Vivien Thomas

Thomas learned the trade from his father, a carpenter who had moved the family from Louisiana to Nashville and set his sons to measuring and sawing after school and on Saturdays. He graduated from Pearl High School in 1929 and took carpentry work at Fisk University, saving toward college and then medical school. The market crashed that October. In February 1930 a childhood friend working at Vanderbilt University told him about an opening, and he went into Alfred Blalock's surgical research laboratory, classified and paid as a janitor. Nine months later Nashville's banks failed and the savings went with them. On his first day he had helped Blalock operate on a dog. Within a few weeks he was doing the surgery himself.

He spent 34 years at Blalock's side, 11 at Vanderbilt and the rest at Johns Hopkins, where the only other Black employees were janitors. Their shock research overturned the reigning theory and saved soldiers in the Second World War. When Helen Taussig brought them the four-part defect that turned infants blue, Thomas devised the operation across nearly two years and 200 dogs, and adapted the needles and clamps himself. On November 29, 1944, he stood on a step stool at Blalock's shoulder and talked him through it, on a 15-month-old named Eileen Saxon.

The paper ran in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May 1945 and named Blalock and Taussig. It did not mention Thomas. The Associated Press carried the story worldwide, newsreels ran it, Blalock's reputation was made, and within a year Hopkins had performed more than 200 of the operations. Thomas was also kept out of the team photographs. His pay stayed low enough that he tended bar for extra money, often at Blalock's own parties, pouring drinks for surgeons he had been teaching that morning. Blalock defended his hiring to doubtful superiors at both universities and insisted he stand in the operating room, and by 1946 had negotiated him into the best-paid assistant's post at Hopkins. He never corrected the public record.

In 1968 the surgeons he had trained, by then chiefs of departments across the country, commissioned his portrait, and Hopkins hung it in the Blalock building lobby near Blalock's own. The university gave him an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1976, as close to a medical degree as its rules allowed, and appointed him Instructor of Surgery. He never operated on a living patient. What he left was people: the surgeons, and the Black laboratory assistants he trained when Hopkins offered them no other route. His autobiography reached print days after he died, Katie McCabe's 1989 article put him in front of the public, and the operation is now the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt.

Vivien Thomas's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Shock and fluid-replacement research discovery
  Hundreds of experiments with Blalock that disproved the toxin theory of traumatic shock 1935
• The Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt discovery
  Worked out on 200 dogs, then coached step by step through the first human operation 1944
• Instruments for cardiac surgery other
  Needles and clamps adapted from the animal laboratory, because none existed for the human operation 1944
• Atrial septectomy for transposed great vessels discovery
  The suture line that made Blalock say it looked like something the Lord made 1946
• Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery book
  His autobiography, reissued in 1998 as Partners of the Heart 1985

• 1929 aged ~19 Graduates from Pearl High School and works as a carpenter at Fisk The wages were meant to pay for college and then medical school.
• February 1930 aged 19 Joins Alfred Blalock's Vanderbilt laboratory, classified and paid as a janitor He assisted with an experimental operation on a dog on his first day. Within weeks he was starting the surgery himself.
• 1930 aged ~20 Nashville's banks fail and take his savings Nine months into the job. He gave up the plan to go back for a degree.
• June 1941 aged 30 Follows Blalock to Johns Hopkins and meets a harder segregation than Nashville's The only other Black employees at the institution were janitors. He took to wearing street clothes between the lab and Blalock's office to draw fewer stares.
• November 29, 1944 aged 34 Coaches Blalock through the first blue-baby operation from a step stool at his shoulder The patient was Eileen Saxon, 15 months old. Thomas had done the procedure on dogs hundreds of times. Blalock had done it once, as Thomas's assistant.
• May 1945 aged 34 The JAMA paper credits Blalock and Taussig and does not name him The Associated Press sent the story around the world. Within a year Hopkins had performed the operation more than 200 times.
• 1947 aged ~37 Looks into a degree at Morgan State and gives the idea up His widow Clara told Washingtonian in 1987 that the college refused credit for his laboratory work and required the standard freshman year. He worked out that he would be 50 before he finished.
• 1971 aged ~61 Hopkins presents his portrait and hangs it near Blalock's The surgeons he had trained commissioned it in 1968. Five years after the ceremony the university gave him an honorary Doctor of Laws and made him Instructor of Surgery.
• November 26, 1985 aged 75 Dies of pancreatic cancer His autobiography was published days later.

• Helen B. Taussig 1898–1986
  Founder of pediatric cardiology whose work helped create the first successful treatment for blue-baby syndrome. brought the problem to the lab
• Charles Drew 1904–1950
  Physician-scientist whose work on blood plasma and blood banking saved countless lives. shut out by the same profession
• Henrietta Lacks 1920–1951
  Her cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951 and became the most used human cell line in science. the other uncredited name at Hopkins
• Michael DeBakey 1908–2008
  Cardiovascular surgeon who invented the roller pump and the Dacron arterial graft built on the surgery he made possible
• Rebecca Lee Crumpler 1831–1895
  First Black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States and an early advocate for care in underserved communities. entered medicine against the same bar