Super-Jesus in Surgery

HEARTS by Thomas Thompson. 304 pages. McCall. $7.95.

Is there something special about the American way of life that tends to cause heart attacks? In a land afflicted with high-cholesterol diets and high-pressure lives, at any rate, heart attacks are a major cause of death. So it is only natural that the world's two leading temples of heart surgery should be American: Methodist Hospital and the Texas Heart Institute, both in Houston. Each of those imposing centers is largely the work of one man. Dr. Michael DeBakey (TIME cover, May 28, 1965), son of a Lebanese immigrant, built Methodist to greatness; Dr. Denton Cooley, his onetime protege turned bitter rival, founded the Texas Heart Institute.

In Hearts, Thomas Thompson tells the story of these two master surgeons, concentrating on their unsuccessful but dramatic experiments with the heart transplant, an operation first executed by South Africa's Dr. Christiaan Barnard. Thompson, a Texan and a staff writer for LIFE, spent several months in Houston last year after the transplant frenzy had subsided. He made rounds with DeBakey, Cooley and their entourages, donned surgical green to watch operations, and talked with dozens of doctors and patients. He has put together a somewhat disjointed but compelling account of a rarefied sphere in the world of medicine.

Okay, Groucho. As Thompson presents them, DeBakey and Cooley each possess a politician's cunning and a financier's wizardry. Both are men of great physical dexterity and enormous ego, disciplined and unforgiving. One Houston pediatric surgeon said of them: "You take these guys out of surgery and put them in business or industry, and they'd be Ross Perot or Bernie Cornfeld. Wait, make that Tom Watson or Henry Ford."

DeBakey apparently plays his role unmercifully as a minor deity among the residents who work for him, testing them almost beyond endurance. In the operating room, he is given to exasperation: "With a third hand I could do it all myself!" Both men, naturally, are fantastically skillful. In surgery, Cooley once joked: "You practice for this procedure by circumcising gnats." But they are also driven by an almost compulsive devotion to work and a kind of superb arrogance. Each has appeared in surgery while ill and insisted upon operating.

Thompson's sketch of Cooley is not as vivid as his picture of DeBakey; the author confesses that Cooley remained an enigma to him. But he offers a nice account of the slow falling out between the two surgeons during their ten-yearlong collaboration. One surgeon told Thompson: "Denton felt that every time he did something important, Mike got credit for it. Denton had become the best heart-cutter in the world and nobody outside the medical societies knew his name." Another hospital official added: "Basically it was the incompatibility of two enormous egos. One day after some bickering over something, Denton said in a quiet little voice that hardly anybody heard. 'Okay. Groucho. have it your way!' Mike had a mustache then and looked a little like Groucho Marx. And Denton left and went across the way and. in effect, never came back."

Sewing and Patching. Thompson's narrative is heightened by a personal drama: his son Scott, then nine, had a heart murmur. One of the Houston heart men discovered that Scott's was a false murmur that would clear up within a few years. That is an exuberant moment that any parent can share. By contrast, the book's most flat and chilling passage recounts a dinner conversation with Dr. Grady Hallman. an associate of Cooley's. "Excellence comes out of experience and nothing else." said Hallman. "I know a lot of people who are dead today because I operated on them early in my career. If I could do them tomorrow, they'd be alive."

Surgeons have something in common with auto mechanics and TV repairmen, since all are devoted to curing ills that baffle the amateur. But the men who cut and patch and sew the human heart inspire awe even among cynics, precisely because they are working at the beating heart of life. That sense of awe and vulnerability lends Thompson's work a special source of drama.

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