Defense Secretary Robert Gates lowered onto one knee to present the flag from the coffin of medical innovator Dr. Michael DeBakey to his widow, Katrin, at Arlington National Cemetery on Friday.
The presence of Gates and Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake at the burial reflected DeBakey's pre-eminence but couldn't burnish a name already immortalized as a brilliant saver of lives.
He viewed death as a personal enemy, said presiding Chaplain Harry Rauch III.
As a young boy, DeBakey devoured a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and he grew into a cardiovascular surgeon who invented so many medical devices, procedures, tools and concepts that he became an encyclopedia entry himself.
DeBakey pioneered such now-common procedures as the heart bypass, helped bring about open-heart surgery, developed artificial hearts and pumps and created more than 70 surgical instruments.
He died last Friday in Houston at the age of 99.
His World War II service entitled him to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, but his grave is not among those of medical doctors. That area is full.
DeBakey was buried in plot 399-A, Section 34, an area where Gen. John J. Pershing and Ira Hayes, one of the Iwo Jima flag raisers, also lie. His nearest neighbor is World War II veteran and Bronze Star winner Edward Curtis Franklin, who died in 1958 at age 43.
The burial site seemed fitting for a man whose work helped deliver lifesaving surgeries to the war front and whose research on the care of returning war veterans helped bring about creation of the VA.
The lives of many of the hundreds of thousands buried at Arlington were cut short in battle, but a number of other veterans there surely benefited from DeBakey's innovations. Among his own patients were presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.
The sun glinted off the medals of a Marine as he handed to Gates the American flag folded with a precision DeBakey would have appreciated. In life he honored the flag, Rauch said. In death the flag honors him.
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On the Net: Arlington National Cemetery: http://www.arlingtoncemetery.org
Baylor College of Medicine: http://www.bcm.edu
