Finally, Vivien Thomas Receives an Equitable Salary

Vivien Thomas’s honorary degree citation highlighted his crucial role in training young surgeons. In fact, many people consider Thomas’s greatest contribution to medicine is that he trained the next generation of America’s top surgeons, who then influenced their own students. Although it was Blalock’s influence that placed his best surgeons in high places, it was Thomas’s instruction that assisted them in becoming the heads and surgery chiefs of twenty-five surgery departments and hospitals around the country. Dr. Robert S.D. Higgins, for example, who is president of Rush University in Chicago, told me, “I am touched by the legacy of Vivien Thomas since he taught surgical techniques to (Henry) Bahnson, who helped teach me..”

Vivien Thomas would comment that pay raises from Hopkins never came easily. After the award ceremony it might have occurred to Hopkins administrators that Thomas deserved to be officially recognized as an instructor. But this did not happen. Instead, Thomas, on his own initiative, approached his supervisor, Dr. Zuidema, to say he deserved to be given the title and pay of an Instructor in Surgery. It took six months, but Hopkins would eventually agree to appoint Thomas as an instructor. He received a significant pay raise—at last—for the final two and a half years of his Hopkins career, as this letter shows. He retired on June 30, 1976, after working at Hopkins for 35 years.