Vivien Thomas

This is the authentic story of Vivien Thomas, a true unsung American hero.

Vivien Thomas was born in 1910 in one of the poorest towns in Louisiana. His father was an ambitious master carpenter who moved his family to Nashville, Tennessee. There, Vivien graduated from a segregated, but excellent, high school that encouraged his interest in medicine. Despite all the odds against Mr. Thomas, including never having attended college, he would make medical history as a surgical lab technician.

His life story will surprise you, anger you, and most of all, inspire you.

It will surprise you because his groundbreaking cardiovascular medical research went far beyond the blue baby surgery, the only one for which he is known. In the late forties, he also created a second innovative cardiac surgery for newborns. Earlier, Mr. Thomas had played a pivotal role in finding a treatment for traumatic shock, which has saved millions of lives. Later, he assisted in developing solutions that allowed heart attack patients to survive.

It will anger you because his work went unrecognized for more than four decades while white physicians took full credit for his many accomplishments. His poverty-level wages at the two deeply segregated universities where he worked, Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins, required him to take second and third jobs to support his family.

It will inspire you because, despite these hardships, he remained focused on his mission in life which was, as he said, to find solutions to the health problems of the “Human Race.” He was so dedicated to helping others that he refused to patent his medical innovations. His incredible resilience kept him focused on surgical research despite the racially hostile environments in which he lived and worked.

This is a provocative story that unmasks the intersection of race and medicine while revealing the betrayal of a brilliant and honorable man by those who owed him the most.