René Favaloro grew up in a poor neighborhood of La Plata, the son of Sicilian immigrants. (He always blamed his Sicilian blood for his passionate behavior.) Despite poverty, he and his brother Juan José both became surgeons and started a country medical practice in La Pampa, where they had the only X-ray machine in a 150-km radius.
René married his high-school sweetheart, María Antonia, and in 1962 they moved to Cleveland to fulfill his dream: cardiothoracic surgery. Dr. Favaloro's experience at the Cleveland Clinic is well described in a review paper published in 1990, in the American Journal of Cardiology. 1 Those early years, of course, were much affected by Mason Sones's development of a simple, rapid, and safe method of imaging the coronary circulation selectively. Dr. Favaloro took the next step and, under the guidance of Donald Effler, began coronary revascularization early in 1967. First the right coronary artery, then the left anterior descending, and finally the circumflex were successfully grafted with saphenous veins.
I can remember that until that year, 1967, the Texas Medical Center had only a handful of cardiovascular surgeons and cardiologists, and in Houston there were none outside the major hospitals. By 1972, our training programs blossomed with new generations of eager clinicians and surgeons. The medical approach to the treatment of coronary patients had changed forever.
In 1970, Dr. Favaloro gave up a potentially lucrative career in the United States in order to return to Argentina to champion universal health care. He practiced at a private hospital until he could open his Fundacion Favaloro in 1992, after many years of work. This foundation was “the culmination of his dream to offer the best-trained hands and most modern equipment both to the grandes dames who could pay and the street urchins who could not.” 2 Dr. Favaloro also trained over 400 doctors and conducted ground-breaking research.
In a 1993 letter to Dr. Cooley, René Favaloro said something that could serve as his own epitaph: “Besides being an outstanding surgeon, you are a good human being, and … to be good is enough.”