Vivien Thomas

Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) was an American laboratory supervisor who in the 1940s developed a procedure used to treat blue baby syndrome (now known as cyanotic heart disease).

He was the assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and later at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Thomas was unique in that he did not have any professional education or experience in a research laboratory; however, he served as supervisor of the surgical laboratories at Johns Hopkins for 35 years.

Vivien Thomas writes in his autobiography, published shortly after his death, that he was born in Lake Providence, Louisiana, in 1910.

Thomas was born during the Jim Crow era, to Willard Maceo Thomas and the former Mary Alice Eaton.

Thomas attended Pearl High School in Nashville in the 1920s, and graduated in 1929.

Thomas' father was a carpenter, and took pleasure in passing down his expertise to his sons.

Thomas worked with his father and brothers every day after school and on Saturdays, doing jobs such as measuring, sawing, and nailing.

This experience proved beneficial to Thomas, as he was able to secure a carpentry job at Fisk University repairing facility damages after graduating from high school.

Thomas had hoped to attend college and become a doctor, but the Great Depression derailed his plans.

Thomas intended to work hard, save money, and gain a higher education as soon as he could afford it.

In the wake of the stock market crash in October 1929, Thomas put his educational plans on hold and, through a friend, secured a job in February 1930 as surgical research assistant with Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University.

On his first day of work, Thomas assisted Blalock with a surgical experiment on a dog.

At the end of Thomas' first day, Blalock told Thomas they would do another experiment the next morning.

Blalock told Thomas to "come in and put the animal to sleep and get it set up."

Within a few weeks, Thomas was starting surgery on his own.

Determined to broaden his skill set, in 1930 he reached out to childhood friend Charles Manlove (who was working at Vanderbilt University at the time) to ask if there were any jobs available.

Thomas was classified and paid as a janitor, despite the fact that by the mid-1930s, he was doing the work of a postdoctoral researcher in the lab.

Thomas struggled with finances despite saving most of what he earned.

The salaries that he received did not provide enough comfort for him to quit his laboratory research job and go back to school.

Nashville's banks failed nine months after Thomas started his job with Blalock, and his savings were wiped out.

He abandoned his plans for college and medical school, relieved to have even a low-paying job as the Great Depression deepened.

Thomas continued working with Blalock and saving his earnings, so that he could provide for his daughters and wife the best he could.

Thomas and Blalock did groundbreaking research into the causes of hemorrhagic 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.

In hundreds of experiments, the two disproved traditional theories which held that shock was caused by toxins in the blood.

Blalock, a highly original scientific thinker and something of an iconoclast, had theorized that shock resulted from fluid loss outside the vascular bed and that the condition could be effectively treated by fluid replacement.

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.

At this same time, Blalock and Thomas began experimental work in vascular and cardiac surgery, defying medical taboos against operating on the heart.

It was this work that laid the foundation for the revolutionary life-saving surgery they were to perform at Johns Hopkins a decade later.

Vivien Thomas spent 11 years at Vanderbilt with Blalock before moving to Johns Hopkins.

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, he requested that Thomas accompany him.

Thomas arrived in Baltimore with his family in June of that year, confronting a severe housing shortage and a level of racism worse than they had endured in Nashville.

Johns Hopkins, like the rest of Baltimore, was rigidly segregated, and the only Black employees at the institution were janitors.

In 1976, Johns Hopkins awarded him an honorary doctorate and named him an Instructor of Surgery for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

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.

There are noted discrepancies in references to Thomas' birthplace due to his listing New Iberia as his birthplace on his World War II draft card, and when he died in 1985, his obituary in The Baltimore Sun also listed New Iberia.

New Iberia was his mother's hometown, Lake Providence his father's. Either way, the family did not stay in Louisiana for long, moving to Nashville, Tennessee, when Thomas was about two years old.

A PBS documentary, Partners of the Heart, was broadcast in 2003 on PBS's American Experience.

In the 2004 HBO movie Something the Lord Made, based on Katie McCabe's National Magazine Award–winning Washingtonian article of the same title, Vivien Thomas was portrayed by Mos Def.