Gone With the Wind and Dr. Alfred Blalock

Vivien Thomas worked for a Southern doctor, Alfred Blalock, MD whose family owned a cotton plantation and its enslaved workers. The Blalocks had similar beliefs about the South, the Confederacy and Black people as espoused in the 1936 book Gone with the Wind and its dramatic 1939 movie, an image which is seen here.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Alfred Blalock, Vivien Thomas’s supervisor from 1930 to 1964 at both Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins universities, was born in Georgia in 1899. His mother proudly but wrongly insisted that she was related to Jefferson Davis, the man who was president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Alfred Blalock’s grandfather had owned a cotton plantation where he relied on the labor of enslaved people to plant and pick the crops. Blalock perceived these inequitable relationships of Blacks and whites as the natural way of the world, and he kept this harmful mindset throughout his life.

When Blalock was eleven years old, his family moved to Jonesboro, Georgia, a town that continues to hold a special place in American culture. The writer Margaret Mitchell, who was born twenty miles from, and a few months after, Alfred Blalock, set her bestselling novel, Gone With the Wind, in Jonesboro, where Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara plantation is located. Her novel tells a romanticized tale of slavery and plantation life in the South. This photo is a publicity poster from the book’s overwhelmingly popular 1939 movie that shows another Vivien: this time, the actress Vivien Leigh in the role of Scarlett O’Hara.

After finishing military high school, Blalock graduated from the University of Georgia and then from the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. He went from Hopkins to working as a lowly but ambitious associate professor at the Vanderbilt Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee when he hired Vivien Thomas as his surgical laboratory technician.