blog # 7

Vivien Thomas

Vivien Theodore Thomas was born on August 29, 1910 and died at the age of 75 on November 26, 1985.  He was an African-American surgical technician who developed the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was an assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and later at the John Hopkins University  in Baltimore, Maryland. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country's most prominent surgeons. Vivien Thomas was the first African American without a doctorate degree to perform open heart surgery on a white patient in the United States.

Vivien Thomas was born in New Iberia, Louisiana.  He was the grandson of a slave.  He attended a racially segregated high school in Nashville, Tennessee.  Even though the school was segregated, it provided him with a decent education. Thomas had hoped to go to college and become a doctor, but the Great Depression derailed his plans. He worked at Fisk University in the summer of 1929 doing carpentry but was laid off in the fall. Thomas put his educational plans on hold, and, through a friend, secured a job as laboratory assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University.  Although Blalock had hired Thomas to clean the cages and feed the laboratory dogs used for surgical experiments, he discovered Thomas' extraordinary eye–hand coordination. When Blalock found that Thomas had an equally sharp intellect, Thomas began doing more laboratory work and less maintenance. Thomas was classified and paid as a janitor, despite that by the mid 1930s he was doing the work of a postdoctoral researcher in the lab.

Thomas and Blalock did groundbreaking research into the causes of and traumatic shock.  This work later evolved into research on Crush syndrome and saved the lives of thousands of soldiers on the battlefields of World War II. Blalock and Thomas did experimental work in vascular and cardiac surgery, defying medical taboos against operating upon the heart. It was this work that laid the foundation for the revolutionary lifesaving surgery they were to perform at Johns Hopkins a decade later.

By 1940, the work Blalock had done with Thomas put him 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, Blalock asked that Thomas join him. Thomas arrived in Baltimore with his family in June of that year. Racism was much worse than he had gone through in Nashville. Hopkins, like the rest of Baltimore, was very segregated, and the only black employees at the institution were janitors. When Thomas walked the halls in his white lab coat, everyone looked.

On November 29, 1944, the first blue baby syndrome procedure was tested on an eighteen-month-old infant.  Blue Baby Syndrome is found babies, whose blood is stopped past the lungs, thus creating oxygen deprivation and a blue color on the baby. Because no medical instruments for heart surgery existed, Thomas used the needles and clamps for the procedure from the instruments used in the animal lab. During the surgery, at Blalock's request, Thomas stood on a step stool next to Blalock's  and coached him step by step through the procedure, Thomas having performed the operation hundreds of times on a dog, and Blalock only once, as Thomas' assistant. The surgery was not completely successful, though it did extend the infant's life for several more months.  Blalock and his team operated again on an 11-year-old girl, this time with success.  And then again on a six-year-old boy, who dramatically regained his color at the end of the surgery. These three cases formed the foundation for an article that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, giving credit to Blalock for the procedure. Vivien Thomas' name was not mentioned in the article at all.

In 1976, Johns Hopkins University presented Thomas with an honorary doctorate. However, because of certain restrictions, he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws, rather than a medical doctorate.  The degree stated that he knew the laws but it did allow the staff and students of the Hospital or the Johns Hopkins Medical School to call him doctor. Thomas was also appointed to the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical School as Instructor of Surgery.

www.wikipedia.org,www.medicalarchives