Vivien Thomas

Dr. Vivien Theodore Thomas was an American laboratory supervisor who in the 1940s developed a procedure used to treat blue baby syndrome. He was the assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and later at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Thomas was unique in that he did not have any professional education or experience in a research laboratory; however, he served as supervisor of the surgical laboratories at Johns Hopkins for 35 years. In 1976, Johns Hopkins awarded him an honorary doctorate and named him an Instructor of Surgery for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country's most prominent surgeons.

29 August 1910

Born on the same birth day (29 August): Aki Yashiro • Alfred Shaw • Arnold Koller • Arthur Anderson (actor) • Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States • Charlie Pickering • Devean George • Ian James Corlett • Isabel Sanford • Jackie Mitchell • Jacques Bouchard • James Brady • Jan Śniadecki • Jean-Baptiste Colbert • Joe Swail • Joel Schumacher • Lise Payette • Ramón Díaz • Rebecca De Mornay • Robin Leach • Stan Hansen • Sterling Morrison • Warren Jabali

Born in the same month (August 1910): Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception • Bruno Coquatrix • Charles Crichton • Dorothea Tanning • Eero Saarinen • Freddie Slack • George Cisar (baseball) • Gerda Taro • Giuseppe Meazza • Gloria Blondell • Hedda Sterne • James Henry Govier • Jimmy Murphy (footballer) • Lonny Frey • Mae Clarke • Morris Graves • Nüzhet Gökdoğan • Pierre Schaeffer • Robert Winters • Sylvia Sidney • Walter Scharf • William Schuman • Willy Ronis