Within four years, minority enrollment quadrupled. Almost overnight, Operating Room 706 became “the heart room,” as dozens of Blue Babies and their parents came to Hopkins from all over the United States, then from abroad, spilling over into rooms on six floors of the hospital. Thomas was also appointed to the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical School as Instructor of Surgery. In a few years, the explanations Blalock was developing would lead to massive applications of blood and plasma transfusion in the treatment of shock. I can tell you put it in.’ Without another word, he turned and left. that for the type of work I was doing, I felt I should be . “I think Vivien admired what I did,” says Watkins, “but he knew that we were different. “Vivien, I want you to listen to this,” he’d say before reading two or three sentences from the pad in his lap, asking, “Is that your impression?” or “Is it all right if I say so-and-so?”. Within a few weeks, Thomas was starting surgery on his own. that I had not been brought up to take or use that kind of language. For this part of the story, we have Thomas’s own voice on tape—deep, rich, and full of soft accents. After all, Thomas had done the procedure dozens of times; Blalock only once, as Vivien’s assistant. We were operating together on one occasion, and we got into trouble with some massive bleeding in a pulmonary artery, which I was able to handle fairly well. More than Blalock’s whine, it was Thomas’s presence that mystified the distinguished surgeons who came from all over the world to witness the operation. They understood the line between life inside the lab, where they could drink together in 1930, and life outside, where they could not. . That’s tetralogy of Fallot, the congenital heart defect that causes Blue Baby Syndrome. After Blalock's death from cancer in 1964 at the age of 65,[42] Thomas stayed at Hopkins for 15 more years. Blalock could see Thomas had a talent for surgery and a keen intellect, but he was not to see the full measure of the man he’d hired until the day Thomas made his first mistake. But Blalock wanted Thomas there— not watching from the gallery or standing next to the chief resident, Dr. William Longmire, or the intern, Dr. Denton Cooley, or next to Dr. Taussig at the foot of the operating table. “Neither he nor I spoke for some four or five minutes while he stood there examining the heart, running the tip of his finger back and forth through the moderate-size defect in the atrial septum, feeling the healed edges of the defect. It will enhance any encyclopedic page you visit with the magic of the WIKI 2 technology. Outside loomed the Depression. Raymond Lee hasn’t come into the hospital on his day off to talk about his role in those historic 1987 operations. For $12 a week, with no overtime pay for sixteen-hour days and no prospect of advancement or recognition, another man might have survived. . Several days later the foreman said to me, ‘Thomas, you could have fixed that floor right in the first place.’ I knew that I had already learned the lesson which I still remember and try to adhere to: Whatever you do, always do your best. His reply was, ‘No, don’t.’ I watched as with an almost 45-degree stoop and obviously in pain, he slowly disappeared through the exit.”. From inside a patient’s body, it monitors the heartbeat, shocking the heart back into normal rhythm each time it fibrillates. . He was careful but firm when he approached Blalock on the issue: “I told Dr. Blalock . You could also do it yourself at any point in time. If Blalock began a suture in the wrong direction, Thomas’s voice would come quietly over his shoulder: “The other direction. I turned to him at the end of it and said, ‘I certainly appreciated the way you solved that problem. 10372340, citing Maryland National Memorial Park, Laurel, Prince George's County, Maryland, USA ; Maintained by Find A Grave . Vivien T. Thomas, L.L.D. Thomas's legacy as an educator and scientist continued with the institution of the Vivien Thomas Young Investigator Awards, given by the Council on Cardiovascular Surgery and Anesthesiology beginning in 1996. Within a month, the former carpenter was setting up experiments and performing delicate and complex operations. “If you don’t stay at Hopkins,” he told Thomas, “you’ll be able to write your own ticket, wherever you want to go.”, “Thanks for the compliment,” Thomas smiled, “but I’ve been here for so long I don’t know what’s going on in the outside world.”. Vivien Thomas portrait presentation. Alfred Blalock (April 5, 1899 – September 15, 1964) was an American surgeon most noted for his work on the medical condition of shock as well as Tetralogy of Fallot— commonly known as Blue baby syndrome. He would check on me from time to time, just to make sure everything was all right. . “Vivien knew all the senior vets in Baltimore,” Haller explains, “and if they had a complicated surgical problem, they’d call on Vivien for advice, or simply ask him to operate on their animals.”, By the late 1940s, the Old Hunterian had become “Vivien’s domain,” says Haller. Thomas almost wasn’t there. So was his policy on Vivien Thomas, Blalock politely replied. Today, in heavy gilt frames, those two men silently look at each other from opposite walls of the Blalock Building, just as one morning 40 years ago they stood in silence at Hopkins. By 1932, Thomas had made his peace. They say that Cooley does them faster than anyone, that he can make a tetralogy operation look so simple it doesn’t even look like surgery. Their policy against hiring blacks was inflexible. “After all, he could have worked all those years and gotten nothing at all,” she says, looking at the Hopkins diploma hanging in a corner of his study. And he remembers where Thomas stood—on a little step stool, looking over Dr. Blalock’s right shoulder, answering questions and coaching every move. Face to face on two lab stools, each told the other what he needed. In the end, it was World War II that caused Thomas to “take his chances” with Blalock. He was married to Clara Beatrice Flanders. “It was my first research project when I joined the medical faculty, and Vivien’s last.” Only months after Thomas’s retirement in 1979, Watkins performed the first human implantation of the AID, winning a place in the long line of Hopkins cardiac pioneers. In infants born with this defect, blood is shunted past the lungs, thus creating oxygen deprivation and a blue pallor. At the end of the 1950s, he fumed as pilot projects fizzled and he and Thomas fell to philosophizing about problems instead of solving them. His father was a builder who had supported a family of seven. Abstract. He began writing just after his retirement in 1979, working through his illness with pancreatic cancer, indexing the book from his hospital bed following surgery, and putting it to rest, just before his death, with a 1985 copyright date. Casper said to me, ‘Dr. Sidelined by deteriorating health, Blalock decided in the early 1950s that cardiac surgery was a young man’s field, so he turned over the development of the heart-lung machine to two of his superstars, Drs. He has come “to talk about Mr. Thomas,” and as he does so, you begin to see why Alex Haller has described Lee as “another Vivien.” Lee speaks so softly you have to strain to hear him above the din of the admitting room. He talked about how powerful Hopkins was, how traditional. In July 2005, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine began the practice of splitting incoming first-year students into four colleges, each named for famous Hopkins faculty members who had major impacts on the history of medicine. [11] On his first day of work, Thomas assisted Blalock with a surgical experiment on a dog. [30], News of this groundbreaking story was circulated around the world by the Associated Press. Written by Lou Potter and Andrea Kalin. “You’re the man in the picture,” he had said. As quietly as he had come through Hopkins’s door at Blalock’s side, Thomas began bringing in other black men, moving them into the role he had first carved out for himself. It seemed that they were stuck. Time and again, to one or another of his residents, Blalock had faulted himself for not helping Thomas to get a medical degree. Let’s do things like we used to and find out what happens.”. A bank failure during the … “Internal healing of the incision was without flaw. “No, you don’t need an appointment,” his secretary is saying. He was the assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. For the first time in 41 years, Thomas stood at center stage, feeling “quite humble,” he said, “but at the same time, just a little bit proud.” He rose to thank the distinguished gathering, his smiling presence contrasting with the serious, bespectacled Vivien Thomas in the portrait. But as a black man doing highly technical research, he had never really fit into the system—a reality that became painfully clear when in a salary discussion with a black coworker, Thomas discovered that Vanderbilt classified him as a janitor. Vivien was 75 years old at the time of death. “I want you to go with me to Baltimore,” Blalock told Thomas just before Christmas 1940. . People stopped and stared at Thomas, flying down corridors in his white lab coat. Thomas was chosen as one of the four, along with Helen Taussig, Florence Sabin, and Daniel Nathans. In such small arteries, a fraction of a millimeter was critical, and the direction of the sutures determined whether the inside of the vessels would knit properly. They brought expertise in vascular surgery that would change medicine. Recently, Vivien Thomas' fascinating story has been the inspiration for the PBS documentary, "Partners of The Heart" and the HBO film, "Something The Lord Made." Blalock’s guilt was in no way diminished by his knowing that even with a medical degree, Thomas stood little chance of achieving the prominence of an Old Hand. For once, it wasn’t Blalock who asked the question that started it all. Sooner or later, he says, all the stories circle back to that moment when Thomas and Blalock stood together in the operating room for the first Blue Baby. Each time, remembers Dr. Henry Bahnson, “he’d comfort himself by saying that Vivien was doing famously what he did well, and that he had come a long way with Blalock’s help.”. From across the country they arrived, packing the Hopkins auditorium to present the portrait they had commissioned of “our colleague, Vivien Thomas.”. He began changing into his city clothes when he walked from the laboratory to Blalock's office because he received so much attention. How Are Fitness Studios Dealing? It was on a summer afternoon in 1928 that Vivien Thomas says he learned the standard of perfection that won him so much esteem. . A colored man who wasn’t even a doctor. “He took one look,” Thomas remembered, and said, ‘Thomas, that won’t do. . Through hundreds of experiments, Blalock wondered and Thomas found out, until in 1933 Blalock was ready to challenge the medical establishment with his first “named lecture.”. [33] Thomas' contribution remained unacknowledged, both by Blalock and by Hopkins. When they came to Hopkins, they brought with them solutions to the problems of shock that would save many wounded soldiers in World War II. Would babies survive it? Directed by Joseph Sargent. “I intend for my wife to take care of our children,” he told Blalock, “and I think I have the capability to let her do so—except I may have the wrong job.”. But Thomas had not come the whole way. The Old Hunterian, too, had been replaced by a state-of-the-art research facility. Then see these powerful images of the Civil Rights movement. Thomas attended Blalock’s parties as a bartender, moonlighting for extra income. “Dr. Narrated by Morgan Freeman. Eaton trained in orthopedics and is now the team doctor for the Tampa Bay Rays. Tension with Blalock continued to build when he failed to recognize the contributions that Thomas had made in the world-famous blue baby procedure, which led to a rift in their relationship. . He had been Blalock’s “other hands” in the lab, had enhanced The Professor’s stature, had shaped dozens of dexterous surgeons as Blalock himself could not have—but a price had been paid, and Blalock knew it. “Will the subclavian reach the pulmonary once it’s cut off and divided?” he asked. With Alan Rickman, Yasiin Bey, Kyra Sedgwick, Gabrielle Union. Neither one was to cross that line. As surgeon-in-chief there, he could run his own department, train his own men, expand his research. Born Vivien T. Thomas, 1910, in Nashville, TN; died, 1985; married; children: two daughters. Thomas first would have to reproduce tetralogy of Fallot in the canine heart before the effectiveness of their “pipe-changing” could be tested. Thomas needed a job, he said, until he could enter college the next fall. How on earth was this boyish professor of surgery going to run a department, they wondered. It was Thomas who made the first move toward cutting the ties, but in the act of releasing Blalock from obligation he acknowledged how inextricably their fortunes were intertwined. Still, Vivien Thomas made a place for himself. Dr. Blalock always had someone on the surgical staff nominally in charge, but it was Vivien who actually ran the place.”. Would you like Wikipedia to always look as professional and up-to-date? Vivien Thomas Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) was an African-American surgical technician who developed the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in … What passed from Thomas’s hands to the surgical residents who would come to be known as “the Old Hands” was vascular surgery in the making—much of it of Thomas’s making. With his simple questions and his Georgia drawl, Blalock didn’t sound much like the golden boy described in his letters of reference. Out came Blalock, a Coke in one hand, cigarette in the other. Thomas did not live to see his nephew graduate, but he rejoiced at his admission. He died on November 26, 1985 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. [31] The surgery was not completely successful, though it did prolong the infant's life for several months. 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