Black & Amazing: How The Grandson of a Slave, Pioneered Cardiac Surgery

Vivien Thomas. August 29 1910 - November 26 1985

Thomas was born in New Iberia, Louisiana in 1910. He was the son of Mary (Eaton) and William Maceo Thomas. His grandfather used to be a slave. In the 1920s, he attended Pearl High School in Nashville. Like all other teenagers of his time, he had also hoped to attend college and become a doctor, but the Great Depression of the 20s derailed his plans.

But he never gave up on his dreams. So during the stock market crash in October, Thomas put his educational plans on hold, and with the help of a friend, in February 1930, he managed to get a job as surgical research assistant with Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University. From there on his career started in spite of deeply seated racism and deprivation. It was such that Thomas was classified and paid as a janitor despite the fact that he was doing the work of a Postdoctoral researcher.

The year was 1943 when Blalock was approached by pediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig. She was seeking a surgical solution to a complex and fatal four-part heart anomaly known as tetralogy of Fallot AKA blue baby syndrome.

Thomas and Blalock were determined to discover a solution through a surgery to cure this anomaly. As it turned out, the answer had already been previously discovered in their earlier work at Vanderbilt Vanderbilt. After first performing the surgery on a dog with a similar problem, Thomas was ready to demonstrate the surgery was non-lethal and could be performed on human babies.

On November 29, 1944, Thomas tried the procedure for the first time on an eighteen-month-old infant named Eileen Saxon and it was a success. The news of this groundbreaking medical discovery was circulated to the world by the Associated Press.

In the 2004 HBO movie, Something the Lord Made, his amazing life-story is portrayed.

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