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): Aimé Bonpland • Celestine Babayaro • David B. Hill • Elliott Gould • Herb Simpson • Hugo Brandt Corstius • Isabel Sanford • Jackie Mitchell • Jerry Bailey • Jivraj Narayan Mehta • John Edward Williams • Lise Payette • Otis Boykin • Stephen Carr

Born in the same month (August 1910): Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception • Anita Page • Dorothea Tanning • Eero Saarinen • Gerda Taro • Giuseppe Meazza • Guy Mairesse • Herman Berlinski • James Henry Govier • Jane Wyatt • Lonny Frey • Morris Graves • Walter Scharf