salk and Sabin — not only a hero to ordinary people, but a superstar of world medicine.
It is tempting to say that they don’t make doctors like that anymore, but there are still skilled, innovative people doing medical research, and every year, the procedures and equipment they develop are saving lives. In medicine, as in the rest of life, every generation stands upon the shoulders of the one before it.
But there is a lack of doctor heroes — or even celebrities — for this generation. Perhaps the reason is that the public has come to accept medical advances as a matter of course. Perhaps it is that the public has been taught to expect more titillation from its celebrities — the spice of scandal or the vicarious thrill of public adoration. We have come to value people who are not necessarily accomplished, but are fabulously well-known.
That’s all right. In the end, celebrity counts for little or nothing. Accomplishments have the only lasting value. DeBakey and the others like him accomplished much for the benefit of the people of the world.
If we must have superstars and celebrities, it would be good if we once again could have our doctor-heroes.
jayhawker (anonymous) says...
Well said, Mr. Kelley. Thank you.
July 14, 2008 at 2:58 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )