Vivien Thomas

Educator and scientist

• Born: August 29, 1910
• Birthplace: New Iberia, Louisiana
• Died: November 26, 1985
• Place of death: Baltimore, Maryland

Thomas was the first person to describe the surgical technique used to operate on children with congenital heart defects known as “blue babies.” He taught the nation’s top surgeons and became the first African American in the country without a doctoral degree to participate in the surgery of a white patient.

Early Life

Vivien Theodore Thomas was the only child born to William Thomas, a carpenter, and Mary Thomas. Thomas’s family relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, where he attended segregated Pearl High School, from which he graduated with honors in 1929. Thomas credited his family physician’s pleasant and kind demeanor with initially influencing him to pursue formal medical training.

In order to earn money for college, Thomas worked as an orderly in an infirmary and a carpenter. He subsequently enrolled at the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College as a premedical student. However, he left college after only one year because of financial woes amid the Great Depression.

In 1930, Thomas found work as a surgical and research assistant in Alfred Blalock’s experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University. Blalock, a prominent white surgeon, served as Thomas’s mentor and taught him surgical and laboratory techniques. Although Thomas was performing work at the postdoctorate level, he was still paid as a janitor and maintenance worker. Blalock took a job at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1941 and took Thomas along because of his skills and intelligence. Thomas faced racial tensions at Johns Hopkins, where the laboratory was segregated and the only African American employees were janitors.

Life’s Work

Blalock’s work initially focused on the causes of traumatic shock. Thomas helped Blalock to prove the theory that shock stems from fluid loss and can be treated with fluid replacement. The laboratory team then turned its attention to cardiac research.

The team began to experiment with new surgical techniques to treat tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart defect that can cause cyanosis. Cyanosis is a condition in which oxygen in the blood is depleted, giving skin a bluish cast—hence the nickname “blue baby syndrome.” Together with Blalock and cardiologist Helen B. Taussig, Thomas developed a procedure that joined an artery leaving the heart (a subclavian artery) to an artery leading to the lungs (a pulmonary artery), allowing blood to be reoxygenated. The groundbreaking procedure came to be called the Blalock-Taussig shunt. Throughout the initial surgery in 1944, Thomas assisted Blalock by providing advice on surgical techniques. Although Thomas received no recognition in the naming of the procedure, he is credited as being essential to its creation and success. The team reported great success in the overall survival rate for children with these life-threatening birth defects. Additionally, in 1947, Thomas invented a clamp for the temporary occlusion of the pulmonary artery.

During Thomas’s thirty-eight-year tenure at Johns Hopkins, he supervised the surgical laboratories and was an instructor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine from 1976 to 1985. He was influential in training the country’s best surgeons and mentored other African American technicians and surgeons. The university awarded him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 1976.

For much of his early career, Thomas’s achievements were not matched by his salary, and he was forced to work side jobs such as bartending to supplement his income. However, in 1946, he became the highest paid technician at Johns Hopkins and the university’s highest paid African American employee. Blalock and Thomas were an inseparable team throughout their careers, although they remained socially distant because of segregation.

Thomas retired in 1979. Although he had long intended to return to college to obtain his degree, he never did. He and his wife, Clara Flanders Thomas, had two daughters.

Thomas died of pancreatic cancer on November 26, 1985, at the age of seventy-five. His autobiography, Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock—An Autobiography, was published two days later. Numerous awards and honors were instituted in his name, including the Council on Cardiovascular Surgery and Anesthesiology’s Vivien Thomas Young Investigator Award and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Vivien Thomas Scholarship for Medical Science and Research. His portrait was hung in the Blalock laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.

Significance

Despite a lack of formal education, medical training, and resources, Thomas became one of the most respected surgical assistants of his time. The “blue baby” surgery paved the way for newer surgical techniques to treat other congenital heart defects. Thomas also fought racial segregation throughout his career and overcame obstacles to obtain fair wages, academic titles, and professional recognition.

Bibliography

Brogan, Thomas, and George Alferis. “Has the Time Come to Rename the Blalock-Taussig Shunt?” Pediatric Critical Care Medicine 4, no. 4 (October, 2003): 450-453. Argues that Thomas’s contribution was so critical that the surgical procedure he developed should be renamed to acknowledge his work.

Kennedy, Damon. “In Search of Vivien Thomas.” Texas Heart Institute Journal 32, no. 4 (2005): 477-478. Brief history of Thomas’s role in the “blue baby” surgery and why it remains pertinent in the field of cardiology.

Thomas, Vivien. Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock—An Autobiography. 2d ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. First published in 1985 as Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock—An Autobiography, this is Thomas’s account of his career, working with Blalock, and the development of the landmark surgical procedure.