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Pre-Op, Post-Op. Houston's normally seething traffic is mercifully light when DeBakey takes off for Methodist Hospital in his Alfa Romeo Sprint (a gift from a grateful Italian patient) at an unpredictable speed and in no particular gear. A man who never walks if he can drive, he gets his exercise by refusing to wait for elevators. He lopes up and down stairs and covers the hospital's labyrinthine corridors at a brisk pace. Professor DeBakey has a handsome, spacious, blue-carpeted office in Baylor's College of Medicine, and rarely uses it. In Methodist Hospital, Surgeon DeBakey has a tiny office, as cluttered as his den, and runs it like an Army command post.
After the staggering schedule of operations, the afternoons are for staff conferences, with internists, cardiologists, radiologists and his chief assistants. Many an oldtime surgeon thought his job was done when he had laid down the scalpel and the last suture was in place. Not DeBakey. He belongs to the latter-day school typified by Harvard's Dr. Francis D. Moore (TIME cover, May 3, 1963), which insists that no less important than the operation itself are the study and preparation of the patient beforehand, and his care and study while he is recovering. DeBakey interrupts pre-operation conferences for quick trips to the intensive-care area to check on patients who may be just coming out of anesthesia or getting ready to take their first hesitant steps.
Nearly every day there are other hospital or medical meetings to take DeBakey's time. And always there are long-distance telephone calls about patients, or plans to further medical progress. Even when DeBakey promises his long-suffering wife that he will be home for dinner, he is usually so late that she eats alone, then gives him a tray at his desk in the den while he is making phone calls. He takes work into the den and stays until midnight.
His backbreaking schedule of operating and writing has no effect on DeBakey's income. All fees from his operations, running far into six figures annually, go to the College of Medicine, and he takes only his professor's salary.
Trips, says DeBakey, are his major relaxation, and next month he takes off for Italy to receive the $16,000 St. Vincent Award of the Turin Academy of Medicine. By way of thanks, he will demonstrate some of his operations. There will also be trips to Brussels to see Marie Liliane, Princess de Réthy, for whose charitable organization DeBakey operates on many Belgian children, and to Paris to see the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Later come a week in Israel and a busman's holiday in Athens, with DeBakey demonstrating surgery while a guest of Queen Mother Frederika.
Gap & Lag? Once back in Houston, back to his wearing schedule, back to the demands of days filled with life-and-death decisions, DeBakey will return to the medico-political battles that he never shuns. A progressive Democrat and an acquaintance of President Johnson, DeBakey favors the use of federal funds for medicine. "The Federal Govern ment," he says, "has already put a lot of money into medicine, and every physician in the United States is better off for it—better off than he ever was before."