A miracle-worker was born on this day in Lake Charles, Louisiana: Dr. Michael Ellis DeBakey (1908–2008), the pioneering father of heart surgery. His groundbreaking inventions and compassionate touch revolutionized medicine.

“There are similarities, but each heart is different,” he once observed.

In 1932, he invented the roller pump for the heart-lung machine—an innovation that made coronary bypass surgery possible. In 1953, he performed the first carotid artery blockage removal. By 1966, he was the first to successfully use an artificial heart.

In his lifetime, DeBakey touched over 20,000 hearts. “Over the years, I’ve done 60,000 operations,” he told Esquire. “Heart surgeries constitute perhaps a third of those operations.”

He was named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress in 2000 and worked with NASA on telemedicine, pioneering remote care long before Zoom calls were imagined. He truly changed the world by listening deeply to the human heart. He saw life pulsing through each patient and treated every case like it mattered.

“Happiness is the reward of success,” he said.