Love, Science & the Heart

The wiry little Tarascan growing up in the mountains of Guerrero in Southwestern Mexico wanted nothing so much as to be a writer and historian. Though he seemed to be drifting when he entered medical school, it was there that he found his life work: "Heart study was my passion." Last week, celebrating the tenth anniversary of his Institute of Cardiology in Mexico City, Dr. Ignacio Chavez, 57, ducked his head modestly as topflight cardiologists from Latin America, the U.S. and Europe blew him compliments.

One member of the audience called Chavez' institute "the heart capital of the world." Baltimore's famed Pediatrician Helen Taussig, whose researches made possible the "blue baby" operation, said: "It is [Chavez] who made this a great institute ... a Mecca for all young people who want to study the heart. We can rejoice when we have the opportunity to come here ourselves."

Triple Ambition. In the Mexico of 1920, heart disease was as merciless a killer as elsewhere--perhaps worse, because the country had one of the world's highest rates of rheumatic fever.* Young Dr. Chavez wangled scholarships so that he could study the heart in Paris. Vienna and Brussels. Back home, he started a cardiology service in Mexico City's-- General Hospital and gathered around him a group of equally dedicated physicians. In the early '30s, they got the idea for "an institute that would be at once a modern hospital for heart patients, a great school for doctors, a rich laboratory for investigators." This would need a balanced staff, so Dr. Chavez sent men out to become specialists, e.g., one to Manhattan to study the dynamics of blood flow, another to the University of Michigan for electrocardiography.

By 1936 the team was ready: all it needed was the institute. Dr. Chavez, who seems to know everybody of influence in Mexican business and politics, promoted 600,000 pesos (then $166,560) from private donors, 1,500,000 pesos from the government. Then he spent eight years directing the building of the institute. Each room, he insisted, must be as comfortable as in a modern luxury hotel. Its surgeries glittered with the world's best equipment. Its motto: Amor scientiaque insermant cordi (Let love and science serve the heart).

Tradition in the Making. For years Director Chavez, a successful practitioner himself, would take not a peso for his love and services to the institute. (The law now insists on a nominal salary.) When the ultramodern building, with its walls of white concrete and glass, was opened, it could care for 12,000 patients annually. Dr. Chavez was soon after more money, got 5,000,000 pesos to double its capacity. Now the institute treats 24,000 heart sufferers each year, 1,272 as in-patients in its 150 beds (divided equally among men, women and children). A quarter of them are treated free; fewer than 10% pay full fees.

The institute has trained heart specialists who have already moved out to 20 of Mexico's 30 states where there were none before. After graduate studies in Mexico City, others have gone back to practice in the U.S., Europe and every Latin American republic. Thirty doctors are now taking the two-year course. "As a young nation," says Dr. Chavez, "Mexico has no tradition in scientific research." Members of his staff are doing much to remedy that, with new techniques for X-raying the heart and great vessels, advances in the use of the electrocardiograph, and a promising drug called Thedetoidin, which resembles digitalis but acts faster.

Would-be Historian Chavez has managed to write a little on Mexican history in his spare time, but, through the institute, he has done more to make it. Says he: "It is false and niggardly to believe that because we are a modest country our hospitals must be sordid and our patients must lack essentials. Yes, modern hospitals can function in Mexico."

* It is only a legend that Mexico City's altitude (7,800 ft.) causes heart trouble, says Dr. Chavez. Though some visitors who arrive with heart disease may feel distress and be advised to leave, natives and long-term residents are not affected. Only above 10,000 ft. does altitude trouble the healthy heart, he says.

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