DeBakey linked to Nazi surgeries
Biographer for iconic heart doctor defends his response to sterilizations
Old quotes resurrected this week tell an unsettling story of Michael DeBakey’s time as a surgeon trainee in Germany: One of the most admired doctors in history apparently performed forced sterilizations for the Nazis.
The assertion comes from a British journalist-historian citing a 1972 interview in which DeBakey said he assisted in the procedures before learning they weren’t voluntary. DeBakey said he found “this kind of repulsive” and “cruel” and after that became “not very keen about even observing.”
“It is at the very least startling that one of American medicine’s most celebrated figures seems to have been caught up — albeit unwittingly — in the eugenics policies of the Third Reich,” Thomas Morris, a former producer for the BBC, wrote in a blog post. “The regime forced hundreds, if not thousands, of German doctors to break the Hippocratic Oath, performing unnecessary and distressing operations on patients who had not given their consent. It appears DeBakey was one of those doctors.”
In the interview, DeBakey later said he “was not really a participant in a
true sense of the word,” that he participated “in the technical aspect … to learn something about it.” Morris calls that “backpedaling” after the interviewer threw him “a lifeline” by asking if he ever refused to participate in the procedures.
In a response on Morris’ blog post and in an email interview with the Chronicle, the author of a soonto-be-published biography of DeBakey came to the pioneering surgeon’s defense — though he didn’t deny that DeBakey assisted in the procedures.
“From a purely semantic approach, did Michael DeBakey assist in performing sterilization procedures for the Nazis in Germany in 1936?” Dr. Craig Miller wrote the Houston Chronicle on Tuesday. “Yes. Did he approve of it, or knowingly participate in the effort? Absolutely not.”
Miller stressed that DeBakey was “a political naif at the time” and “as a trainee, and a foreign one at that, he certainly was not involved in the decisionmaking process regarding surgical operations.”
DeBakey, then 28, would go on to become one of the 20th century’s leaders in medicine as a pioneering surgeon, inventor, statesman and educator. He spent 60 years in Houston, joining Baylor College of Medicine’s faculty in 1948 and becoming its president in 1969. He died in 2008 at 99 years old.
DeBakey is internationally acclaimed as the father of modern cardiovascular surgery and considered by many as the greatest surgeon ever. He invented many of the procedures and devices — more than 50 surgical instruments — used to repair hearts and arteries and is credited with the first successful surgical treatment of potentially deadly aneurysms of various parts of the aorta. His work during World War II led to the development of mobile army surgical hospitals, called MASH units.
Miller, a vascular surgeon and scholar-in-residence at the Ohio State University Medical Heritage Center, said the interview in question is a valuable resource, but noted the comments are only “reminiscences” and added that DeBakey “demonstrably misremembered some things while conflating and otherwise distorting others.” Miller said he only used quotes from the interview for supporting quotations when he had other primarily sources.
Miller’s 636-page biography, “A Time for All Things: The Life of Michael E. DeBakey” (Oxford University Press), includes a lengthy section on the matter. It draws from other interviews DeBakey gave as well as the 1972 one.
In the 1972 interview, archived at the National Library of Medicine, DeBakey noted the Heidelberg clinic at which he worked did a lot of sterilization operations and said, “I assisted in these … you see, and worked, I did some of them.”
DeBakey asked why so many people wanted to be sterilized and was told “they don’t necessarily want to. They’re ordered.”
DeBakey asked “on what basis” and was told that the sterilizations were performed on Jewish people, the insane and the congenitally ill.
It was after that response that the interviewer asked if DeBakey ever refused to participate and DeBakey said he withdrew. “I didn’t like it,” he said. “I put my time elsewhere.”
Miller said his takehome message from the interview was that DeBakey’s focus as a young trainee was learning to operate, but he then became repulsed when he found out why the clinic did so many vasectomies and tubal ligations.
“What did he do when he found out the reasons for the procedures?” asked Miller. “Stop participating or even observing. I’m not sure there was a different or better tack he could have taken.”
Miller also noted in the email to the Chronicle that DeBakey served with great distinction during World War II, including time in the field with every one of the U.S. Armies — First, Second, Third, Fifth, Seventh and Ninth — fighting the Nazis in both the Mediterranean and European Theaters of Operation.
Miller’s biography is scheduled for release in December.
todd.ackerman@chron.com twitter.com/chronmed