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): Antti Niemi (ice hockey) • Carlos Loyzaga • Charlie Parker • Dave Reichert • Devean George • Gary Gabelich • Geneviève Jeanson • Georgios Kalaitzis • Herbert Meier • James Florio • Jerry Bailey • Kyle Cook • Len Butterfield • Néstor Araujo • Ramón Díaz • Robert Rubin • Rodney McCray (basketball) • Roy Oswalt • Salme Pekkala-Dutt • Vincent Enyeama • Volkan Arslan

Born in the same month (August 1910): Anita Page • Charles Crichton • Dorothea Tanning • Eero Saarinen • Freddie Slack • George Cisar (baseball) • Gloria Blondell • Guy Mairesse • Hedda Sterne • Herminio Masantonio • James Henry Govier • Jane Wyatt • Jimmy Murphy (footballer) • Mae Clarke • Morris Graves • Mother Teresa • Nüzhet Gökdoğan • Robert Winters • Roger Bushell • Sylvia Sidney • Tjalling Koopmans • Walter Scharf • Willy Ronis • Yusof Ishak