His family later moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he was educated in the public schools. At the end of the 1950s, he fumed as pilot projects fizzled and he and Thomas fell to philosophizing about problems instead of solving them. “Well, finally, the resident realized that the dog hadn’t had any fluids intravenously, so he called over to Vivien, ‘Vivien, would you come over and administer some I-V fluids?’ Now, the whole time Vivien had been watching us out of the corner of his eye from across the lab, not saying a word, but not missing a thing, either. In his four years with Blalock, Thomas had assumed the role of a senior research fellow, with neither a PhD nor an MD. put on the pay scale of a technician, which I was pretty sure was higher than janitor pay.”. Within a few weeks, Thomas was starting surgery on his own. Watkins holds part of Thomas’s legacy in his hand as he speaks, a metal box called an Automatic Implantable Defibrillator. At this same time, Blalock and Thomas began experimental work in vascular and cardiac surgery,[15] defying medical taboos against operating upon the heart. . That was the beginning.”, A loudspeaker summons Cooley to surgery. That afternoon Blalock presented his situation to Dandy, who responded immediately with a donation to the department—earmarked for Thomas’s salary. From across the country they arrived, packing the Hopkins auditorium to present the portrait they had commissioned of “our colleague, Vivien Thomas.”. Of course they have time, they say, these men who count time in seconds, who race against the clock. “I might make Dr. Blalock nervous—or even worse, he might make me nervous!”. [21] Hopkins, like the rest of Baltimore, was rigidly segregated, and the only black employees at the institution were janitors. It was the beginning of modern cardiac surgery, but to Thomas it looked like chaos. I must have looked white as a ghost, because when he came over with the I-V needle, he sat down at my foot, tugged at my pants leg, and said, ‘Which leg shall I start the fluid in, Dr. Haller?’ ”, The man who tugged at Haller’s pants leg administered one of the country’s most sophisticated surgical research programs. No one else had compiled such a mass of data on hemorrhagic and traumatic shock. In the hectic Blue Baby years, Blalock would leave his hospital responsibilities at the door of the Old Hunterian at noon and closet himself with Thomas for a five-minute research update. Neither one was to cross that line. For Vivien they’ll make time. And yet history argues that the Vivien Thomas story could never have happened. Their policy against hiring blacks was inflexible. But he lost his job. He began writing just after his retirement in 1979, working through his illness with pancreatic cancer, indexing the book from his hospital bed following surgery, and putting it to rest, just before his death, with a 1985 copyright date. As quietly as he had come through Hopkins’s door at Blalock’s side, Thomas began bringing in other black men, moving them into the role he had first carved out for himself. Blalock told Thomas to "come in and put the animal to sleep and get it set up". But they were one of the most productive flops in medical history. Shortly after noon, the foreman came by to inspect. From beginning to end, Thomas and Blalock maintained a delicate balance of closeness and distance. We were operating together on one occasion, and we got into trouble with some massive bleeding in a pulmonary artery, which I was able to handle fairly well. Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) was an African-American laboratory supervisor who developed a procedure used to treat blue baby syndrome (now known as cyanotic heart disease) in the 1940s.