The numbers alone are stunning. He performed more than 60,000 cardiovascular procedures, published 1300 medical articles, cowrote three books for dealing with and preventing heart disease, and was awarded 36 honorary doctorates. He pioneered several surgical procedures, some with names that are meaningless to me but one landmark everyone knows - implanting the first completely artificial heart. And finally, he should be named the patron saint of syndicated television, he invented the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Michael Ellis DeBakey turns 92 today, and was performing open-heart surgery as recently as June of this year. This year the US Library of Congress designated him a Living Legend.
Two Portuguese colonies celebrate their dramatically different separations from Portugal today. Brazil's independence in 1822 was a family affair, Mozambique's sovereignty followed more than a decade of violence, and the quarter century since has been almost as bad.
As a writer and publisher I have good reason to support copyright as a protection for creative endeavors, but when a US court awarded almost two million dollars to the owners of a 1963 song because of musical similarity in a later George Harrison song I was stunned. To say that the bulk of the success of "My Sweet Lord" was the result of borrowing two note sequences was absurd. If I had sung the song it wouldn't have made ten bucks. In fact, when Billy Preston recorded it there was no avalanche of cash, and he had talent. No, the bulk of the success of the song came from Harrison's fame as a member of the Beatles and his skills as a performer and producer. Harrison did end up paying $587,000 in damages, and the concept of "subconscious plagiarism" is now part of case law.
Several readers challenged yesterday's item in which Ferdinand Magellan's one surviving ship, the Victoria, returned to Sevilla, Spain on 6 September 1521, arguing that the ship would have had to fly over 50 miles to get there. Actually, there is a river that connects Sevilla and it's "outport" Sanlucar de Barrameda, where the Victoria landed. The journey started and ended in Sevilla, but it was the outport that they reached on the 6th.
1776 - David Bushnell of Connecticut attacked a British ship of the line, HMS Asia, in New York harbor with his oak-hulled submarine Turtle. He was entangled in Asia's rudder bar, loosed his ballast and surfaced, attempted to secure a cask of gunpowder to Asia's hull, but the cask floated away and Bushnell was captured.
1880 - George Ligowsky of Cincinnati is granted a patent for a device to throw clay pigeons for trapshooters. Earlier the same year he was inspired by watching boys throw seashells into the surf, but found that clam shells bonded together failed to break when hit, then developed a "clay pigeon" made from a mixture of limestone and pitch.
1943 - Swiss chemist Paul Muller is granted US Patent No. 2,329,074, formally titled "Devitalizing Composition of Matter," for his discovery that Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloromethylmethane (DDT) could be used to kill insects that spread typhus, malaria, and other diseases. He won the 1948 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, but it was attacked by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book Silent Spring and banned in the US a decade later.
1976 - In Bright Tunes Music Corp. v. Harrisongs Music, Ltd. et al a US judge awarded damages of $1,599,987 to Bright Tunes Music on the grounds that the majority of the income from George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" was attributable to two sequences of notes that Harrison subconsciously plagiarized from a 1963 song "He's So Fine."
Victory Day, Mozambique - Marks the end of more than a decade of guerilla struggle against Portuguese colonial rule in 1974, leading to independence the following June.
Independence Day, Brazil - Threatened by Napoleon in 1808 the Portuguese Court moved to Rio de Janeiro. On this day in 1822, the year after the court returned to Lisbon, the crown prince of Portugal proclaimed Brazil's independence. He had himself crowned Emperor Pedro I in December and fought a two-year war with Portugal while continuing to be the heir to the Portuguese throne.
1908
- Michael Ellis DeBakey, US surgeon - Born to Lebanese immigrants
at Lake Charles, Louisiana, good student but not a drudge, he enjoyed
sports and played in the high school band, and his mother taught him to
sew. Parents required all four siblings to check out one book a week at
library, when he wasn't allowed to check out the Encyclopaedia Britannica
his father bought it and Michael read it. Kept the books for father's
pharmacy in high school. Entered Tulane College 1928, started at Tulane
Medical School after only two years in college and finished his B.S. while
in med school. Invented the roller pump, a major component in the heart-lung
machine that makes open heart surgery possible, while at Tulane. Challenged
his two sisters to pioneer the field of medical communications. Served
his internship at Charity Hospital, New Orleans, his surgical residency
was divided between the Uniersity of Strasbourg in France and the University
of Heidelberg in Germany. Returned to Tulane in 1937 as associate professor
until World War II, moved to Arlington, Virginia and served with the US
Army Surgeon General, where he created the first Mobile Army Surgical
Hospital units. In 1948 joined Baylor College of Medicine and Methodist
Hospital in Houston, Texas. From 1950 to 1953 developed Dacron grafts
for cardiac bypass, sewing the first ones himself. First to clear a blocked
carotid artery in 1953, performed first patch-graft angioplasty in 1956.
In 1963 he helped develop telemedicine, and his DeBakey-Raytheon-ITS telemedicine
system uses satellites to electronically link remote sites to the Texas
Medical Center for medical training and treatment. Performed first aorta
bypass in 1964, implanted first artificial heart in 1966. Working with
NASA labs over twelve years, he developed the four-ounce DeBakey Ventricular
Assist Device to augment pumping action in weakened hearts, it was first
implanted in Gemany in 1998 and he assisted in the June 2000 surgery for
the first US clinical trial. He has been an advisor on health issues to
the US president since 1950, led the campaign for the National Library
of Medicine, and in 1996 went to Moscow to consult on Soviet President
Yeltsin's heart condition.
If wrinkles must be written upon our brow, let them not be written upon
the heart; the spirit should not grow old.
- James A. Garfield
And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the
heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the
eye.
- Saint Exupery
The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion
of the wise and humane surgeon.
- Sir John Eric Ericksen
For all the advances in medicine, there is still no cure for the common
birthday.
- John Glenn, Jr
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