The Remarkable Story of Vivien Thomas, the Black Man Who Helped Invent Heart Surgery
With only a high school education and no formal medical training, Vivien Thomas developed surgical techniques that revolutionized heart surgery.
Thomas was the first African-American, without a doctorate degree & only a high school diploma, to perform open heart surgery. The patient was a white patient.
With less that a college education, Thomas began his career in medicine in 1930 in the laboratory of Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University, where Blalock trained him as his surgical assistant.
Due to the racism of the time, Thomas was ineligible to be a student or faculty member at Vanderbilt in the 1930s. Although he did the job of a laboratory assistant, Thomas was classified and paid as a janitor.
Thomas' intelligence and outstanding ability as a researcher and surgical assistant was so impressive, that Dr. Blalock requested Thomas to follow him to Johns Hopkins University in 1941. Blalock became Chief of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore MD, insisting that Thomas be hired for his team. They worked together on treatments for high blood pressure, traumatic shock, and in the 1940's Thomas, himself, led the team which developed a surgical treatment for blue baby syndrome.
Despite the racism barriers, Blalock and Thomas worked as partners in conducting pioneering research in heart surgery This work was essential to furthering the development of open heart surgery, building on the surgical foundations laid by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the African American surgeon who first performed open heart surgery.
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