Birth and Early Life
            Vivien Thomas was born August 29, 1910, near Lake Providence, Louisiana.  He went to school at Pearl High School, which is now Pearl-Cohn High School, in Nashville, Tennessee.  It was during the time of segregation, and Thomas was an African-American.  However, the school did give Thomas a good education. 

Career
            Thomas had wanted to be a doctor, but being in the time of the Great Depression, he was challenged with many obstacles.  He took a job as an orderly in a hospital in the summer of 1929.  He was saving money to go to college.  However, he only had this job until the fall of that year.  There was a stock market crash, and Thomas was laid off.  A friend of his helped him to find another job as a laboratory assistant with Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University.   Not long later, Nashville’s banks failed, and Thomas lost his savings.  He quit on his hopes of going to college and medical school.
            Even though Thomas had given up on becoming a doctor, Dr. Blalock needed a surgical assistant and chose him for the job.  This was a turning point in Thomas’ and Blalock’s lives.  Thomas quickly learned all the things he needed to learn to be a good surgical assistant.  He also had extraordinary surgical skills.  They worked together for 35 years.  Thomas and Blalock worked together to design many surgical pieces.   In 1941 the two moved to Johns Hopkins University Hospital where Blalock was chosen as chief of surgery.   Thomas was given the title of Mechanical Technician even though he had a much more important job.  All other African-Americans at the hospital were janitors. 
            Thomas’ best achievements were in inventing new surgical procedures.  The team of Blalock and Thomas was the first to do open-heart surgery.  They created a procedure to correct a fatal children’s heart problem known as “Blue Baby Syndrome.”  Thomas did the original research on the procedure using dogs, then trained Blalock when it came time to perform it on humans.  This achievement made Blalock and Johns Hopkins University famous, but Thomas was given no public recognition. 

Later Life
            Thomas worked at Johns Hopkins until his retirement in 1979.  Blalock had died in 1965 from cancer.  Thomas was made the supervisor of Surgical Research Laboratories, and he trained many residents in surgery during the rest of his career.   In 1968, the surgeons he trained had a portrait of him painted, and it was hung next to Blalock’s in the lobby of the Alfred Blalock Clinical Sciences Building.  Johns Hopkins University presented Thomas with an Honorary Doctor of Laws in 1976 and appointed him to the faculty as Instructor of Surgery.  In 1979 he was made Instructor Emeritus of Surgery.  Thomas wrote an autobiography, Partners of the Heart:  Vivien Thomas and his Work with Alfred Blalock.  It was published just days after his death in 1985.  He died of pancreatic cancer.  Two movies have also been made about Thomas’ life—a documentary, “Partners of the Heart,” in 2003, and an HBO movie, “Something the Lord Made,” in 2004.

References
www.medicalarchives.jhmi.edu/vthomas.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivien Thomas
“Something the Lord Made.” HBO, 2004