Vivien Thomas portrait presentation. Find a Grave, database and images ( https://www.findagrave.com : accessed 28 December 2020 ), memorial page for Vivien Theodore Thomas (29 Aug 1910–25 Nov 1985), Find a Grave Memorial no. [3] Because of certain restrictions, he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws, rather than a medical doctorate, but it did allow the staff and students of Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to call him doctor. 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. At birth these babies became weak and “blue,” and sooner or later all died. In their long talks in Thomas’s office, the young surgeon remembers that “he taught me to take the broad view, to try to understand Hopkins and its perspective on race. In 1950, six years after he and Blalock had stood together for Blue Baby One, Blalock operated on Blue Baby 1,000. Cooley’s right here. He meant to do at least as well for his own family. Vivien Thomas was born on August 29, 1910 and died on November 26, 1985. . In 1989, Washingtonian published what might be the most popular article in its history. No larger than a cigarette package, Watkins’s AID is deceptively simple-looking. At 5 PM, when everyone else was leaving, Thomas and “The Professor” prepared to work on into the night—Thomas setting up the treasured Van Slyke machine used to measure blood oxygen, Blalock starting the siphon on the ten-gallon charred keg of whiskey he kept hidden in the laboratory storeroom during Prohibition. In 1968, the surgeons Thomas trained â who had then become chiefs of surgical departments throughout America â commissioned the painting of his portrait (by Bob Gee, oil on canvas, 1969, The Johns Hopkins Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives)[43] and arranged to have it hung next to Blalock's in the lobby of the Alfred Blalock Clinical Sciences Building. He and Thomas were a package deal, Blalock told the hospital. 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. According to the caption, the photograph was taken in 1979 in front of the hospital’s Broadway entrance. 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. They’re good.”, But fifteen years at center stage had made it hard for Blalock to be a bystander. But the true message lies in what the caption does not say: In 1941, the Broadway entrance was for whites only. Thomas had family obligations to consider, too. 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. 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. Three years after meeting Blalock, Thomas married Clara Flanders Thomas in 1933 and had two daughters. He would walk out into the rotunda alone, he insisted. Things were getting to the point that it seemed to be a matter of survival.”. From across the country they arrived, packing the Hopkins auditorium to present the portrait they had commissioned of “our colleague, Vivien Thomas.”. Perhaps Blalock was remembering what it had been like when he was 30 and Thomas 19, juggling a dozen research projects, working into the night, trying to “find out what happens.” By including Thomas in his own decline, Blalock was acknowledging something deeper than chronology: a common beginning. He was careful but firm when he approached Blalock on the issue: “I told Dr. Blalock . “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.”. After 37 years, Thomas was appointed to the faculty at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. So complete was the transfer from lab to operating room on the morning of November 29, 1944, that only Thomas was missing when Eileen Saxon was wheeled into surgery. “The foreman said, ‘Thomas, you could have fixed that floor right in the first place.’ I knew that I had learned the lesson I still try to adhere to: Whatever you do, always do your best.”. When Blalock and Thomas arrived in Baltimore in 1941, the questions on most people’s minds had nothing to do with cardiac surgery. But the depression, which had halted carpentry work in Nashville, wiped out his savings and forced him to postpone college. In that case, the answer came back, there would be no deal. This is about Vivien Thomas. . Blalock saw the same quality in Thomas, who exuded a no-nonsense attitude he had absorbed from his hard-working father. 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. He was concerned with my being too political and antagonizing the people I had to work with. That's it. [24] Thomas was charged with the task of first creating a blue baby-like condition in a dog, and then correcting the condition by means of the pulmonary-to-subclavian anastomosis. [7] Thomas had hoped to attend college and become a doctor, but the Great Depression derailed his plans. 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. After Blalock's death from cancer in 1964 at the age of 65,[42] Thomas stayed at Hopkins for 15 more years. Vincent Gott and Bruce Reitz, 1987 was a year of firsts, and Lee was part of both: In May, he assisted in a double heart-lung transplant, the first from a living donor; in August, he was a member of the Hopkins team that successfully separated Siamese twins. Vivien Thomas, who never earned a medical degree, died in Baltimore, Maryland at the age of 75. Blalock and Thomas knew the social codes and traditions of the Old South. . With no regret for the past, the 35-year-old Thomas took a hard look at the future and at his two daughters’ prospects for earning the degrees that had eluded him. Thomas was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, and was the son of Mary (Eaton) and William Maceo Thomas. “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. “Perhaps you could discuss the problem with your wife,” Blalock suggested. Even at rest, the nine-pound girl’s skin was deeply blue, her lips and nail beds purple. The problem was money. Author of autobiography, Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surg… Blalock’s scalpel moved swiftly to the point of no return. In a slow Texas drawl he says he just loves being bothered about Vivien. “Mr. For more than three decades, the partnership endured, as Blalock ascended to fame, built up young men in his own image, then became a proud but reluctant bystander as they rose to dominate the field he had created. Blalock and Thomas realized immediately that the answer lay in a procedure they had perfected for a different purpose in their Vanderbilt work, involving the anastomosis (joining) of the subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery, which had the effect of increasing blood flow to the lungs. But in the medical world of the 1940s that chose and trained men like Denton Cooley, there wasn’t supposed to be a place for a black man, with or without a degree. Would babies survive it? 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. I can tell you put it in.’ Without another word, he turned and left. Within three days, Vivien Thomas was performing almost as if he’d been born in the lab, doing arterial punctures on the laboratory dogs and measuring and administering anesthesia. I told him he could just pay me off . He served as supervisor of the surgical laboratories at Johns Hopkins for 35 years. As Blalock was laying plans for his 1947 “Blue Baby Tour” of Europe, Thomas was preparing to head back home to Nashville, for good. Following his retirement in 1979, Thomas began work on an autobiography, Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and his Work with Alfred Blalock, ISBN 0-8122-1634-2. 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. In 1930, Vivien Thomas was a nineteen-year-old carpenter’s apprentice with his sights set on Tennessee State College and then medical school. “Seeing that he was unable to stand erect,” Thomas recalled later, “I asked if he wanted me to accompany him to the front of the hospital. Following his retirement in 1979, Thomas began work on an autobiography. “Will the subclavian reach the pulmonary once it’s cut off and divided?” he asked. 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. . [39] He sometimes resorted to working as a bartender, often at Blalock's parties. . He was not scrubbed in as an assistant, and he never touched the patients. 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. So Thomas ordered his surgical supplies, cleaned and painted the lab, put on his white coat, and settled down to work. “Only Vivien is to stand there,” Blalock would tell anyone who moved into the space behind his right shoulder. Vivien Thomas died in 1985 at the age of 75, just a few days before the publication of his autobiography Partners of the Heart. [34] To the host of young surgeons Thomas trained during the 1940s,[35] he became a figure of legend, the model of a dexterous and efficient cutting surgeon. He translated Blalock’s concepts into reality, devising techniques, even entire operations, where none had existed. [31] Thomas performed the operation hundreds of times on a dog, whereas Blalock only once as Thomas' assistant. The procedure had not produced the hypertension model they had sought, but it had rerouted the arterial blood into the lungs. According to the accounts in Thomas's 1985 autobiography and in a 1967 interview with medical historian Peter Olch, Taussig suggested only that it might be possible to "reconnect the pipes"[24] in some way to increase the level of blood flow to the lungs but did not suggest how this could be accomplished. Yet he was full of questions about the experiment in progress, eager to learn not just “what” but “why” and “how.” Instinctively, Blalock responded to that curiosity, describing his experiment as he showed Thomas around the lab. If outsiders puzzled at Thomas’s role, the surgical team took it as a matter of course. “It must have been said many times,” Spencer writes, “that ‘if only’ Vivien had had a proper medical education he might have accomplished a great deal more, but the truth of the matter is that as a black physician in that era, he would probably have had to spend all his time and energy making a living among an economically deprived black population.”. [29], On November 29, 1944, the procedure was first tried on an eighteen-month-old infant named Eileen Saxon. 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 Thomas died of pancreatic cancer in 1985, and his autobiography was published just days later. Of course they have time, they say, these men who count time in seconds, who race against the clock. [25] Among the dogs on whom Thomas operated was one named Anna, who became the first long-term survivor of the operation and the only animal to have her portrait hung on the walls of Johns Hopkins. Datasets available include LCSH, BIBFRAME, LC Name Authorities, LC Classification, MARC codes, PREMIS vocabularies, ISO language codes, and more. “I don’t know how you feel about it,” he said as Blalock mulled over post-retirement offers from around the country, “but I’d just as soon you not include me in any of those plans. On the other hand, there were limits to his tolerance, especially when it came to issues of pay, academic acknowledgment, and his social interaction outside of work. Still, Vivien Thomas made a place for himself. The two bided their time, teaching themselves vascular surgery in experiments in which they attempted to produce pulmonary hypertension in dogs. “It was a question of trust,” says Dr. Alex Haller, who was trained by Thomas and now is surgeon-in-chief at Hopkins. The anastomosis began to function, shunting the pure blue blood through the pulmonary artery into the lungs to be oxygenated. 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. Vivien T. Thomas, who was born in New Iberia, La., and raised in Nashville, Tenn., had hoped one day to become a surgeon. Besides, he had brought a colored man up from Vanderbilt to run his lab. Then, as Hopkins took halting steps toward desegregation, he made a new role for himself as mentor to the first generation of African American medical students, as well as hospital staff. Underneath the sterile drapes, Eileen turned pink. that I had not been brought up to take or use that kind of language. For days, he went over the specimens—tiny hearts so deformed they didn’t even look like hearts. Vivien T. Thomas, L.L.D. Thomas excelled. Thomas hadn’t gone to college, let alone medical school, but through their pioneering work together, the two men essentially invented cardiac surgery. The story of Thomas’s unlikely and inspiring journey won a National Magazine Award for feature writing and became an Emmy Award–winning HBO movie starring Mos Def. In the world in which Thomas had grown up, confrontation could be dangerous for a black man. These young fellows can do a much better job than I can. The sutures could not be seen from within, and on gross examination the edges of the defect were smooth and covered with endocardium. was a supervisor of surgical laboratories and an instructor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Vanderbilt University Medical School, surgical research technician, 1930–41; Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, research associate and supervisor of surgical research laboratories, 1941–79, appointed to the medical school faculty, 1977. A dramatization of the relationship between heart surgery pioneers Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas. For 34 years they were a remarkable combination: Blalock the scientist, asking the questions; Thomas the pragmatist, figuring out the simplest way to get the answers. Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) was an African-American laboratory supervisor who developed a procedure used to treat blue baby syndrome (now known as cyanotic heart disease) in the 1940s. They brought expertise in vascular surgery that would change medicine. “Is the incision long enough?” he asked Thomas. 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. Legacy. 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. Yet Thomas was always the patient teacher. It seemed that they were stuck. By 1935, a handful of other scientists had begun to rethink the physiology of shock, but no one besides Blalock had attacked the problem from so many angles. Produced by Andrea Kalin. In 1976, Johns Hopkins University presented Thomas with an honorary doctorate. . In 1941 the only other black employees at the Johns Hopkins Hospital were janitors. There’s no point in my beating myself out with them around. 10372340, citing Maryland National Memorial Park, Laurel, Prince George's County, Maryland, USA ; Maintained by Find A Grave . "There wasn't a false move, not a wasted motion, when he operated." 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. 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. Out came Blalock, a Coke in one hand, cigarette in the other. He told me, ‘Vivien, all the easy things have been done.’ ”. [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. A Change of Heart: Vivien Thomas and the Blue Baby, The Unknown Black Heroes Who Saved Thousands of Lives, NHD Nationals 2016 -- Vivien Thomas and the Blue Babies, Something the Lord Made (The1st Heart Surgeon). He was just out of high school, working on the Fisk University maintenance crew to earn money for his college tuition. He was a cardiac pioneer 30 years before Hopkins opened its doors to the first black surgical resident. Used to promote blood flow in cyanotic newborns with congenital heart defects, this pioneering surgical treatment has since been used by surgeons around the globe to help thousands of “blue babies.” 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. How and where had he learned? [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. 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. The offer on the card left Thomas speechless: The trustees had doubled his salary and created a new bracket for non-degreed personnel deserving higher pay. Levi Watkins Jr. is everything Vivien Thomas might have been had he been born 40 years later. At this same time, Blalock and Thomas began experimental work in vascular and cardiac surgery,[15] defying medical taboos against operating upon the heart. “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. Named Eileen Saxon 3 ] to and find out what happens. ” to hurry a powerful ally the. To bring more blood to their lungs, thus creating oxygen deprivation and second. 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