Born Vivien T. Thomas, 1910, in Nashville, TN; died, 1985; married; children: two daughters. “I remember one time,” says Haller, “when I was a medical student, I was working on a research project with a senior surgical resident who was a very slow operator. Vivien Thomas grew up in North Nashville, the city's African American community, which had a thriving middle class with its own doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs. You handled your hands beautifully, too.’, “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I trained with Vivien.’ ”. Those are the facts that Cooley has laid out, as swiftly and efficiently as he operates. 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. Vivien Thomas was born on August 29, 1910 in New Iberia, Louisiana. Until Blalock’s retirement in 1964, the two men continued their partnership. Then, one morning in 1943, while Johns Hopkins and Vivien Thomas were still getting used to each other, someone asked a question that would change surgical history. Casper said to me, ‘Dr. A failed experiment to treat hypertension became the starting point for finding a treatment for cyanotic "blue" babies. A few weeks before Blalock’s retirement in 1964, they closed out their partnership just as they had begun it—facing each other on two lab stools. . That’s tetralogy of Fallot, the congenital heart defect that causes Blue Baby Syndrome. In retrospect, I think that incident set the stage for what I consider our mutual respect throughout the years.”. that for the type of work I was doing, I felt I should be . There’s no point in my beating myself out with them around. So why haven't you heard of him? The College is committed to building and fostering a pipeline of future leaders like Vivien Thomas who can continue to shape the future and leave their own mark on the profession. For the next year, Blalock and Longmire rebuilt hearts virtually around the clock. In December 1933, after a whirlwind courtship, he had married a young woman from Macon, Georgia, named Clara Flanders. Vivien Theodore Thomas was born on August 29, 1910, in New Iberia, Louisiana, as the son of Mary and William Maceo Thomas. “Perhaps you could discuss the problem with your wife,” Blalock suggested. In addition to severe respiratory disease, Covid-19 can result in a systemic multi-organ disease with an increased mortality rate. He worried about my getting out there alone.”. Vivien Thomas was paid a janitor's wage, never went to college, and still became a legend in the field of heart surgery. 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. Click here to start. It was the admiration and affection of the men he trained that Thomas valued most. Together they devised an operation to save “Blue Babies”— infants born with a heart defect that sends blood past their lungs— and Cooley was there, as an intern, for the first one. “It’s the best I can do—it’s all I can do.”. 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. “Nobody had fooled around with the heart before,” he says, “so we had no idea what trouble we might get into. Thomas's contributions to cardiovascular surgery were unequivocal, and yet it was only after his death that he gained more widespread recognition. Clara Thomas speaks proudly of her husband’s accomplishments, and matter-of-factly about the recognition that came late in his career. 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. No one else had compiled such a mass of data on hemorrhagic and traumatic shock. Vivien Thomas: His Vitals. “Mr. Sooner or later, he says, all the stories circle back to that moment when Thomas and Blalock stood together in the operating room for the first Blue Baby. After his patients, nothing mattered more to Blalock than his research and his “boys,” as he called his residents. Face to face on two lab stools, each told the other what he needed. 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. They say that Cooley does them faster than anyone, that he can make a tetralogy operation look so simple it doesn’t even look like surgery. He died on November 26, 1985 of pancreatic cancer, at age 75, and the book was published just days later. And he never lost his sense of humor. So it went for more than half a century. I was stung, but I replaced the piece of flooring. I was the only one in the lab, except for Casper. While he never realized his dream of going to college and medical school, losing his college savings during the Great Depression, he became a scientist and educator and the teacher of many cardiac surgeons who went on to head surgery departments across the U.S. “It was my first research project when I joined the medical faculty, and Vivien’s last.” Only months after Thomas’s retirement in 1979, Watkins performed the first human implantation of the AID, winning a place in the long line of Hopkins cardiac pioneers. “Something went wrong,” Thomas later wrote in his autobiography. He was a cardiac pioneer 30 years before Hopkins opened its doors to the first black surgical resident. Year after year, the Old Hands came back to visit, one at a time, and on February 27, 1971, all at once. “I hope you will accept this,” he told Thomas, drawing a file card from his pocket. Vivien Thomas (1910–1985) was an African-American scientist, pioneer, and renowned educator. Vivien Thomas was son to a carpenter and grandson to a slave. I turned to him at the end of it and said, ‘I certainly appreciated the way you solved that problem. Their first child, Olga Fay, was born the following year, and a second daughter, Theodosia, would arrive in 1938. A reprinted version of this August 1989 article appears in the May 2020 issue of Washingtonian. That was what he and Thomas talked about the day they met in the hospital cafeteria, a few weeks after Watkins had come to Hopkins as an intern in 1971. “You’re the man in the picture,” he had said. Nothing in the laboratory had prepared either one for what they saw when Blalock opened Eileen’s chest. Technically, a non-MD could not hold the position of laboratory supervisor. 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. The job was to clean the lab and the cages of the animals used for experiments. But it didn’t happen.” With each passing month, Thomas’s hopes dimmed, something not lost on Blalock. I never had to repeat or redo another assignment.”. In 1989, Washingtonian published what might be the most popular article in its history. And could he operate. Hanlon, the surgeon and scholar, spoke of Thomas’s hands, and of the man who was greater still; of the synergy of two great men, Thomas and Blalock. No, Vivien Thomas wasn’t a doctor, says Cooley. This time I could barely discern which piece I had put in. By this time, Blalock was dying of ureteral cancer. After a day of house-hunting in Baltimore, he thought he might have to. Cheating Spouses, Secret Addictions and Identities—Marriages Are Buckling Under Covid Quarantine, 3 Captivating Longreads for a Corona-Free Weekend. 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. “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. . In a few years, the explanations Blalock was developing would lead to massive applications of blood and plasma transfusion in the treatment of shock. “He took one look,” Thomas remembered, and said, ‘Thomas, that won’t do. 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. Blalock promised to investigate. 2 A black man who grew up in the early 1900s in the South, Thomas graduated from high school and adopted his father's trade: carpenter. Despite his lack of formal education, Thomas served as supervisor of surgical laboratories at Johns Hopkins for 35 years. Shortly after noon, the foreman came by to inspect. And they brought five dogs, whose rebuilt hearts held the answer to a question no one yet had asked. We talk ourselves out of doing anything. Thomas trained them and sent them out with the Old Hands, who tried to duplicate the Blalock-Thomas magic in their own labs. “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. And he remembers where Thomas stood—on a little step stool, looking over Dr. Blalock’s right shoulder, answering questions and coaching every move. 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. Each time, remembers Dr. Henry Bahnson, “he’d comfort himself by saying that Vivien was doing famously what he did well, and that he had come a long way with Blalock’s help.”. “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. He was careful but firm when he approached Blalock on the issue: “I told Dr. Blalock . “Vivien knew all the senior vets in Baltimore,” Haller explains, “and if they had a complicated surgical problem, they’d call on Vivien for advice, or simply ask him to operate on their animals.”, By the late 1940s, the Old Hunterian had become “Vivien’s domain,” says Haller. The problem had stymied Blalock for months, and now it seemed that Thomas had solved it. 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. 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!”. They had only Vivien Thomas, who flew from one end of the Hopkins complex to the other without appearing to hurry. Say his name, and the busiest heart surgeons in the world will stop and talk for an hour. Watkins holds part of Thomas’s legacy in his hand as he speaks, a metal box called an Automatic Implantable Defibrillator. Casper immediately took over, placed the clamps appropriately, and got us out of trouble. Case 4. We knew we had the answer in the Vanderbilt work,” Thomas says, referring to the operation he and Blalock had worked out at Vanderbilt some six years earlier—the “failed” experiment in which they had divided a major artery and sewn it into the pulmonary artery that supplied the lungs. Thomas and Blalock did groundbreaking research into the causes of hemorrhagic and traumatic shock. Congenital Heart Disease and Pediatric Cardiology, Explore the College’s Anti-Racism Resource Center, Harold on History | Black History Month and Pioneering African American Physicians, Congenital Heart Disease and     Pediatric Cardiology, Invasive Cardiovascular Angiography    and Intervention, Pulmonary Hypertension and Venous     Thromboembolism. [Graphic][3] Multidisciplinary team working is the employment benchmark in the health service this decade. Nobody knew how to do this.”. Even if you’d never seen surgery before, Cooley says, you could do it because Vivien made it look so simple. Therefor, there only is "humans". Vivien Thomas surprised Johns Hopkins. For the 29-year-old Thomas and his family, it meant leaving the home they had built in Nashville for a strange city and an uncertain future. 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. In a world where “men were walking the streets looking for jobs that didn’t exist,” Thomas watched his own college and medical-school plans evaporate. . In the end, it was World War II that caused Thomas to “take his chances” with Blalock. 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. Celebrate Black History Month and read about more Black pioneers in medicine. . As surgeon-in-chief there, he could run his own department, train his own men, expand his research. Besides, he had brought a colored man up from Vanderbilt to run his lab. It was during “Anna’s era,” Haller says, that Thomas became surgeon-in-residence to the pets of Hopkins’s faculty and staff. 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. 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. How on earth was this boyish professor of surgery going to run a department, they wondered. 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. In a slow Texas drawl he says he just loves being bothered about Vivien. Wearing a back brace as the result of a disc operation, he could barely stand. And Thomas had smiled and invited him up to his office. In 1937, Blalock received an offer of a prestigious chairmanship from Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Blalock told Thomas, “Let’s face it, Vivien, we’re getting older. “It’s a chance I have to take,” he told Blalock. He would check on me from time to time, just to make sure everything was all right. Always the family man, he was thinking practically. He had spent some time observing Vivien and working with him. “Internal healing of the incision was without flaw. 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. Blalock, a highly original scientific thinker and something of an iconoclast, had theorized that shock resulted from fluid loss outside the vascular bed a… Performing the work of a postdoctoral researcher, Thomas became an essential part of Blalock's research into the causes and treatment of hemorrhagic and traumatic shock, which evolved into the study of crush syndrome. Vivien Thomas was an African-American man who went from janitor to lab technician to pioneer in heart surgery at Johns Hopkins. “That’s what I took from Vivien,” he says, “simplicity. Two of the twenty went on to medical school, but most were men like Thomas, with only high school diplomas and no prospect of further education. He would walk out into the rotunda alone, he insisted. “I turned to him and said, ‘I certainly appreciated the way you solved that problem. . Thomas needed a job, he said, until he could enter college the next fall. “Dr. . But Thomas had not come the whole way. . Indoor Workout Classes Are Now Banned in DC. Only their rhythm changed. Vivien Thomas' life and legacy are rife with colors – black, white and blue. Within a month, the former carpenter was setting up experiments and performing delicate and complex operations. The Old Hunterian, too, had been replaced by a state-of-the-art research facility. Vivien Thomas was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, during a time of racial unrest. The first and only one conceived entirely by Thomas, it was a complex but now common operation called an atrial septectomy. 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. The Blue Baby Operation A new era in heart surgery began at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1944, when Alfred Blalock, Vivien Thomas, and Helen Taussig debuted a daring procedure that would eventually save thousands of deathly-ill children. He had spent all morning fixing a piece of worn flooring in one of the faculty houses. 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. “Neither he nor I spoke for some four or five minutes while he stood there examining the heart, running the tip of his finger back and forth through the moderate-size defect in the atrial septum, feeling the healed edges of the defect. 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. It was the beginning of modern cardiac surgery, but to Thomas it looked like chaos. Thomas had family obligations to consider, too. Won’t somebody please help me?” he’d ask plaintively, stomping his soft white tennis shoes and looking around at the team standing ready to execute his every order. From the first, Thomas had seen the worst and the best of Blalock. Yet he did not let the era’s institutional racism deter him from his dream of attending Tennessee State College and then going on to medical school. He tells the Blue Baby story so matter-of-factly that you forget he’s outlining the beginning of cardiac surgery. As Blalock was laying plans for his 1947 “Blue Baby Tour” of Europe, Thomas was preparing to head back home to Nashville, for good. Thousands of DC Twentysomethings Live in Group Houses. . Thomas would always tell us, ‘Everybody’s got a job to do. But more than science passed from man to man over fourteen years. “Vivien Theodore Thomas, Doctor of Laws,” it reads, a quiet reminder of the thunderous ovation Thomas received when he stood in his gold-and-sable academic robe on May 21, 1976, for the awarding of the degree. “Once Dr. Blalock accepted you as a colleague, he trusted you completely—I mean, with his life.” Haller says. “You’ve never seen anything so dramatic,” Thomas says on the tape. “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.”. 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. “Will the subclavian reach the pulmonary once it’s cut off and divided?” he asked. “The Professor and I just looked at each other. When Blalock exposed the pulmonary artery, then the subclavian—the two “pipes” he planned to reconnect— he turned to Thomas. That man was Vivien Thomas, an aspiring physician. . Using a canine model, he had found a way to improve circulation in patients whose great vessels were transposed. He is Dr. Levi Watkins, and the diplomas on his office wall tell a story. “Must I operate all alone? 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. What mattered was that Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas could do historic things together that neither could do alone. In 1946, Thomas developed an atrial septectomy to improve blood circulation for patients whose aorta and pulmonary artery were transposed. 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.

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