Vivien Thomas

Vivien Theodore Thomas was born on the twenty-ninth of August 1910 at New Iberia, Louisiana, the son of William Maceo Thomas — a Black carpenter — and Mary Eaton Thomas, of Cherokee-and-African-American descent. The family moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1914 in his father’s carpentry trade, and Thomas was raised in the Black-Nashville middle-class household of his father.

He was placed at six at the Nashville public schools and at the Pearl High School at Nashville — the principal Black high school of the city — and was admitted in 1929 at nineteen to the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal College — subsequently Tennessee State University — in pre-medical studies on his own savings. The 1929 stock-market crash wiped out his small savings and his family’s savings within the first year of his enrollment, and he was forced to withdraw from Tennessee State in 1930.

He was hired at the close of 1930 by the Vanderbilt University Medical School at Nashville as a laboratory janitor in the surgical research laboratory of Dr. Alfred Blalock — the white Vanderbilt vascular surgeon who would become the principal collaborator of his career. Blalock was at the time of the hire approximately Thomas’s age and was at the opening period of his shock-research programme at Vanderbilt.

Thomas worked from 1930 across the following thirty-four years as Blalock’s research-laboratory technician — first at Vanderbilt and from 1941 onward at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and University at Baltimore when Blalock was named professor of surgery and surgeon-in-chief of the Hopkins Hospital. Thomas was hired by Hopkins at the time of the Blalock move to Baltimore under the position of surgical research technician, the only Black professional staff member of the Hopkins Department of Surgery of the period.

He was the principal developer between November 1943 and November 1944 of the surgical anastomosis procedure for the correction of the cyanotic-congenital-cardiac defect known as the Tetralogy of Fallot — the so-called blue-baby disease in which infants are born with insufficient pulmonary-arterial blood flow. Thomas developed across the year the surgical-laboratory animal-model procedure that connected the subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery, restoring the pulmonary blood flow.

The procedure was performed by Dr. Alfred Blalock on the patient Eileen Saxon at the Hopkins Hospital on the twenty-ninth of November 1944 — Vivien Thomas standing at Blalock’s right shoulder at the operating table, instructing Blalock on the surgical technique he himself had developed but which Blalock alone was authorised to perform under the Hopkins institutional racial-caste rules of the period. The Saxon operation was successful; the patient lived. The procedure was named the Blalock-Taussig procedure in the principal Hopkins literature — Thomas was not credited at the time. The procedure was renamed the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig procedure in the cardiac-surgical literature in the 1970s.

Thomas trained at the Hopkins surgical research laboratory across the following twenty years over a hundred and fifty surgical residents — many of whom rose to senior posts at the principal American academic medical centres and credited Thomas as their principal surgical teacher.

Hopkins awarded him the honorary doctor of laws on the second of February 1976 — at the same convocation at which the same honorary degree was awarded to Dr. Helen Brooke Taussig.

He died at Baltimore on the twenty-sixth of November 1985 of complications of pancreatic cancer, at seventy-five.

He is honored here as the principal developer of the blue-baby procedure.