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): Byron G. Harlan • Dave Reichert • David B. Hill • David Boaz • Deshaun Thomas • James Finlayson (industrialist) • Jennifer Landon • Steve Yarbrough (writer)

Born in the same month (August 1910): Adoniran Barbosa • Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception • Charles Crichton • Freddie Slack • Gerda Taro • Giuseppe Meazza • Guy Mairesse • Hedda Sterne • Herminio Masantonio • James Henry Govier • Jane Wyatt • Morris Graves • Mother Teresa • Willy Ronis