( In memory of all the Male Nurses : fondly called Sura Dada, Madu Dada etc. of my Alma mater who have taught me venous access )
In medical college, our paramedical staff are our first Guru. So was Vivian Thomas in the Johns Hopkins.
You can have enough trouble if there’s a hole in your heart or a block even. But this baby had both an hole and block together in her heart from the birth. In addition, she had wrong wiring of the pipes of her heart. That is her pure blood goes to the wrong chamber and is blocked there. The blue blood instead of getting oxygenated are pushed to her whole body. No wonder she was born blue and was supposed to die soon.
She had 4 manufacturing defects inside her heart. It was a case of “Tetralogy of Fallots“.
It was Nov 29, 1944.
Dr Helen Taussig of Johns Hopkins Medical Institute knew that Prof Blalock was doing a lot of experimental shunts in dogs. She proposed, “Can’t we shunt her blue blood back to her lungs with a man-made channel as you are doing in your dogs.”
Back home Dr Blalock was studying causes and treatment of shock in dogs before joining Hopkins. His trusted assistant Vivien Thomas, a black man was tremendous with these dog jobs. He would look after the dogs, open their hearts and put ties and bypasses so that Dr Blalock could come out with his game changer hypotheses. Dr Blalock is still remembered as the man who proposed the theory that “loss of fluid causes shock.”
But Dr Blalock himself had not touched those dogs. It was Vivien. Vivien was not a doctor. He had not even completed his high school. He was the grandson of a slave and the keeper of his dogs. Vivien’s surgical acumen was extraordinary. So Dr Blalock said why not offer a job of janitor to Vivien here in Hopkins. But Vivien was not willing and rightly so. After all he was poor and had four mouths to feed in Nashville. With the meagre salary of a Janitor, he couldn’t afford living in a big city like Baltimore. So Dr Blalock offered a second job to Vivian’s wife and both of them moved to Baltimore.
On that November morning, a stool was arranged behind Prof Blalock so that Vivien Thomas who’s not even a qualified medical person can stand right behind him and guide the procedure. ( With all apology to that pioneer in Pediatrics Cardiac surgery.)
It was a skinny, scrawny blue baby on the OT table whose Parents had accepted the eventuality. Dr Helen Taussig, the famous Pediatric Cardiologist gave a whoop of cry when the blue lips of the baby turned pink as the first channel opened up. The first blue baby of the world became pink on that day.
By 1945, Drs Blalock and Taussig had presented a paper of three successful operations and became world famous. Blue babies from all over world came to Hopkins and the procedure Blalock- Taussig shunt got into textbooks of cardiology.
But Vivien remained a Janitor. He served as supervisor of the surgical laboratories at Johns Hopkins for the next 35 years and also the bartender in the evening. In the day time he would teach operative techniques to some of the US’s most prominent surgeons and in the evening would serve them drinks.
At last in 1976 Johns Hopkins Medical Institute awarded him an honorary doctorate and named him an instructor of surgery for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Dr Ramakanta's Ideas 