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Vivien Thomas - the man who changed heart surgery and saved children

On November 29, 1944, a nurse rolled a tiny metal crib through the halls of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Inside lay fifteen-month-old Eileen Saxon. She weighed just nine pounds. Her body carried the color of a storm—lips blue, fingers blue, skin faintly dusky from a heart that could not deliver oxygen to her lungs. She could barely breathe, barely move. And by the medical truth of that era, she was already dying.

Doctors called it Blue Baby Syndrome. Every child born with it died. Not usually. Not often. Always.

That morning, Alfred Blalock, Chief of Surgery, prepared to attempt something no surgeon had ever dared to do: reroute blood flow inside a living infant’s heart. It was an act balanced between science and faith. He had performed the operation once before—on an animal.

Behind him, standing on a step stool so he could see over Blalock’s shoulder, was the one man in the room who truly knew the operation.

His name was Vivien Thomas.

He held no medical degree. He had never attended college. On the hospital payroll, he was classified as a janitor. Yet no one in that operating room—no professor, no surgeon, no student—understood the procedure better than he did.

Vivien Thomas was born on August 29, 1910, in Louisiana, the grandson of an enslaved person. He grew up in Nashville, graduated high school with honors, and saved every dollar he could with one goal in mind: college, then medical school. He wanted to be a doctor.

Then came 1929. The stock market crashed. His savings vanished overnight. His dream collapsed with it.

In 1930, desperate for work, Thomas took a job at Vanderbilt University as a laboratory assistant for Dr. Alfred Blalock. His title said janitor. His wages said janitor. But from the very first days, something was unmistakable: Vivien Thomas had the hands of a surgeon.

He learned techniques others struggled to master. He ran experiments, analyzed results, kept flawless records. When surgical tools didn’t exist for the delicate work they were attempting, he designed and built them himself. Blalock noticed. He relied on Thomas. And when Blalock was recruited to Johns Hopkins in 1941, he insisted Thomas come with him.

At Hopkins, the only Black employees were janitors. Thomas wore a white lab coat inside the lab—and street clothes in the hallways—because a Black man in a lab coat drew too much attention.

In 1943, pediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig brought Blalock a desperate problem. Infants with Blue Baby Syndrome were dying by the hundreds. She believed surgery might save them. She just didn’t know how.

Blalock handed the problem to Thomas.

For nearly two years, Vivien Thomas worked in the animal laboratory. He operated on dogs again and again—more than two hundred times—perfecting a way to connect the subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery, allowing oxygen-starved blood to reach the lungs. One dog, Anna, became the first long-term survivor. Her portrait still hangs at Johns Hopkins.

Infant blood vessels were smaller than anything surgeons had ever worked with. So Thomas improvised. He shortened needles, sharpened them with an emery board, and built clamps precise enough to work on vessels no thicker than angel-hair pasta.

And then came Eileen Saxon.

On the morning of her surgery, the observation gallery overflowed with surgeons and medical students. The room fell silent. Blalock lifted the scalpel. Thomas climbed onto his stool.

For four and a half hours, Thomas quietly guided every movement—every incision, every clamp, every stitch—steps he had performed hundreds of times before. Blalock’s hands moved. Thomas’s knowledge led.

When the clamps were finally removed and blood rushed through the new pathway, Helen Taussig looked at the child and spoke words that would echo through medical history. 

Eileen’s lips were turning pink.

Thomas later wrote, “You have never seen anything so dramatic. It was almost a miracle.”

Eileen survived the surgery. She lived several more months before her condition returned. A second operation was attempted. She died just before her second birthday. 

But she lived long enough to prove something the world had believed impossible.

The operation worked.

Within a year, more than two hundred babies underwent the procedure at Johns Hopkins. Families traveled thousands of miles. The surgery was named the Blalock–Taussig shunt. 

Vivien Thomas’s name was not mentioned.

Newsreels praised the breakthrough. Medical journals published the discovery. Time magazine celebrated the triumph. Blalock and Taussig received global recognition.

Thomas went back to the lab and cleaned the instruments.

His salary remained low. His job title unchanged. He was excluded from photographs and omitted from publications. Officially, he did not exist. 

But surgeons knew.

For decades, Vivien Thomas trained the nation’s most elite heart surgeons. Denton Cooley, who would become one of the greatest cardiac surgeons in history, said, “There wasn’t a false move, not a wasted motion, when he operated.”

Another surgeon later said, “I thought Dr. Blalock trained me. Someone corrected me: ‘No. Vivien Thomas trained you.’”

In 1968, the surgeons he had trained commissioned a portrait of him. In 1971, they gathered from across the country to hang it in the lobby of the Alfred Blalock Clinical Sciences Building—beside Blalock’s own.

In 1976, Johns Hopkins awarded Thomas an honorary doctorate and appointed him Instructor of Surgery—his first faculty title after thirty-seven years.

Vivien Thomas retired in 1979. He died of pancreatic cancer on November 26, 1985, at the age of seventy-five.

Days later, his autobiography, Partners of the Heart, was published.

In 2004, HBO released Something the Lord Made—a phrase spoken by Blalock after witnessing one of Thomas’s flawless surgical performances.

Today, the life-saving operation is officially called the Blalock–Thomas–Taussig shunt.

Vivien Thomas never became the doctor he dreamed of being. 

But he trained more great surgeons than most medical schools ever have.

He saved lives not with credentials, but with precision.

Not with position, but with patience.

Not with recognition, but with mastery.

And when the world finally chose to see him, he had already changed it forever. 

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Anna Julia Cooper - Determined to free her mind

 

Born enslaved in 1858. Earned a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne at 66. Lived to 105. Her quote is printed in every U.S. passport. Yet most Americans have never heard her name.

Anna Julia Cooper was born into slavery on August 10, 1858, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her mother, Hannah Stanley Haywood, was enslaved. Her father was almost certainly George Washington Haywood—her mother's white enslaver.
Anna was born property. A slave child, worth money, with no legal rights, no future, no hope.
Seven years later, the Civil War ended. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. And Anna, now free, was determined to get an education.
In 1868, St. Augustine's Normal School opened in Raleigh for formerly enslaved children. Anna enrolled at age nine. The school offered basic education for Black children—reading, writing, arithmetic. Girls were steered toward domestic skills: sewing, cooking, preparing to be servants or wives.
Anna wanted more.
She demanded to take the advanced courses reserved for boys preparing for ministry. The school resisted. Girls didn't need Greek. Girls didn't need advanced mathematics. Girls needed to learn their place.
Anna didn't care what they thought girls needed. She took the courses anyway. And she excelled.
At St. Augustine's, she met George Cooper, a theology student. They married in 1877 when Anna was 19. Two years later, George died suddenly. Anna was widowed at 21.
She could have retreated into grief. Instead, she applied to Oberlin College in Ohio—one of the few institutions in America that admitted both Black students and women.
In 1884, Anna Julia Cooper earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oberlin. She was 26 years old. A formerly enslaved woman with a college degree.
But she wasn't done. She stayed at Oberlin and earned her master's degree in mathematics in 1888.
Then she went to teach.
Anna moved to Washington, D.C., and began teaching at the M Street High School—the only Black high school in the District of Columbia. This is where her real battle began.
In 1902, she became principal of M Street High School. And she had a vision: Black students deserved a classical education. Greek, Latin, advanced mathematics, literature, science. The same rigorous curriculum taught at elite white schools.
This was revolutionary. And controversial.
At the time, most educators—including prominent Black leaders like Booker T. Washington—believed Black students should receive vocational training. Learn a trade. Be useful. Don't aim too high.
Anna disagreed fundamentally. She believed limiting Black students to vocational training was just another form of oppression. She insisted her students could compete academically with anyone in the country.
And she proved it. Under her leadership, M Street High School students passed entrance exams for Harvard, Yale, and other elite universities. They graduated and succeeded. Anna's students were demonstrating that when given equal education, Black students could achieve anything.
The school board hated it.
In 1906, Anna was forced out as principal. The political pressure was too intense. Powerful people wanted M Street to focus on vocational training, not college preparation. Anna's insistence that Black students deserved the same education as white students was too radical, too threatening.
She returned to teaching, but she didn't stop fighting.
In 1892, Anna had published A Voice from the South—one of the first Black feminist texts ever written. The book argued that Black women's voices were essential to both racial progress and women's rights movements.
She wrote: "Only the BLACK WOMAN can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.'"
She was arguing for intersectionality decades before the term existed—showing how race and gender oppression intersected and how Black women faced unique challenges that white women and Black men didn't fully understand.
The book was brilliant. It was largely ignored by white feminists and not fully appreciated until decades later.
Anna kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept advocating for educational equity and women's rights.
And then, in her 60s, she decided to pursue a doctorate.
Anna Julia Cooper was 64 years old when she enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris to pursue her Ph.D. This was 1922—a time when most American universities wouldn't admit women to doctoral programs at all. When Black women were systematically excluded from higher education. When the idea of a 64-year-old pursuing a Ph.D. was considered absurd.
Anna didn't care.
She studied French attitudes toward slavery after the Haitian Revolution. She wrote her dissertation entirely in French. She traveled back and forth between Washington and Paris while continuing to teach and support her adopted family—she had taken in and raised five children over the years, including two great-nieces.
In 1924, at age 66, Anna Julia Cooper earned her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne—one of the world's most prestigious universities.
She was the fourth Black woman in American history to earn a doctorate. The first to earn one from the Sorbonne. And she did it at age 66, while working full-time and raising children.
Anna continued teaching until she retired at 84. She lived quietly in Washington, D.C., writing, advocating, mentoring young people.
In 1964, Anna Julia Cooper died at age 105.
She had been born into slavery. She lived long enough to see the Civil Rights Act pass.
She had lived through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, two World Wars, the Great Depression, the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. She had witnessed Black Americans go from enslaved property to earning doctorates, though the fight for equality remained far from over.
Her quote—one of her most powerful statements—lives on today:
"The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity."
That quote is printed in every United States passport. Millions of Americans carry her words with them every time they travel internationally.
Yet most have never heard of Anna Julia Cooper.
She should be as famous as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, or Susan B. Anthony. Her accomplishments were extraordinary. Her writing was brilliant. Her vision was ahead of her time.
But Anna was a Black woman advocating for both racial justice and women's rights in an era when both movements often excluded her. White feminists focused on gender but ignored race. Black male leaders focused on race but dismissed women's concerns.
Anna insisted both mattered. That Black women's experiences and voices were essential. That true freedom required fighting all forms of oppression simultaneously.
She was right. But being right and being heard are different things.
Today, scholars recognize Anna Julia Cooper as one of the most important Black feminist intellectuals in American history. Her book A Voice from the South is taught in universities. Her ideas about intersectionality predate the formal academic framework by nearly a century.
But in mainstream American consciousness? She remains largely unknown.
Anna Julia Cooper was born enslaved in 1858. By the time she died in 1964, she had earned a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, written groundbreaking feminist texts, transformed education for Black students, and lived 105 extraordinary years.
She proved that intelligence has no race or gender. That formerly enslaved people could earn doctorates from the world's best universities. That Black students deserved the same rigorous education as anyone else. That Black women's voices mattered in fights for both racial and gender justice.
Her words are in every American passport. Her life spanned from slavery to the Civil Rights Movement. Her accomplishments were astonishing.
Yet you probably learned about Paul Revere's midnight ride in school—a story with questionable documentation.
And you probably never heard about Anna Julia Cooper earning a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne at age 66—which definitely happened.
That tells you everything about whose stories we choose to remember and whose we allow to fade.
Anna Julia Cooper refused to be silent in life.
We shouldn't let her be forgotten in death. 

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