Vivien Thomas, Essay Example

One of the most significant contributors in the field of cardiology including what was known as “blue baby syndrome,” may also be the least known: Vivien Thomas.  Recently, he achieved more widespread notoriety when an HBO film portrayed his incredible rise from a modest background, including being the grandson of a slave, to becoming a world-renowned researcher who worked with the famous heart surgeon, Dr. Alfred Blalock.  (Mccabe, 1989). This paper will examine Dr. Thomas’s life, educational background, and  his exceptional achievements leading him to achieve an important place in the field of medicine.

Born in New Iberia, Louisiana, on August 29, 1910, Vivien Thomas was the son of a building contractor.   Later on, his family moved to Nashville, where he attended Pearl High School, named for a union sympathizer, Joshua Fenton Pearl. Despite the fact that the school system was racially segregated, he received a good education.  He graduated in 1929 with honors, and because he had always admired the competence and attitude of his family physician, he wanted to study medicine.  In order to do so, however, he needed to find the means to pay for his education.  All during his school years, he worked after school and on weekends, as well as during the summer, becoming an apprentice to a carpenter.  Eventually, he found a position as an orderly in a private medical facility.  His plan was to earn enough money to pay for his college education.

When he finally had enough money, he enrolled in a pre-med program at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College.  His time there were short lived, however, since the crash of the stock market in 1929 caused him to lose all of his savings.  He had married his wife, Clara, and had two daughters.  In order to support his family, he had to drop out of school, and fatefully, the following year he began working at Vanderbilt University as a laboratory assistant.  His employer was the well-known Dr. Alfred Blalock.  He was hired to be a janitor, although within a short time, he was doing the work of a postdoctoral researcher in Blalock’s lab.

Dr. Blalock was conducting unique research into the causes and effects of the body’s reaction to trauma.  He was looking to hire someone who was smart and self-directed, someone who could carry out his experimental work at the laboratory while he was spending time with his patients in the hospital.

As a lab assistant, initially, Thomas was hired to clean the cages and feed the dogs being used for experiments in surgery.  Dr. Blalock soon found that Thomas had excellent eye-hand coordination which he had honed doing his carpentry work.  He also found that Thomas was intellectually exceptional, and he began allowing Thomas to become involved in the lab experiments and less involved in what he was originally hired to do, maintenance work.

Along with Dr. Blalock, Thomas was able to study the causes of traumatic shock.  They continued conducting research on Crush syndrome, which affected soldiers on the battlefield and which resulted in saving the lives of many soldiers during World War II.  The nature of this research consisted of hundreds of experiments, and disproved the long-held notion that shock was caused by toxins in the blood.  Blalock was well known for being an extremely thorough and original thinker, and believed that shock was the result of fluid loss outside the vascular bed.  He theorized that the treatment for this could be done by effectively replacing the fluid.  With the flawless work and assistance provided by Thomas, he was able to prove his theory beyond a shadow of a doubt.  After presenting those results, Blalock became much respected among doctors.

In addition, Blalock worked with Thomas to experiment in vascular and cardiac surgery; the pair changed the way the medical community viewed operating on the heart, which had been seen as somewhat of a taboo procedure.  Ten years later, Dr. Blalock was offered the position of chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins.  Once there, the team of Blalock and Thomas continued their work on the lifesaving cardiac surgery that they had been working on.

The move to Baltimore to work at Johns Hopkins presented Thomas with a problem finding housing for his family, and he also experienced an intensity of racism that was unlike what he had experienced growing up in Nashville.  The city of Baltimore was extremely segregated, and the only jobs in the hospital typically held by blacks were positions such as janitorial jobs.  Thomas was not easily accepted as a medical professional by staff or patients.

The way that Dr. Blalock approached the matter of Thomas’ race was complex and paradoxical during their 34 years of working together.  He consistently advocated for his choice of working with Thomas at both Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins, insisting that Thomas be included in the operating room.  The contradiction occurred when it came to Blalock’s attitudes towards salary, acknowledgments of Thomas’s work on their experiments, and his attitudes toward socializing with him outside of the hospital.

At Johns Hopkins, Thomas was able to join Dr. Blalock’s surgical team, which consisted of various prestigious surgeons.  While working there, Thomas developed a new and unique procedure in the field of cardiology.  The procedure was designed to repair a congenital heart defect, known as the blue baby syndrome. The babies born with this problem had very short life expectancies, and Thomas, along with Blalock’s team, developed a procedure that delivered more oxygen to the blood, therefore reducing the constriction caused by the heart defect.

Thomas had been given the job of creating a similar condition in dogs, and finding a correction to the condition.  After nearly two years working on the problem, and studying more than 200 dogs, Thomas was able to demonstrate that the corrective procedure that they had developed was not dangerous, and convinced Blalock to try the operation on human patients.  At that time, Thomas was aware that he would not be able to operate on patients himself, but he followed Dr. Blalock standards and helped him perform the procedures.

The procedure was initially attempted on an 18 month old infant on November 29, 1944.  Her illness had made her lips and fingers become blue, and the rest of her skin had a hint of that color as well.  She was only able to walk a few steps before becoming winded.  At that time, there were no instruments available for cardiac surgery, so Thomas used equipment for the procedure taken from a lab for animals.  Because he had performed this operation hundreds of times on the dogs he had studied, during the operation on the infant, Thomas stood behind Blalock and helped him through each part of the procedure.  The results of the first operation were not a complete success, although it did prolong the baby’s life for several months.  They continued using this procedure on various children and were able to achieve complete success.

When an article about the procedure was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the doctors involved were given credit while Thomas’ name did not even appear in the article.

During Blalock’s lifetime, Thomas did not receive formal recognition although he served as supervisor of the surgical research laboratories at Johns Hopkins from 1941 through 1979.  He was involved in training many of the nation’s most prestigious surgeons.  He was finally honored for his work in 1971, when his portrait was hung next to that of Dr. Blalock.  In 1976, at long last, he was awarded an honorary degree from Johns Hopkins, allowing him to become an official member of the faculty.

Despite the lack of acknowledgment of his groundbreaking work, during the 1940s Thomas became a legendary figure to the many surgeons that he trained.  He was known to be the prototype of a skilled and efficient cutting surgeon.  He was a role model to surgeons such as Denton Cooley, who said “there wasn’t a false move, not a wasted motion, when he operated.”(McCabe, 1989.) Still, despite his astonishing accomplishments and reputation, he was not well compensated and had to work at other jobs such as bartending.  Ultimately, with Blalock leading the argument, he became the highest paid technician at Johns Hopkins.

Finally, Johns Hopkins University granted Thomas an honorary doctorate in 1976; because of racial restrictions, however, instead of granting him a medical degree, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.  At the same time, he was invited to join the faculty of the medical school, teaching surgical methods.

In 1979, Thomas retired and he began to work on his autobiography, Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and his Work with Alfred Blalock.  Thomas was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died on November 26, 1985.  He was 75 years old, and soon afterwards, his book was published.  Since then, his story has become well known as a result of many magazine articles, films, and books.  Sadly, the celebration of his life and incredible achievements came too late for him to discover that he had become legendary among medical students, doctors, and society as a whole.

References

Kennedy, Damon. “In search of Vivien Thomas.” Texas heart institute journal 32.4 (2005): n. pag. Web.  Retrieved 11 Jun 2010. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1351817/

Like Something the Lord Made. Prods. Julian Krainin, Mike Drake. Dir. Joseph Sargent.  (Videocassette).  HBO, 2004.

McCabe, K. “Like Something the Lord Made.” The Washingtonian. August 1989: 109-111, 226-233. Print.

Thomas, V. Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock: An Autobiograph. Philadelphia,PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Print.