Vivien Thomas Writes About his Surgical Research Work  

Dr. Mark Ravitch and other Hopkins surgeons urged Mr. Thomas to write a book about his experimental research surgeries. Thomas spent years writing, going into detail about what life was really like working at two segregated medical schools and hospitals, Vanderbilt and Hopkins, as a Black man with only a high school diploma. His stored-up anger, pain, disappointment, and frustration came pouring out of him and onto the page. Unfortunately, he removed most of his personal thoughts about race and about his long-standing anger at Dr. Blalock and the two universities where he’d spent his career. He censored a tremendous amount of material that he’d written, realizing that it would be difficult convincing a book editor to accept his claims. As he said, publishers “can’t let a Negro take credit for something a white man already has credit for.”

My biography, Vivien Thomas, could quote his suppressed material because Mrs. Thomas donated his original manuscript drafts and publication letters to the Johns Hopkins Chesney Medical Archives so that history would not be “so mixed up,” as her husband had said. Some of his thoughts, which he held back from publication in his own book, include:

• “One of things that slowed down my writing was how to keep it race free;”
• “I have been what you call hidden in the medical world;” and
• “Hopkins is presented as a progressive liberal institution, which it is not.”

Thomas’s book, Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiac Surgery: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock, is an interesting technical description of his work. It was rejected by Johns Hopkins Press and published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, which has since retitled the book Partners of the Heart, as seen here. Alas, Thomas never saw a copy because he died on November 26, 1985, at age seventy-five, one week before his highly anticipated book was published. At least, he was spared from learning that Johns Hopkins’s medical campus bookstore refused to carry Pioneering Research and never put it on its shelves.