U.S. Congressman Michael C. Burgess, M.D. 26th District of Texas

 
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Mr. BURGESS. Mr. Speaker, I do want to thank my friends who have come to the floor to help us today honor Dr. Michael DeBakey. I do want to thank Al Green for his persistence in getting this bill to the floor. It has been a long time in the making. And obviously I want to thank our senior Senator from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and certainly thank Chairman Frank for allowing the Senate bill to come through the floor procedure so that we may hasten this floor process for Dr. DeBakey. As has been mentioned here several times this morning, Dr. DeBakey is 99 years old and certainly deserving of this honor, and we need to get it to him with all haste.

Dr. DeBakey is the father of cardiovascular surgery in our country. And I do encourage my colleagues to vote in favor of S. 474, a bill to designate the Congressional Gold Medal for the famed Houston heart surgeon. This bill has been very important to me, as one of the physicians in the House of Representatives, to be able today to come to the floor and talk about how Dr. DeBakey changed the face of medicine so significantly forever in this country. As a fellow physician, Dr. DeBakey's work on medical advancements is legendary. His dedication to healing those around him came not only from his talents as a physician but his ongoing commitment to the larger medical community. His motto, as we heard others mention it today, was ``strive for nothing less than excellence.'' Boy, every Member of this House could adopt that as one of our mottos and do better by the country for it.

Mr. Speaker, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the education and entrepreneurial spirit that made him worthy of the Nation's highest expression of appreciation for distinguished achievements and contributions. Dr. DeBakey received his bachelor's and M.D. degree from Tulane University in New Orleans, as we have already heard mentioned. He delivered Al Green in medical school.

But probably more importantly, while in medical school, he developed the roller pump, later to become the major component in the heart-lung machine that is used in open heart surgery routinely today. This was a groundbreaking achievement, Mr. Speaker. Every pump to pump the heart, to take over the work of the heart artificially, prior to that time, had worked on a mechanical piston-type arrangement. Dr. DeBakey envisioned the roller pump which preserved the structure of red blood cells as they took their course through the pump and allowed this pump to, in fact, become part and parcel with something that we now just all accept as part of cardiovascular surgery. It was truly a visionary change. Again, he popularized that while he was in medical school in the 1930s.

Now, Dr. DeBakey completed his internship at Charity Hospital, one of the venerable institutions of learning in this country. Many of my professors at Parkman Hospital trained at Charity Hospital. Charity Hospital is no longer with us because of the ravages of Hurricane Katrina 2 years ago. After Dr. DeBakey completed his internship at Charity, he went on to the University of Strasbourg in France and the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

He volunteered for service in World War II and was subsequently named director of the surgical consultants division of the U.S. Surgeon General's Office. His work during that war led to the development of what we have already heard described today as the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, the so-called MASH unit. Mr. Green has already eloquently pointed out that we wouldn't have the MASH units today. More importantly, we wouldn't have those forward surgical teams that go into the combat areas and provide vital care to our soldiers in that first golden hour after injury, all of that pioneered by Dr. DeBakey well over two generations ago.

He helped establish the specialized medical and surgical center system for treating military personnel returning home from war, which we now know as the Veterans Administration Medical Center. But it was at Methodist Hospital in Houston where Dr. DeBakey performed many of his groundbreaking surgeries, including the first removal of a carotid artery blockage in 1950, interestingly the year that I was born, the first coronary artery bypass graft in 1964, the first use of a ventricle assist device to pump blood and support a diseased heart in 1966; and then on to some of the first heart transplants in this country in 1968 and 1969.

He developed a self-contained miniaturized left ventricular assist device to pump blood for a diseased heart, something that is in use to this day. The techniques used to miniaturize the device's inner workings were developed by engineers working on the Nation's space program at nearby NASA.

He has served as adviser to every President of the United States for the last 50 years. Think of that, Mr. Speaker: every President for the last 50 years has depended upon Dr. Michael DeBakey for medical advice. He has given advice to heads of state throughout the world and traveled famously to Russia in 1996 to consult on heart surgery for the ailing Boris Yeltsin. I have GPO's PDFto believe, Mr. Speaker, that he did a lot more than consult in that operating room that day 10 years ago.

During his professional surgical career, he performed more than 60,000 cardiovascular procedures and trained thousands of surgeons who practice around the world. Today, his name is affixed to any number of organizations, centers for learning and projects devoted to medical education and health education for the general public.

But think of this, Mr. Speaker: Dr. DeBakey also underwent an operation that was named for him. I picked up a copy of the New York Times last December and read a story about how Dr. DeBakey had undergone the surgery that he himself had described many years before. In fact, Dr. DeBakey admitted that at the time, although he knew he was ill, he never called his own doctor, he never called 911.

``If it becomes intense enough you are perfectly willing to accept cardiac arrest as a possible way of getting rid of the pain.'' This is what he told the New York Times last year. What a unique, what a pragmatic individual.

He helped establish the National Library of Medicine which is now the world's largest and most prestigious repository of medical archives. The National Library of Medicine is something I look at several times a week as I prepare for committee hearings on our Committee on Energy and Commerce, developed and established by Dr. Michael DeBakey.

Mr. Speaker, as we talk in this Congress about the need for improving computer technology for medical records and medical information, Dr. DeBakey was on the forefront of that while most of us were still in grammar school. In 1969 he received the highest honor a United States citizen can receive, the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction. In 1976, his students founded the Michael E. DeBakey International Surgical Society. His contributions to medicine and his breakthrough surgeries and innovative devices have completely transformed our view of the human body and our view of longevity on this planet. He has been designated as a living legend by the United States Library of Congress; and, today, we take another step in honoring him with the Congressional Gold Medal.

Mr. Speaker, it has been a high honor for me to be associated with this endeavor. And I certainly do thank Mr. Green and thank him for allowing me to be on the telephone when we gave the news to Dr. DeBakey several weeks ago on his 99th birthday. It is imperative that we get this legislation accomplished quickly. I appreciate Mr. Green's willingness to work with the other body in getting this legislation to the floor so swiftly.