Helen B. Taussig

Helen Taussig lost most of her hearing to a childhood ear infection and struggled with dyslexia badly enough that her father, a Harvard economist, tutored her at the kitchen table. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Helen was eleven. She wanted to study at Harvard Medical School; Harvard let women audit lectures but refused, on principle, to award them a degree, so she took a bachelor's degree at Berkeley instead and finished her medical training at Johns Hopkins, one of the few schools that admitted women at all. By the time she reached the wards she could no longer trust a stethoscope. She learned to diagnose heart defects by feeling a child's chest with her fingertips, reading the flutter of a faulty valve the way other doctors read sound.

As chief of the children's heart clinic at Johns Hopkins from 1930, Taussig worked out that infants with tetralogy of Fallot, so-called blue babies, were dying because too little blood reached their lungs. She could diagnose the defect; she could not operate, and no textbook offered a fix. In 1943 she took the problem to surgeon Alfred Blalock, whose laboratory assistant Vivien Thomas had spent nearly two years perfecting a shunt technique on dogs. On November 29, 1944, the team operated on eighteen-month-old Eileen Saxon; by 1951 they had performed the operation on more than a thousand children, with a mortality rate near five percent. Taussig later crossed to Germany, found a wave of infants born without limbs, traced it to a sedative called thalidomide, and helped keep the drug off the American market before it was ever approved here.

The operation that made Taussig famous ran on credit she did not entirely receive and credit she did not entirely give. As a woman, she could diagnose the defect but was never going to be allowed to cut a patient open herself; the surgery needed a man's hands, and Blalock's name went on it alongside hers. Vivien Thomas, whose two years of experiments on some two hundred dogs had actually built the shunt technique, and who stood at Blalock's shoulder coaching him through the first human operation because Blalock had done it himself only once, was classified and paid as a janitor. The 1945 paper crediting the breakthrough named Blalock and Taussig and left Thomas out entirely. Johns Hopkins did not give him an honorary doctorate until 1976, two years before Taussig's own death.

Taussig kept working past retirement, publishing forty-one more papers after Johns Hopkins made her an emeritus professor, and was still researching the genetics of congenital heart defects in birds when, on May 20, 1986, she was killed in a car crash while driving friends to the polls for a local election, four days short of her eighty-eighth birthday. By then tens of thousands of children had survived surgery built on her diagnosis. The operation is now more often called the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt, the name lengthened by decades to catch up with who actually built it, and her 1947 textbook on congenital heart malformations remained a standard reference for a generation of cardiologists after her.

Helen B. Taussig's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Blalock-Taussig shunt (with Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas) discovery
  First performed November 29, 1944, on 18-month-old Eileen Saxon 1944
• Congenital Malformations of the Heart book
  Founding textbook of pediatric cardiology; expanded edition 1960 1947
• Harriet Lane Home pediatric cardiac clinic other
  Built and led as chief from 1930 to 1963 1930
• Thalidomide warnings to Congress speech
  Testimony that helped keep the drug off the U.S. market 1962

• May 24, 1898 aged 0 Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• 1909 aged ~11 Loses her mother to tuberculosis at age 11
• 1921 aged ~23 Earns a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley Harvard had allowed her to audit medical lectures but refused to grant women a degree.
• 1927 aged ~29 Earns her M.D. from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
• 1930 aged ~32 Becomes chief of the Harriet Lane Home pediatric cardiac clinic
• November 29, 1944 aged 46 The first blue baby operation is performed on Eileen Saxon Developed with surgeon Alfred Blalock and lab technician Vivien Thomas.
• 1959 aged ~61 Promoted to full professor at Johns Hopkins Only the second woman to hold that rank there.
• January 1962 aged 63 Travels to Germany and traces a wave of infant limb deformities to thalidomide
• May 20, 1986 aged 87 Dies in a car crash while driving friends to vote

• Virginia Apgar 1909–1974
  Physician who created the Apgar score, transforming rapid assessment and survival of newborns. contemporary of
• William Osler 1849–1919
  Built bedside clinical teaching into American medical education as a founding Johns Hopkins professor. trained within the institution built by
• Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet 1787–1851
  Founded the first permanent American school for deaf students. forerunner in deaf education
• Charles Drew 1904–1950
  Physician-scientist whose work on blood plasma and blood banking saved countless lives. contemporary barrier-breaker in medicine