DeBakey was modern surgery giant

Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, whose innovative heart and blood-vessel operations made him one of the most influential doctors in the United States, died Friday night in Houston, where he lived. He was 99.

His death, at the Methodist Hospital, was of natural causes, according to a statement released by the hospital and Baylor College of Medicine, where Dr. DeBakey was chancellor emeritus.

"Many consider Michael E. DeBakey to be the greatest surgeon ever," the Journal of the American Medical Association said in 2005.

Dr. DeBakey's pioneering surgical procedures in bypassing blocked arteries in the neck, legs and heart have been performed on millions of patients around the world. By the time he stopped a regular surgical schedule, when he was in his 80s, he had performed more than 60,000 operations.

He was also instrumental in making Houston a major center for heart surgery and research and transforming Baylor into one of the nation's great medical-education and research institutions.

And he was a leader in developing mechanical devices to assist failing hearts. An early invention, the roller pump, devised while he was in medical school in the 1930s, became the central component of the heart-lung machine, which takes over the functions of the heart and lungs during surgery by supplying oxygenated blood to the brain. It helped inaugurate the era of open-heart surgery.

One of Dr. DeBakey's innovations helped preserve his own life in 2006, when he underwent surgery to repair a torn aorta. He had devised the operation 50 years earlier. Afterward, he spent months making what he called a miraculous recovery and then returned to his office and an active schedule.

A number of his surgical innovations and observations were initially ridiculed. While working at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1939, Dr. DeBakey and Dr. Alton Ochsner made one of the first links between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Many prominent doctors derided the concept. Then, in 1964, the surgeon general documented the link.

Dr. DeBakey went on to discover — again in the face of professional skepticism — that Dacron grafts were excellent substitutes for damaged parts of arteries; the finding allowed surgeons to repair previously inoperable aneurysms of the aorta in the chest and abdomen.

His patients ranged from the penniless to such famous figures as the Duke of Windsor, the Shah of Iran, King Hussein of Jordan and presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.

But he said celebrities didn't get special treatment on the operating table: "Once you incise the skin, you find that they are all very similar."

Dr. DeBakey's first wife, Diana, died in 1972. His survivors include his second wife, the former Katrin Fehlhaber, who had been a film actress in Germany; their daughter, Olga-Katarina; two sons from his first marriage, Michael and Dennis; two sisters; and a number of grandchildren. Two sons, Ernest and Barry, died earlier.

Dr. DeBakey was a perfectionist, intolerant of incompetence, sloppy thinking and laziness.

Before mellowing in his later years, he had a reputation for sometimes-tyrannical behavior in firing assistants for making relatively minor errors such as cutting a suture to the wrong length.

"If you were on the operating table," Dr. DeBakey said, "would you want a perfectionist, or somebody who cared little for detail?"

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.