NOT my profile,' Surgeon Michael -DeBakey objected when Painter Henry Koerner asked him to turn his head aside.

"I told him he had an elegant profile," Koerner said, "and he would have to trust me as his patients trust him. He has a truly great face--those big eyebrows and that huge forehead."

Koerner painted his subject for this week's cover in four sittings at the Texas Medical Center's Methodist Hospital in Houston. One sitting was abruptly halted when DeBakey was summoned to a nearby operating room to help revive a patient whose heart had stopped beating. In surgical gown and mask, Koerner also studied and sketched DeBakey while he was performing several operations. For the background, Koerner chose the overhead lamp of an operating room and an oscilloscope that monitors a patient's heart and pulse. "I learn something from every operation," DeBakey says; it was his meditative post-operative mood Koerner sought to convey.

NEXT to operating, Dr. DeBakey likes most to talk about operations. In a recent session with fellow surgeons he had a new-old story to tell. In May of 1868, he said, a mounted scout rode up to an adobe building in Trinidad, Colo., marched into the office and asked: "Dr. Beshoar, will you please be here in two hours when General Carson will arrive by ambulance. He is very ill."

The horse-drawn ambulance bore the immobile form of the famed Western scout Kit Carson, by then elevated to the rank of brigadier general. Beshoar examined him, noted his difficulty in speaking and moving his right arm or leg, and readily found the reason: a large, soft swelling on the left side of his neck. Beshoar knew it was a massive aneurysm of the carotid artery, and that he could do nothing about it. He did all he could to make the patient more comfortable, then referred him to the nearest Army hospital at Fort Lyon 90 miles away. There, two weeks later, Kit Carson died. The striking thing, said DeBakey, is that not until almost 90 years after this could any surgeon have done anything more than did Beshoar.

Dr. DeBakey heard this hitherto unpublished story from Barren Beshoar, chief of TIME'S Denver bureau, who did much of the reporting on the cover story. He is the grandson of the Dr. Beshoar who began practice in the cattle town of Trinidad in 1865, and his great-grandfather and father were surgeons as well. After finishing the cover story, Medicine Writer Gilbert Cant sent a note of congratulation to Beshoar: "TIME'S annals are full of examples of reporters who went to amazing lengths to get the facts. But I can't think of any other who assigned his grandfather to help--and 50 years before the correspondent was born!"

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