Vivien Thomas dreamed of attending medical school as a young man, but saw those dreams dashed with the onset of the Great Depression. However, through hard work and perfect timing, he became a surgical assistant to a Vanderbilt University surgeon and the pair went on to revolutionize cardiac surgery.
Born August 29, 1910 in New Iberia, La., Thomas was raised in Nashville, Tenn. and attended college for one year at what is now known as Tennessee State University. During the devastating financial crash, Thomas took a low-paying janitorial job at Vanderbilt before becoming an understudy of heart surgeon, Dr. Alfred Blalock.
Thomas was a quick study and learned the intricacies of surgery while working on laboratory animals. The pair discovered early on that shock in humans was related to a rapid loss of blood and fluids, and Thomas invented a spring-like device that helped with varying levels of blood pressure during surgeries.
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When Blalock was hired to work at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, he insisted that Thomas be hired as his assistant. Although he faced Jim Crow-inspired racism in the Deep South, Thomas endured much more division in segregated Maryland. When Thomas walked the halls of Hopkins where most Blacks working there were in low-paying jobs, they wouldn’t even look at him.
Blalock and Thomas made medical history by performing the first Tetralogy of Fallot, (blue baby syndrome) successful surgery in 1944 on 15-month-old Eileen Saxon. This would lead to hundreds of other such operations and the invention of techniques and devices aimed at aiding cardiac surgery. Thomas became an important cog of the heart surgery department at Hopkins, eventually becoming the director of Surgical Research Laboratories after Blalock’s death in 1964.
Thomas, who never attended medical school, trained scores of surgeons, most especially African-American students who came through Hopkins. He served as a mentor for Hopkins’ first Black cardiac resident, the late Levi Watkins Jr., among several others. Thomas also aided his former mentee in the development of the groundbreaking automatic implantable defibrillator device.
Thomas was awarded an honorary doctorate by Johns Hopkins University in 1976. Although it was not a medical doctorate, Thomas would called doctor by students and staff via the honor. Toward the end of his 37-year career, Thomas was named part of the School of Medicine faculty as Instructor of Surgery.
Thomas, who died in 1985, was the subject of the 2004 biopic, Something The Lord Made that featured rapper/actor Mos Def in the lead role.
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