The grandson of a slave, Vivien Theodore Thomas was born in Lake Providence, Louisiana August 29, 1910. The family did not stay in Louisiana for long, moving to Nashville, Tennessee, when Thomas was about two years old. Thomas attended Pearl High School in Nashville, and graduated with honors in 1929. Thomas worked at Fisk University in the summer of 1929 as a carpenter to earn money for college and medical school but suffered a major setback with he Great Depression which started in the fall of the year. He lost both his job and his entire savings that he had earned as a carpenter’s apprentice to attend college. In 1930, at age 19, Vivien Thomas put his educational plans on hold.
Through a friend, he secured a job as a laboratory assistant with Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University. The school was all-white and would never admit him as a student, but he could get experience in the medical field and bring him closer to his dream. Blalock was a University of Georgia graduate who earned his medical degree at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Thomas had never been in a lab before, but his intelligence and curiosity impressed Blalock. On his first day of work, Thomas assisted Blalock with a surgical experiment on a dog. At the end of Thomas' first day, Blalock told Thomas they would do another experiment the next morning. Blalock told Thomas to "come in and put the animal to sleep and get it set up."
Vivien Thomas felt nervous when he first met Dr. Blalock because the friend, that recommend him for the job, had said that many people had a hard time working with Blalock, due to his temper. Thomas soon learned that Blalock moved quickly and expected his technicians to be just as efficient. Blalock’s ill temper surfaced only once in those early days. Thomas had made a mistake—minor enough that the exact error is forgotten—and Blalock erupted in anger, hurling profanity and throwing what Thomas described as a “temper tantrum.” This often bothered Thomas, who said that he would sooner leave than take such abuse. Blalock apologized, and the mutual respect that would characterize their relationship continued from that point forward.
Dr. Blalock relied on Thomas heavily and within a few weeks, Thomas was starting surgery on his own. Their first breakthrough was in the treatment of traumatic shock, which Blalock had been researching for years. The technician and the doctor re-created in dogs the same trauma experienced by humans. Their discovery that shock was linked to a loss of fluid and blood saved the lives of countless soldiers during World War II. In hundreds of experiments, the two disproved traditional theories which held that shock was caused by toxins in the blood. Assisted by Thomas, he was able to provide incontrovertible proof of this theory. Blalock presented the results of their research, becoming the definitive authority on shock.
Despite this, Thomas received no credit. Rather, he discovered that he was classified as a janitor like the other Black employees. For $12 a week, Thomas worked 16 hours a day or more in the lab. But Thomas’ pay increased when he told Blalock he needed to be paid the same as other lab techs. Not long after, Thomas received a salary increase. Blalock would stand up for his colleague again when the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit approached him to serve as chairman. Blalock would be surgeon-in-chief and have an entire department at his disposal for whatever research he wanted. But he could not bring Thomas with him, they said. They would not hire a Black man.
When he was offered the position of Chief of Surgery at his alma mater Johns Hopkins University in 1941, he accepted on the condition that Thomas accompany him. Dr. Blalock was offered other jobs before his move to Johns Hopkins, and he did not consider taking any where the employer would not hire Thomas as well. Thomas wanted to think it over. In the end, they all agreed. Johns Hopkins, like the rest of Baltimore, was rigidly segregated. The only Black employees at the institution were janitors. At Johns Hopkins, he wore a white lab coat, defying the traditions of that institution. He was eventually convinced to take it off when he went around the hospital.
In 1943, while searching for a new project, Blalock was approached by Dr. Helen Taussig, who had an idea of how to treat tetralogy of Fallot (also known as blue baby syndrome). She suggested it might be possible to take part of an artery and add another pathway from the heart to the lungs to increase the level of blood flow. Taussig suggested only that it might be possible to "reconnect the pipes", to bring more blood to the babies’ lungs, but did not suggest how this could be accomplished. Blalock and Thomas realized immediately that the answer lay in a procedure they had perfected for a different purpose in their Vanderbilt work, involving the joining of the subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery.
Thomas was set on the task of first creating a blue baby-like condition in a dog, then correcting the condition with the new artery. Two years and 200 dogs later, a satisfactory procedure was developed. Once the condition could be simulated, it was relatively easy to develop a method to solve it. The first such dog to be successfully treated was named Anna. The procedure performed on Anna was executed so flawlessly by Thomas that Blalock, upon examining the nearly undetectable suture line, was prompted to remark, "Vivien, this looks like something the Lord made." Even though Thomas knew he was not allowed to operate on patients at that time, he still followed Blalock's rules and assisted him during surgery.
At the time, heart surgery was unheard of. But Thomas, Blalock and Taussig were undeterred. About a year after they began their research, they performed the first operation on a “blue baby.” Doctors filled the gallery to witness history. The first blue baby surgery took place in November 29th, 1944, on a human patient, 15-month-old Eileen Saxon. The blue baby syndrome had made her lips and fingers turn blue, with the rest of her skin having a very faint blue tinge. She could take only a few steps before beginning to breathe heavily. During the surgery, Thomas stood behind Blalock and advised him as he performed the procedure, as Thomas had performed the operation on dogs many more times than Blalock had. It was the beginning of cardiac surgery.
Since no such instruments then existed, Thomas designed and built them himself to perform the operation. The surgery, however, was not completely successful, though it did prolong her life for two more months. Blalock and his team operated again on an 11-year-old girl, this time with complete success and the patient was able to leave the hospital three weeks after the surgery. The three cases formed the basis for the article that was published in the May 1945 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, giving credit to Blalock and Taussig for the procedure. There was no mention or credit given to Vivien Thomas. On Dec. 31, 1945, Time magazine ran an article about the surgery, touting the skills of Blalock and Taussig but never once mentioning Thomas.
Within a year, more than 200 such operations were performed, with parents bringing their suffering children from thousands of miles away. Always, Blaylock was assisted by Thomas. Soon, Thomas eventually began to train others in the procedure, but he was still not well-paid. He sometimes resorted to working as a bartender, often at Blalock's parties. This led to the peculiar circumstance of his serving drinks to people he had been teaching earlier in the day. Eventually, after negotiations on his behalf by Blalock, he became the highest-paid assistant at Johns Hopkins by 1946, and by far the highest-paid African American on the institution's rolls.
Thomas had clung to the possibility of further education throughout the blue baby period, and had abandoned the idea only with great reluctance. In 1947, he tried again to get into college to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor. He enrolled as a freshman at Morgan State University. Thomas had been deterred by the inflexibility of Morgan State University. They refused to grant him credit for life experience and insisted that he fulfill the standard freshman requirements. He realized that if he went through the entire education process, he would be 50 years old before completed college and medical school, and enter regular practice. He grudgingly decided to give up the idea.
Blalock's approach to the issue of Thomas' race was complicated and contradictory throughout their 34-year partnership. On the one hand, he would often defend his choice of Thomas and break many racial barriers in his use of a Black technician (something unheard of at the time, and the sight of Thomas in his long white laboratory coat would often cause profound confusion). On the other hand, there were limits to his tolerance, especially when it came to issues of pay, academic acknowledgement, and socialization outside of work. Tension with Blalock continued to build when he failed to recognize the contributions that Thomas had made in the world-famous blue baby procedure, which led to a rift in their relationship. Thomas was absent in official articles about the procedure.
When Blalock celebrated his 60th birthday at the Southern Hotel in Baltimore in April 1960, Thomas was not invited, at Blalock's insistence. The organizers of the party arranged that Thomas could watch the events from behind the curtain, which Thomas found deeply humiliating. Alfred Blalock later died in 1964 at the age of 65, having worked with Thomas for 34 years. Thomas stayed at Johns Hopkins for 15 more years as director of Surgical Research Laboratories. He mentored a number of Black lab assistants as well as Hopkins' first Black cardiac resident, Levi Watkins Jr. In 1971, his former students commissioned a portrait of Thomas, and surgeons from around the country gathered to pay homage and hang the portrait in the Blalock Building at Johns Hopkins.
Thomas received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1976, but it was an honorary doctor of laws. Due to certain restrictions, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws, rather than a medical doctorate. But it did allow the staff and students of Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to call him "Doctor". After working there for 37 years, Thomas was also finally appointed to the faculty of the School of Medicine as Instructor of Surgery, although due to his lack of an official medical degree, he was never allowed to operate on a living patient. Johns Hopkins medical school’s four colleges are named for “legendary former faculty members.” One of those is Thomas College. Following his retirement, Thomas began work on an autobiography. Dr. Vivien Thomas passed away in November 1985.