So it went for more than half a century. Had Blalock not believed in Thomass lab results with the tetralogy operation, he would never have dared to open Eileen Saxons chest. Inside the lab, it was his skill that raised eyebrows. Is the incision long enough? he asked Thomas. But it was the words of hospital president Dr. Russell Nelson that hit home: There are all sorts of degrees and diplomas and certificates, but nothing equals recognition by your peers.. In his four years with Blalock, Thomas had assumed the role of a senior research fellow, with neither a PhD nor an MD. [16] He abandoned his plans for college and medical school, relieved to have even a low-paying job as the Great Depression deepened. He was overjoyed that he was finally getting recognition for his significant role in the research leading to developmental skills that many surgeons now practice. Of course they have time, they say, these men who count time in seconds, who race against the clock. Thomas trained them and sent them out with the Old Hands, who tried to duplicate the Blalock-Thomas magic in their own labs. It was invented in 1879 by T. A. Edison. Something the Lord Made (TV Movie 2004) - Plot - IMDb How did Vivien Thomas die? - Answers Vivien Theodore Thomas was born on August 29, 1910, in New Iberia, Louisiana, as the son of Mary and William Maceo Thomas. (Sun file photo) 'Technician' showed surgeon what to. [45] He sometimes resorted to working as a bartender, often at Blalock's parties. Eaton trained in orthopedics and is now the team doctor for the Tampa Bay Rays. All that was inside the laboratory. 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. 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. At birth these babies became weak and blue, and sooner or later all died. His grandfather was a slave and his childhood was spent in poverty. 16. Like Something the Lord Made, by Katie McCabe, tells of Vivien Thomas, an African American lab assistant to white surgeon Alfred Blalock from the 1930s to the 60s. Viviens older brother, Harold, had been a school teacher in Nashville. In the end, it was World War II that caused Thomas to take his chances with Blalock. It was the admiration and affection of the men he trained that Thomas valued most. [48] Blalock's approach to the issue of Thomas's race was complicated and contradictory throughout their 34-year partnership. Vivien was.. Thomas, a man who represented what they themselves might become. We talk ourselves out of doing anything. Blalock and Thomas knew the social codes and traditions of the Old South. A PBS documentary, Partners of the Heart,[4] was broadcast in 2003 on PBS's American Experience. Face to face on two lab stools, each told the other what he needed. Still, Vivien Thomas made a place for himself. [29] Having treated many such patients in her work in Hopkins's Harriet Lane Home, Taussig was desperate to find a surgical cure. However, Blalock saw Thomas as a valuable asset and did everything he could to keep Thomas from leaving. [18] Thomas was classified and paid as a janitor,[19] despite the fact that by the mid-1930s, he was doing the work of a postdoctoral researcher in the lab. If neither Hopkins nor Thomas would bend, Blalock would have to find another way to solve the problem. To Thomas he entrusted both and, in so doing, doubled his legacy. Even if youd never seen surgery before, Cooley says, you could do it because Vivien made it look so simple. I can tell you put it in. Without another word, he turned and left. Dr. Blalock sounded off like a child throwing a temper tantrum. When Blalock and Thomas arrived in Baltimore in 1941, the questions on most peoples minds had nothing to do with cardiac surgery. When Thomas walked the halls in his white lab coat, many heads turned. After a day of house-hunting in Baltimore, he thought he might have to. But the true message lies in what the caption does not say: In 1941, the Broadway entrance was for whites only. Raymond Lee hasnt come into the hospital on his day off to talk about his role in those historic 1987 operations. The hypertension studies, as such, were a flop, Thomas said. Their policy against hiring blacks was inflexible. It was the Old Hands relentless campaign that finally convinced Vivien to turn his boxes of notes and files into an autobiography. Blalock told Thomas, Lets face it, Vivien, were getting older. They had only Vivien Thomas, who flew from one end of the Hopkins complex to the other without appearing to hurry. 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.. . In 1971, Thomas was recognized for all his hard work "behind the scenes" with a ceremony, and the presentation of his portrait to the medical institution. It was a question of trust, says Dr. Alex Haller, who was trained by Thomas and now is surgeon-in-chief at Hopkins. Thomas almost wasnt there. Is this all right, Vivien? Blalock asked as he began joining the smooth inner linings of the two arteries. Each time, remembers Dr. Henry Bahnson, hed comfort himself by saying that Vivien was doing famously what he did well, and that he had come a long way with Blalocks help.. As Blalock was laying plans for his 1947 Blue Baby Tour of Europe, Thomas was preparing to head back home to Nashville, for good. Wont somebody please help me? hed ask plaintively, stomping his soft white tennis shoes and looking around at the team standing ready to execute his every order. No one else had compiled such a mass of data on hemorrhagic and traumatic shock. In the 60-year-old Thomas, the 26-year-old Watkins found a man with the ability to transcend the times and the circumspection to live within them. Vivien Thomas had no medical degree, but he still became one of surgery's greatest innovators. It was fatherly advice, Watkins says fondly, from a man who knew what it was like to be the only one. When Thomas retired, one era ended and another began, for that was the year that Levi Watkins joined the medical-school admissions committee. Education: Attended Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College. See all videos for this article. Subjects: People Terms: Education - Historically Black Colleges (HBCU) Do you find this information helpful? With his simple questions and his Georgia drawl, Blalock didnt sound much like the golden boy described in his letters of reference. During his final illness Blalock said to a colleague: I should have found a way to send Vivien to medical school. It was the last time he would voice that sense of unfulfilled obligation. It was Thomas who remained, the one constant. It was Dr. Helen Taussig, a Hopkins cardiologist, who came to Blalock and Thomas looking for help for the cyanotic babies she was seeing. Vivien Thomas was born on August 29, 1910, in New Iberia, Louisiana. It helped in suturing the babies heart since due to its small size. Watkins was an honors graduate of Tennessee State, the first black graduate of Vanderbilt University Medical School, and Johns Hopkinss first black cardiac resident. I dont know how you feel about it, he said as Blalock mulled over post-retirement offers from around the country, but Id just as soon you not include me in any of those plans. No one else had been able to explain such a complex phenomenon so simply. The problem was money. Thomas Edison | Biography, Early Life, Inventions, & Facts Vivien Thomas's greatest dream was to attend college to study medicine. . 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. How long had he been doing this, they wanted to know. He was a skilled carpente. Along the years, they develop the bypass surgery using dogs as guinea pigs. In 1910 Thomas was born during the Jim Crow era, to Willard Maceo Thomas and the former Mary Alice Eaton. Vivien T. Thomas was born in New Iberia, Louisiana in 1910, the son of a carpenter. [28] During this time, he lived in the 1200 block of Caroline Street in the community now known as Oliver, Baltimore. Besides, it was Blalock, 60 years old, recently widowed and in failing health, who was feeling old, not Thomas, then only 49. Within a month, the former carpenter was setting up experiments and performing delicate and complex operations. Blalock promised to investigate. "There wasn't a false move, not a wasted motion, when he operated." There were no cardiac experts then. It seemed that they were stuck. He was just out of high school, working on the Fisk University maintenance crew to earn money for his college tuition. Thomas was chosen as one of the four, along with Helen Taussig, Florence Sabin, and Daniel Nathans. I must have looked white as a ghost, because when he came over with the I-V needle, he sat down at my foot, tugged at my pants leg, and said, Which leg shall I start the fluid in, Dr. Haller? , The man who tugged at Hallers pants leg administered one of the countrys most sophisticated surgical research programs. A colored man who wasnt even a doctor. He had sued the Nashville Board of Education, alleging salary discrimination based on race. . In the world in which Thomas had grown up, confrontation could be dangerous for a black man. He tells the Blue Baby story so matter-of-factly that you forget hes outlining the beginning of cardiac surgery. Blalock saw the same quality in Thomas, who exuded a no-nonsense attitude he had absorbed from his hard-working father. Mr. And he remembers where Thomas stoodon a little step stool, looking over Dr. Blalocks right shoulder, answering questions and coaching every move. [53] He died of pancreatic cancer on November 26, 1985, and the book was published just days later. heart attack Something the Lord Made (TV Movie 2004) - IMDb On his first walk from the lab to Blalocks office in the hospital across campus, the Negro man in a lab coat halted traffic. [56], Vanderbilt University Medical Center created the Vivien A. Thomas Award for Excellence in Clinical Research, recognizing excellence in conducting clinical research.[57]. [24] 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. 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. The anastomosis began to function, shunting the pure blue blood through the pulmonary artery into the lungs to be oxygenated. 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. It was a triumphant momentan 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 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. Sidelined by deteriorating health, Blalock decided in the early 1950s that cardiac surgery was a young mans field, so he turned over the development of the heart-lung machine to two of his superstars, Drs. For the next year, Blalock and Longmire rebuilt hearts virtually around the clock. You were lucky to have hit the jackpot twice, Thomas answered, remembering that the good old days were, more often than not, sixteen-hour days. But after the stock market crashed in 1929, Vivien lost all his savings. Nobody had fooled around with the heart before, he says, so we had no idea what trouble we might get into. Thomas Edison: One Of The Greatest Invention | ipl.org I turned to him at the end of it and said, I certainly appreciated the way you solved that problem. . VIVIEN THOMAS (from autobiography): One day, I became the target of Dr. Blalock's famous temper. Eventually, after negotiations on his behalf by Blalock, he became the highest paid assistant at Johns Hopkins by 1946, and by far the highest paid African-American on the institution's rolls. At their black-topped workbench and eight animal operating tables, the two set out to disprove all the old explanations about shock, amassing evidence that connected it to a decrease in blood volume and fluid loss outside the vascular bed. 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.. [46] 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. In that case, the answer came back, there would be no deal. Director Joseph Sargent Writers Peter Silverman Robert Caswell Stars Cliff McMullen Yasiin Bey He was a cardiac pioneer 30 years before Hopkins opened its doors to the first black surgical resident. 10:29 AM ET 02/22/2016. What passed from Thomass hands to the surgical residents who would come to be known as the Old Hands was vascular surgery in the makingmuch of it of Thomass making. Its Also a Hot Mess. For more than 30 years, the two men pursued a variety of medical research projects. Within the lab, they functioned almost as a single mind, as Thomass deft hands turned Blalocks ideas into elegant and detailed experiments. He and Thomas were a package deal, Blalock told the hospital. [47] Thomas quickly learned that Blalock moved quickly and expected his technicians to also be just as efficient. Vivien, I want you to listen to this, hed 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?. He was so modest that I had to keep asking him, What did you do to get your picture on the wall? says Watkins of his first meeting with a man who was for fourteen years a colleague, a counselor, a friend., Even though I only knew him a fraction of the time some of the other surgeons did, I felt very close to him. Thomas was eighty-four when he died. [25] Thomas arrived in Baltimore with his family in June of that year,[26] confronting a severe housing shortage and a level of racism worse than they had endured in Nashville. So Thomas ordered his surgical supplies, cleaned and painted the lab, put on his white coat, and settled down to work. Just before they reached the exit from the main corridor to the rotunda where Blalocks portrait hung, he asked Thomas to stop so that he could get out of his wheelchair. Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 [1] - November 26, 1985) [2] was an American laboratory supervisor who developed a procedure used to treat blue baby syndrome (now known as cyanotic heart disease) in the 1940s. 12. What is the disease the Dr. Blalock and Vivian Thomas There was a generations difference between Vivien and me, and it was a big generation. In retrospect, I think that incident set the stage for what I consider our mutual respect throughout the years.. These young fellows can do a much better job than I can. It was this work that laid the foundation for the revolutionary life saving surgery they were to perform at Johns Hopkins a decade later. Read it here and raise a glass to lifesaving medical professionals everywherewith or without an MD. And could he operate. [30] 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. In an extensive 1967 interview with medical historian Dr. Peter Olch, we meet the warm, wry Vivien Thomas who remains hidden behind the formal, scientific prose of his autobiography. [38] Next, they operated upon a six-year-old boy, who dramatically regained his color at the end of the surgery. As close as Blalock was to his protgs, they moved on. 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. I told him he could just pay me off . In 1941 the only other black employees at the Johns Hopkins Hospital were janitors. On July 1, 1976, Thomas was appointed to the faculty as an instructor of surgery; Thomas served as the Instructor of Surgery for 3 years and retired in 1979. Vivien Thomas was 19, a carpenter's apprentice, when he took a temporary job as a lab assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock. For days, he went over the specimenstiny hearts so deformed they didnt even look like hearts. He translated Blalocks concepts into reality, devising techniques, even entire operations, where none had existed. 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,[25] he requested that Thomas accompany him. Within three days, Vivien Thomas was performing almost as if hed been born in the lab, doing arterial punctures on the laboratory dogs and measuring and administering anesthesia. Its the best I can doits all I can do.. Casper said to me, Dr. Even at rest, the nine-pound girls skin was deeply blue, her lips and nail beds purple. Thomas died of complication of diabetes on October 18, 1931 in his home, Glenmont" in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey. [14] Thomas intended to work hard, save money, and gain a higher education as soon as he could afford it. . As surgeon-in-chief there, he could run his own department, train his own men, expand his research. I no longer recall what, but I made some error. 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. He wished to attend college but couldn't due to the Great Depression. But it didnt happen. With each passing month, Thomass hopes dimmed, something not lost on Blalock. Today Bahnson is chairman emeritus of the department of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and Spencer chairs the department of surgery at New York University. VIVIEN THOMAS, The Man who Helped Invent the Heart Surgery [35] The blue baby syndrome had made her lips and fingers turn blue, with the rest of her skin having a very faint blue tinge. Order of appearance: Dr. Denton Cooley, Dr. Alex Haller, Jr., Dr. C. Rollins Hanlon, Dr. Paul Ebert, and Dr. James Jude. 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. One look inside the instrument cabinet told him that he was in the surgical Dark Ages. 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 Thomass pet. Finally, off came the bulldog clamps that had stopped the flow of blood during the operation. Only Vivien is to stand there, Blalock would tell anyone who moved into the space behind his right shoulder. In the wake of the stock market crash in October, he secured a job as a laboratory assistant in 1930 with Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University. What has the author Vivian T Thayer written? It was enough to make him want to head back to Nashville and take up his carpenters tools again. Vivien Thomas (1910-1985) - Blackpast Always the family man, he was thinking practically. Dr. Cooleys right here. It was Vivien who helped me to work through the problems of testing this thing in the dog lab, says Watkins, turning the little half-pound heart shocker in his hand and running his fingers along its two electrode wires. [31] 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. In January of 1930, Vivien Thomas took a job in Alfred Blalock's Vanderbilt University Hospital laboratory. [35], On November 29, 1944, the procedure was first tried on an eighteen-month-old infant named Eileen Saxon. Thomass wife, Clara, still refers to her husbands autobiography by Viviens title, Presentation of a Portrait: The Story of a Life, even though when it appeared in print two days after his death in 1985, it bore the more formal title of Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery: Vivien Thomas and His Work With Alfred Blalock. . Thomas did not live to see his nephew graduate, but he rejoiced at his admission. Its always just a few degrees warmer on the operators side than it is on his assistants when you get into the operating room!, Thomass portrait was hung opposite The Professors in the lobby of the Blalock Building, almost 30 years from the day in 1941 that he and Blalock had come to Hopkins from Vanderbilt. Even with a 20 percent increase over his Vanderbilt salary, Thomas found it almost impossible to get along. Something would have to be done, he told Blalock. He had spent some time observing Vivien and working with him. Surely there had to be a way to change the pipes around to bring more blood to their lungs, Taussig said. He joined Vanderbilt University's medical school as a surgical assistant, working for Dr. Alfred Blalock. The partnership lasted 34 years, and together the two men would invent heart surgery. He took one look, Thomas remembered, and said, Thomas, that wont do. It is to her that the book is dedicated, and it was in her arms that he died, 52 years after their marriage. Would babies survive it? . From across the country they arrived, packing the Hopkins auditorium to present the portrait they had commissioned of our colleague, Vivien Thomas.. What did Vivien Thomas invent? Nashville's banks failed nine months after Thomas started his job with Blalock, and his savings were wiped out. His reply was, No, dont. I watched as with an almost 45-degree stoop and obviously in pain, he slowly disappeared through the exit.. Born Vivien T. Thomas, 1910, in Nashville, TN; died, 1985; married; children: two daughters. No, Vivien Thomas wasnt a doctor, says Cooley. He had spent all morning fixing a piece of worn flooring in one of the faculty houses. I hope you will accept this, he told Thomas, drawing a file card from his pocket.