Vivien Thomas: The Man Who Overcame Racism to Save Millions of Lives
This is the authentic story of Vivien Thomas, a true unsung American hero.
Vivien Thomas was born in one of the poorest communities in the South in 1910, but his father was an ambitious master carpenter. The family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where Vivien graduated from an excellent segregated Southern high school that kick-started his ambition to work in medicine. Despite all the odds against this Southern Black man, including his never having attended college, Thomas 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 medical research went far beyond the blue baby surgery, the only one for which he was known. He created yet a second innovative cardiac surgery and he also played a pivotal role in finding a treatment for traumatic shock, which has saved millions of lives, and he contributed to 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. The poverty-level wages at the two segregated universities where he worked, Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins, meant that he had to take second and third jobs to support his family.
It will inspire you because he remained focused on his mission in life, 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, and his incredible resilience kept him focused on his 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 man by those who owed him the most.