Let’s do things like we used to and find out what happens.”. “Maybe she could get a job to help out.”, Thomas bristled. [45] McCabe's article, brought to Hollywood by Washington, D.C. dentist Irving Sorkin,[46] formed the basis for the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning 2004 HBO film Something the Lord Made. The well-spoken young man who sat on the lab stool politely responding to Blalock’s questions had never been in a laboratory before. 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. 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. The satisfaction of making a public racial statement was a luxury Thomas would not have for decades, and even then he would make his point quietly. It was the admiration and affection of the men he trained that Thomas valued most. After Blalock's death from cancer in 1964 at the age of 65,[42] Thomas stayed at Hopkins for 15 more years. Their policy against hiring blacks was inflexible. Thomas hadn’t gone to college, let alone medical school, but through their pioneering work together, the two men essentially invented cardiac surgery. So Blalock, with everything to gain, and Thomas, with “nothing to lose,” as he put it, made their move together. . In the evenings, with Thomas’s notes at one elbow and a glass of bourbon at the other, Blalock would phone Thomas from his study as he worked on scientific papers late into the night. [39] He sometimes resorted to working as a bartender, often at Blalock's parties. 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. Haller, I was very much impressed with the way you handled yourself there.’ Feeling overly proud of myself, I said to Casper, ‘Well, I trained with Dr. Blalock.’, “A few weeks later, we were operating together in the lab for a second time, and we got into even worse trouble. [18] Assisted by Thomas, he was able to provide incontrovertible proof of this theory, and in so doing, he gained wide recognition in the medical community by the mid-1930s. That afternoon Blalock presented his situation to Dandy, who responded immediately with a donation to the department—earmarked for Thomas’s salary. . He was instrumental in the development of the “blue baby” operation in 1944, with surgeon Alfred Blalock and pediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig. “The Professor and I just looked at each other. In 1950, six years after he and Blalock had stood together for Blue Baby One, Blalock operated on Blue Baby 1,000. It is to her that the book is dedicated, and it was in her arms that he died, 52 years after their marriage. For the next year, Blalock and Longmire rebuilt hearts virtually around the clock. “Well, finally, the resident realized that the dog hadn’t had any fluids intravenously, so he called over to Vivien, ‘Vivien, would you come over and administer some I-V fluids?’ Now, the whole time Vivien had been watching us out of the corner of his eye from across the lab, not saying a word, but not missing a thing, either. But the true message lies in what the caption does not say: In 1941, the Broadway entrance was for whites only. It seemed that they were stuck. In retrospect, I think that incident set the stage for what I consider our mutual respect throughout the years.”. Blalock was a great scientist, a great thinker, a leader,” explains Denton Cooley, “but by no stretch of the imagination could he be considered a great cutting surgeon. Coached by Blalock’s young research fellow, Dr. Joseph Beard, Thomas mastered anatomy and physiology, and he plunged into Blalock’s round-the-clock research. Blalock let us know in no uncertain terms, ‘When Vivien speaks, he’s speaking for me,’ ” remembers Dr. David Sabiston, who left Hopkins in 1964 to chair Duke University’s department of surgery. Cooley suddenly is on the line from his Texas Heart Institute in Houston. He worried about my getting out there alone.”. In 1943, while pursuing his shock research, Blalock was approached by pediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig,[23] who was seeking a surgical solution to a complex and fatal four-part heart anomaly called tetralogy of Fallot (also known as blue baby syndrome, although other cardiac anomalies produce blueness, or cyanosis). 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. Following his retirement in 1979, Thomas began work on an autobiography. Thomas received no mention. “It was almost a miracle.”. [31] Thomas performed the operation hundreds of times on a dog, whereas Blalock only once as Thomas' assistant. Heart presenting a tetralogy of Fallot. In the verbal shorthand they developed, Thomas learned to translate Blalock’s “I wonder what would happen if” into step-by-step scientific protocols. Vivien Theodore Thomas Collection, Item no. Born Vivien T. Thomas, 1910, in Nashville, TN; died, 1985; married; children: two daughters. There was no provision in Hopkins’s salary classification for an anomaly like Thomas: a non-degreed technician with the responsibilities of a postdoctoral research fellow. After 37 years, Thomas was appointed to the faculty at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. 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. [30] During the surgery itself, at Blalock's request, Thomas stood on a step stool at Blalock's shoulder and coached him step by step through the procedure. You handled your hands beautifully, too.’, “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I trained with Vivien.’ ”. . And then, in 47 minutes—just about the time it takes him to do a triple bypass—he tells you about the man who taught him that kind of speed. Blalock was plowing new ground beyond the horizons we’d ever seen before. Narrated by Morgan Freeman. . He meant to do at least as well for his own family. They could see that the black man on the stool behind Dr. Blalock was not an MD. . Two days before Christmas 1946, Blalock came to Thomas in the empty lab with Hopkins’s final salary offer, negotiated by Blalock and approved by the board of trustees that morning. When Alfred Blalock died in 1965 at age 65, Vivien Thomas fell into a depression and did not undertake a major research project for six years. “I no longer recall what, but I made some error. Vivien Theodore Thomas was born on August 29, 1910 in New Iberia, Louisiana, USA. So complex was the four-part anomaly of Fallot’s tetralogy that Thomas thought it possible to reproduce only two of the defects, at most. “It’s been almost 25 years,” he says, “since Mr. Thomas got a hold of me in the elevator of the Halsted Building and asked me if I might be interested in becoming a laboratory assistant.”, Along with surgical technique, Thomas imparted to his technicians his own philosophy. The partnership lasted 34 years, and together the two men would invent heart surgery. You are put here to do a job 100 percent, regardless of how much education you have.’ He believed that if you met the right people at the right time, and you can prove yourself, then you can achieve what you were meant to do.”, Alex Haller tells of another Thomas technician, a softspoken man named Alfred Casper: “After I’d completed my internship at Hopkins, I went to work in the lab at NIH. Blue Babies arrived daily, yet Hopkins had no cardiac ward, no catheterization lab, no sophisticated apparatus for blood studies. [18] Blalock, a highly original scientific thinker and something of an iconoclast, had theorized that shock resulted from fluid loss outside the vascular bed and that the condition could be effectively treated by fluid replacement. In 1929, as he was preparing for college and medical school, Thomas lost his entire savings when a Nashville bank failed. When Thomas walked the halls in his white lab coat, many heads turned. . Besides, he had brought a colored man up from Vanderbilt to run his lab. [19] Thomas arrived in Baltimore with his family in June of that year,[20] confronting a severe housing shortage and a level of racism worse than they had endured in Nashville. In 1937, Blalock received an offer of a prestigious chairmanship from Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Coronavirus Update. From that moment, money ceased to be an issue. Underneath the sterile drapes, Eileen turned pink. The problem had stymied Blalock for months, and now it seemed that Thomas had solved it. “Once Dr. Blalock accepted you as a colleague, he trusted you completely—I mean, with his life.” Haller says. This includes data values and the controlled vocabularies that house them. He would walk out into the rotunda alone, he insisted. To Thomas he entrusted both and, in so doing, doubled his legacy. The hospital’s policy against hiring blacks was inflexible. Though Thomas' intelligence, dexterity and determination were critical to Blalock's success, it was over 25 years before he was given proper public credit for his role in devising the Blue Baby surgery. Thomas trained them and sent them out with the Old Hands, who tried to duplicate the Blalock-Thomas magic in their own labs. Because no instruments for cardiac surgery then existed, Thomas adapted the needles and clamps for the procedure from those in use in the animal lab. What mattered was that Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas could do historic things together that neither could do alone. It will enhance any encyclopedic page you visit with the magic of the WIKI 2 technology. [40] Although Thomas never wrote or spoke publicly about his ongoing desire to return to college and obtain a medical degree, his widow, the late Clara Flanders Thomas, revealed in a 1987 interview with Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe that her husband had clung to the possibility of further education throughout the blue baby period and had only abandoned the idea with great reluctance. Thomas had surprised The Professor with an operation he had conceived, then kept secret until healing was completed. Vivien Thomas, who never earned a medical degree, died in Baltimore, Maryland at the age of 75. This Group Is Giving Out-of-Work Fitness Instructors a Way to Host Safe Workout Classes Outdoors. “The applause was so great that I felt very small,” Thomas wrote. “You see,” explains Cooley, “it was Vivien who had worked it all out in the lab, in the canine heart, long before Dr. Blalock did Eileen, the first Blue Baby. Thomas's more notable work involves aiding in the discovery of the cause of traumatic shock, designing and guiding the first operation to treat Tetralogy … . Written by Lou Potter and Andrea Kalin. Leaving an indelible mark, he became instructor emeritus of surgery. [21] Hopkins, like the rest of Baltimore, was rigidly segregated, and the only black employees at the institution were janitors. He died on November 26, 1985, due to pancreatic cancer. In that case, the answer came back, there would be no deal. But the 30-year-old surgeon who showed Thomas into his office was even then, Thomas said, “a man who knew exactly what he wanted.”. “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.”. Following his retirement in 1979, Thomas began work on an autobiography, Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock. And lest Thomas look away, Blalock would plead over his shoulder, “Now you watch, Vivien, and don’t let me put these sutures in wrong!”. There’s no point in my beating myself out with them around. “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.”. He translated Blalock’s concepts into reality, devising techniques, even entire operations, where none had existed. . Of course they have time, they say, these men who count time in seconds, who race against the clock. Always the family man, he was thinking practically. When several paydays later Thomas and his coworker received salary increases, neither knew whether he had been reclassified as a technician or just given more money because Blalock demanded it. By 1932, Thomas had made his peace. was a supervisor of surgical laboratories and an instructor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Thomas had family obligations to consider, too. And he remembers where Thomas stood—on a little step stool, looking over Dr. Blalock’s right shoulder, answering questions and coaching every move. He died in November 26, 1985 of pancreatic cancer, at age 75, and the book was published just days later. 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. [12] At the end of Thomas's first day, Blalock told Thomas they would do another experiment the next morning. But Thomas had not come the whole way. He was a teacher to surgeons at a time when he could not become one. [30] Newsreels touted the event, greatly enhancing the status of Johns Hopkins and solidifying the reputation of Blalock, who had been regarded as a maverick up until that point by some in the Hopkins old guard. Nobody knew how to do this.”. Had Blalock not believed in Thomas’s lab results with the tetralogy operation, he would never have dared to open Eileen Saxon’s chest. 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. Yet despite his crucial role, Vivien Thomas was side-lined. People stopped and stared at Thomas, flying down corridors in his white lab coat. Her blood vessels weren’t even half the size of those in the experimental animals used to develop the procedure, and they were full of the thick, dark, “blue” blood characteristic of cyanotic children. Using a canine model, he had found a way to improve circulation in patients whose great vessels were transposed. Within a few weeks, Thomas was starting surgery on his own. Visitors’ eyes widened at the sight of a black man running the lab. We revered him as we did our professor.”, To Blalock’s “boys,” Thomas became the model of a surgeon. 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. [8] He worked at Vanderbilt University in the summer of 1929 doing carpentry[9] but was laid off in the fall. Down the seventh-floor hallway of the Alfred Blalock Clinical Sciences Building they went: the white-haired Professor in his wheelchair; the tall, erect black man slowly pushing him while others rushed past them into the operating rooms. Until Blalock’s retirement in 1964, the two men continued their partnership. It is not Thomas’s diploma that guests first see when they visit the family’s home, but row upon row of children’s and grandchildren’s graduation pictures. The procedure we were doing would ordinarily have taken an hour, but it had taken us six or seven hours, on this one dog that had been asleep all that time. Enjoy this article about Vivien Thomas? “I think Vivien admired what I did,” says Watkins, “but he knew that we were different. He says he’s on his way to do a “tet case” right now. How Are Fitness Studios Dealing? A / initial anastomosis - B / modified anastomosis. 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. Thomas was absent in official articles about the procedure, as well as in team pictures that included all of the doctors involved in the procedure.[41]. “I want you to go with me to Baltimore,” Blalock told Thomas just before Christmas 1940. . Thomas,” a man who represented what they themselves might become. On Friday afternoons, Thomas opened the Old Hunterian to the pet owners of Baltimore and presided over an afternoon clinic, gaining as much prestige in the veterinary community as he enjoyed within the medical school. Through a friend who worked at Vanderbilt University, Thomas learned of an opening as a laboratory assistant for a young doctor named Alfred Blalock—who was, in his friend’s words, “hell to get along with.” Thomas decided to take a chance, and on February 10, 1930, he walked into Blalock’s animal lab. The procedure had not produced the hypertension model they had sought, but it had rerouted the arterial blood into the lungs. In 1976 Hopkins awarded him an honorary doctorate and named him an instructor of surgery for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. I told him he could just pay me off . Year after year, the Old Hands came back to visit, one at a time, and on February 27, 1971, all at once. From his spot at Blalock’s shoulder in the operating room, Thomas would race to the wards, where he would take arterial blood samples on the Blue Babies scheduled for surgery, hand off the samples to another technician in the hallway, return to the heart room for the next operation, head for the lab to begin the blood-oxygen studies, then go back to his spot in the OR. He recalled: “Had there been an organized complaint by the Negroes performing technical duties, there was a good chance that all kinds of excuses would have been offered to avoid giving us technicians’ pay and that leaders of the movement or action would have been summarily fired.”. To the black technicians he trained—twenty of them over three decades—he was “Mr. Directed by Joseph Sargent. Thomas, always his own man, replied, “I will consider it.”. He would check on me from time to time, just to make sure everything was all right. Vivien Theodore Thomas. "[28] Even though Thomas knew he was not allowed to operate on patients at that time, he still followed Blalock's rules and assisted him during surgery. [29] The blue baby syndrome had made her lips and fingers turn blue, with the rest of her skin having a very faint blue tinge. Having learned about Thomas on the day of his death, Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe brought his story to public attention in a 1989 article entitled "Like Something the Lord Made", which won the 1990 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and inspired the PBS documentary Partners of the Heart,[4] which was broadcast in 2003 on PBS's American Experience and won the Organization of American Historians's Erik Barnouw Award for Best History Documentary in 2004. There wasn’t a false move, not a wasted motion, when he operated.”. “Dr. “For the time being,” he said, “I felt secure in that, at least, I had a job. “Those dogs were treated like human patients.”, One of the experimental animals, Anna, took on legendary status as the first long-term survivor of the Blue Baby operation, taking up permanent residence in the Old Hunterian as Thomas’s pet. The first and only one conceived entirely by Thomas, it was a complex but now common operation called an atrial septectomy. If neither Hopkins nor Thomas would bend, Blalock would have to find another way to solve the problem. If outsiders puzzled at Thomas’s role, the surgical team took it as a matter of course. For Vivien they’ll make time. Suture silk for human arteries didn’t exist, so they made do with the silk Thomas had used in the lab—as well as the lab’s clamps, forceps, and right-angle nerve hook. Taussig’s question was asked in 1943, and for more than a year it consumed Blalock and Thomas, both by then working in the Army’s shock research program. He was careful but firm when he approached Blalock on the issue: “I told Dr. Blalock . With Alan Rickman, Yasiin Bey, Kyra Sedgwick, Gabrielle Union. [30], News of this groundbreaking story was circulated around the world by the Associated Press. 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. Those are the facts that Cooley has laid out, as swiftly and efficiently as he operates. His family later moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he was educated in the public schools. When Blalock exposed the pulmonary artery, then the subclavian—the two “pipes” he planned to reconnect— he turned to Thomas. For this part of the story, we have Thomas’s own voice on tape—deep, rich, and full of soft accents. 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 the 1940s. In the halls of the school hangs a replica of Thomas's portrait commissioned by his surgeon-trainees in 1969. 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. Thomas was also appointed to the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical School as Instructor of Surgery. [27] Blalock was impressed with Thomas's work; when he inspected the procedure performed on Anna, he reportedly said, "This looks like something the Lord made. that I had not been brought up to take or use that kind of language. It was a triumphant moment—an occasion that called for a Yousuf Karsh portrait, a surprise party at the Blalock home, gifts of Scotch and bourbon, and a long evening of reminiscing with the Old Hands. In 1993, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation instituted the Vivien Thomas Scholarship for Medical Science and Research sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. Then, as they settled down to monitor all-night shock experiments, Blalock and Thomas would relax with a whiskey-and-Coke. We talk ourselves out of doing anything. He helped develop treatments for blue baby syndrome during the 1940s. He began changing into his city clothes when he walked from the laboratory to Blalock's office because he received so much attention. From the very beginning, there was this deeper bond between us: I knew that he had been where I had been, and I had been where he could not go.”, Both men were aware that their differences ran deep: Watkins, whose exposure to the early civil-rights movement as a parishioner of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had taught him to be “out front and vocal about minority participation”; and Thomas, whose upbringing in Louisiana and Tennessee in the early years of the century had taught him the opposite. In 1930, Vivien Thomas was a nineteen-year-old carpenter’s apprentice with his sights set on Tennessee State College and then medical school. . 274768. Indoor Workout Classes Are Now Banned in DC. [23] Having treated many such patients in her work in Hopkins's Harriet Lane Home, Taussig was desperate to find a surgical cure. And Thomas had smiled and invited him up to his office. A reprinted version of this August 1989 article appears in the May 2020 issue of Washingtonian. . Thomas needed a job, he said, until he could enter college the next fall. Realizing that he would be 50 years old by the time he completed college and medical school, Thomas decided to give up the idea of further education. As the hectic pace of the late ’40s slowed in the early ’50s, the hurried noon visits and evening phone conversations gave way to long, relaxed exchanges through the open door between lab and office. He served as supervisor of the surgical laboratories at Johns Hopkins for 35 years. Cooley’s right here. Along the way, Thomas and Blalock grew old together, Thomas gracefully, Blalock more reluctantly. By 1940, the work Blalock had done with Thomas placed Blalock at the forefront of American surgery, and when he was offered the position of Chief of Surgery at his alma mater Johns Hopkins in 1941,[19] he requested that Thomas accompany him. . Up and down the halls of Hopkins, Koco Eaton turned heads—not because he was black, but because he was the nephew of Vivien Thomas. You handled your hands beautifully.’ He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I trained with Vivien.'”. Always one for gentle statements, Thomas celebrated the changing times on the last page of his book: Thomas is shown standing proudly next to Levi Watkins and a third-year medical student named Reginald Davis, who is holding his infant son. The two bided their time, teaching themselves vascular surgery in experiments in which they attempted to produce pulmonary hypertension in dogs. [3] Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country's most prominent surgeons. Thomas and Blalock did groundbreaking research into the causes of hemorrhagic[15] and traumatic shock. Vivien Thomas surprised Johns Hopkins. 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