Timeline

Vivien Thomas is born to Clara Flanders Thomas and William Maceo Thomas on Aug. 29, 1910 in Louisiana. He is the fourth child of what will be five siblings.

The Thomas family relocates to Nashville, Tennessee.

Public schools in Tennessee start at age seven and so the Thomases pay tuition for Vivien to begin private kindergarten at Fisk University.

In high school, Vivien Thomas works after school and on Saturdays, learning carpentry skills and a work ethic from his father. Vivien Thomas’s ultimate goal is to become a physician.

Vivien Thomas graduates in June from the segregated yet academically rigorous Pearl High School.

Over the summer, Vivien Thomas begins a seasonal carpentry job at Fisk University to earn money for college and medical school and is kept on in the fall. Unfortunately, when the stock market crashes at the end of September, Fisk University regrettably lets him go. He begins looking for work but can’t find a job.

In February, Vivien Thomas takes a job as a laboratory assistant at Vanderbilt University Medical School working for Alfred Blalock, MD, a true-gray Southerner from Georgia.

Thomas is never told that he and all Black lab workers at Vanderbilt are classified as janitors.

In November, Nashville’s People’s Bank closes, taking with it the hard-earned savings of Vivien Thomas and his entire family.

Thomas researches traumatic shock and Blalock uses him to double-check the accuracy of the articles Blalock writes.

Every day at lunch, Vivien Thomas is tutored in chemistry and biology by Joseph Beard, MD, to whom he attributes his lifelong interest in surgical research.

On Dec. 22, Thomas marries Miss Clara Beatrice Flanders of Macon, Georgia.

Vivien and Clara Thomas’s first child, Olga Fay Thomas, is born.

Alfred Blalock is offered a position at Ford Hospital in Detroit and is told he can bring Thomas with him. Blalock dissembles about the actual job offer to receive a promotion at Vanderbilt and then misleads Thomas about his reason for rejecting Ford to enhance Thomas’s allegiance to him.

Clara and Vivien Thomas’s second and last child, Theodosia Patricia Thomas, is born.

Alfred Blalock accepts the position of surgery chief and surgery chair at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and asks Vivien Thomas to relocate with him. Thomas has no choice after he learns that Vanderbilt will fire him as soon as Blalock leaves. The Thomases prepare to move, but they rent out their Nashville house in case they want to return.

Clara and Vivien Thomas arrive in Baltimore and are horrified at the city’s segregated, yet expensive, housing for Black families. In April, Vivien Thomas’s brother, Harold Thomas, files a lawsuit with the NAACP for equal pay for Black and white teachers in Nashville and wins his suit the following year. However, as Vivien had feared, the school system retaliates against Harold and he resigns, never to teach again.

In December, the US enters World War II. The military exempts Thomas from the draft because of its need for his urgent experimental work on traumatic shock for the war effort. He has little access to Blalock, who must travel for wartime medical meetings and to brief military physicians on treating shock with blood and plasma.

Thomas begins to train medical students in surgical techniques.

The Northern Migration of Black families from the South increases as people seek well-paying jobs in Baltimore’s war industries, making the sub-par segregated housing costs to skyrocket. Vivien Thomas requests a raise from Blalock who, after putting him off, uses a charitable donation to increase Thomas’s salary very slightly. The Thomas family continues living below the poverty line. Thomas must work as a bartender at the parties given by the Blalocks and other Hopkins surgeons to help make ends meet.

Blalock and Thomas meet with pediatrician Dr. Helen Taussig, who asks them to find a surgical way to improve the amount of oxygen in the blood circulation of her sick or dying “blue babies” babies who were born with a defect called Tetralogy of Fallot. It takes an entire year of experimental surgeries before Thomas can complete the first step, which is to alter the dogs’ physiology to make them significantly oxygen deprived.

Thomas’s next step is to structurally alter the vessels leading to the dogs’ heart and lungs to bring more oxygen to their circulation. After months of trial and error, and by working fourteen-hour days, he succeeds.

In late November, Taussig realizes that her fifteen-month-old blue baby patient, Eileen Saxon, is dying from oxygen deprivation. She asks Blalock to operate on Eileen, using Thomas’s new surgery. Blalock has only seen Thomas’s surgery once on a dog in the lab and tells him to stand by him to direct him through the operation. This surgery advances cardiac care as well as obliterating the long-held belief that babies should never undergo any type of operation.

In May, Blalock and Taussig publish the results of their now three blue baby surgeries and gain worldwide acclaim. Vivien Thomas is given no credit for the surgery and his role is kept from the public by Hopkins. The operation remains known as the Blalock-Taussig shunt.

Parents with sick blue babies arrive at Hopkins, many without having made an appointment. For the next hundred or more blue baby surgeries, Thomas stands by Blalock’s side to assist him in the operating room. He remains on-call to through the end of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s to assist other surgeons.

Toward the end of World War II in Europe, General Patton attributes the increased survival rate of soldiers to the new medical treatment of traumatic shock, devised by Blalock and proven by Thomas’s surgical experiments.

Blalock is offered a higher paying position as Chief of Surgery at Columbia University and wants Thomas to come with him. His lab assistant sees this as an opportunity to leave the pervasive race discrimination he faces at Hopkins and in Baltimore. Thomas makes it clear to Blalock that he expects to receive a salary that permits his family to live in the suburbs of Long Island. Rather than lose Blalock, Hopkins agrees to a hefty salary increase and so Blalock decides to stay. As a result, Thomas's hopes for a brighter future for himself and his family are shattered.

With this disappointment in mind, the Thomas family visits Nashville and Vivien learns he can earn twice or three time his Hopkins salary by returning to construction work. He tells Blalock that he is quitting and eventually the surgeon agrees to raise Thomas’s pay.

Along with returning GIs, Thomas hopes to attend the segregated state college in Towson, Maryland (now Towson University) but learns he must take a full four-year load of classes with no exceptions. With great emotional difficulty, he abandons his dream of being a physician.

Alfred Blalock and Helen Taussig are invited to England, France and Sweden to demonstrate the blue baby operation, and receive standing ovations and prestigious awards. Vivien Thomas stays in Baltimore and receives no recognition.

Thomas creates another critical heart surgery for babies who are born with a different kind of defective heart (Transposition of the Great Arteries). He works completely independently of Blalock and succeeds in increasing the amount of oxygenated blood in infants by surgically creating an opening in the heart wall (atrial septum defect). Blalock describes the surgery as “like something the Lord made.” However, Blalock then attributes the surgery to his resident surgeon, C. Rollins Hanlon, MD, which increases Thomas’s bitterness. The surgery remains known as the Blalock-Hanlon operation.

Vivien Thomas works on a variety of experiments to push cardiac care ahead. Most important were his contributions to lowering cardiac deaths caused by electrical shock and his work on heart massage for resuscitation (CPR). He builds a basic operating-room defibrillator to save the lives of patients who have a heart attack during surgery.

After conducting research for Dr. Blalock for more than 20 years, Vivien Thomas receives his first co-author credit with Blalock in a publication written by a Canadian surgeon at Hopkins, Raymond Heimbecker, MD.

Hoping to leave the employ of Blalock and Hopkins, Vivien Thomas applies for a job at the nearby federal National Institutes of Health working for a former Hopkins surgeon who heads its Heart Institute. Although highly qualified, Thomas is told he can’t have the job: the chief fears retaliation from Blalock if he were to hire him away from Hopkins.

Thomas trains and hires lower-level Black Hopkins employees to become lab technicians and begins a summer program for Baltimore high school students interested in health-care careers.

A celebration to honor Alfred Blalock is planned with hundreds of guests invited from throughout the world. Blalock refuses to invite Vivien Thomas saying that having a Black man at his party is "simply something that isn't done." The celebration planners, all surgeons trained by Blalock and Thomas, tell Thomas to sneak into the hotel’s kitchen and hide in the back of the ballroom so Blalock won’t see him. Thomas refuses to be humiliated in this way and becomes embittered at Blalock and the Hopkins surgeons.

Alfred Blalock dies in the Hopkins hospital after expressing some regret to his former students about his treatment of Thomas, who is not told this. During Blalock’s months of hospitalization, Thomas never visits him nor writes a condolence note to his widow.

Surgeons donate money for a portrait of Vivien Thomas, but Hopkins stalls for two years before giving permission to have it displayed.

The portrait of Vivien Thomas is presented in a ceremony on campus and Thomas received several standing ovations.

The University of Maryland contacts Hopkins about Thomas’s responsibilities for the purpose of awarding him an honorary Doctor of Science Degree. Maryland subsequently decides not to award Thomas the honorary degree.

In April, Hopkins convenes a special committee to add Vivien Thomas to its own honorary degree recipient list. He receives an honorary Doctor of Law (LLD) from Hopkins in May.

At his firm request, Thomas is finally given the title and pay of an Instructor in Surgery. He is 66 years old when he receives for the first time a salary that reflects the actual work he performs.

Vivien Thomas begins assisting Hopkins surgeon Dr. Levi Watkins in researching the first implantable defibrillator by testing it on dogs. The device they are testing can reverse cardiac arrest. Watkins will go on to successfully complete the first device implant in a person in 1980.

Vivien Thomas retires from Hopkins at age sixty-nine and begins writing a book, Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock.

When the manuscript is completed, Johns Hopkins University Press rejects it. Eventually, the University of Pennsylvania Press accepts it and prepares it for publication.

Vivien Thomas, seventy-five years old, dies on Nov. 25 of pancreatic cancer. One week later, his book, Pioneering Research, is published. (Thomas’s book is now named Partners of the Heart.)

The Johns Hopkins University medical campus bookstore refuses to stock Vivien Thomas’s book.

A celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the historic blue baby surgery takes place at Hopkins. The presentations are on Dr. Blalock, Dr. Taussig and little Eileen Saxon, the baby who was operated on. There is no separate presentation on the role of Vivien Thomas.

The PBS series American Experience devotes an episode to Thomas and Blalock, euphemistically titling it "Partners of the Heart".

HBO produces a television movie about Thomas called Something the Lord Made, starring Mos Def as Vivien Thomas, Gabrielle Union as Clara Thomas and Alan Rickman as Alfred Blalock. It presents the actions of Alfred Blalock and Johns Hopkins University toward Vivien Thomas so favorably that Clara Thomas refuses to attend its opening premiere in Baltimore.

The Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, through its Vivien Thomas Summer Research Program, offers a pipeline opportunity for high school students interested in pursuing a career in scientific research.

The Congressional Black Caucus, with GlaxoSmithKline, annually awards a Vivien Thomas Scholarship for Medical Science and Research Scholarship.

Baltimore City Public Schools offer a science education program at the Vivien T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy.

The American Heart Association gives exemplary postdoctoral students a Vivien Thomas Early Career Investigator Award.

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine hangs Vivien Thomas’s portrait beside other paintings of Vanderbilt medical notables in Langford Auditorium.

The state of Tennessee awarded Vivien Thomas a proclamation recognizing him as a pioneer who devoted his gifts to the betterment of humanity.

Johns Hopkins University establishes the Vivien Thomas Scholars Initiative program with $150 million from the Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Vanderbilt University renames a street on its campus as Vivien Thomas Way.