Vivien Thomas

(Wikipedia) - Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) was an African-American surgical technician and animal surgeon who developed in the canine model the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was an assistant to white surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. 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. Continued