Hero of Time

The man who invented the operation that saves babies born with blue-baby syndrome had no medical degree, no college degree, and was listed on the payroll as a JANITOR. He guided the first operation from a stool behind the surgeon's shoulder, telling him where to cut. Vivien Thomas. He had been saving to study medicine when the 1929 crash wiped out his savings and the bank holding them. He took a job as a lab assistant at Vanderbilt for a janitor's wage, because that was the classification available. Within a couple of years he was running experimental surgery — developing techniques, performing operations on his own, training surgeons. He moved to Johns Hopkins with Alfred Blalock in 1941, where he was still paid as a janitor and had to enter through a back door. He was the only Black man in that building not carrying a mop. He worked out the surgical fix for tetralogy of Fallot — the condition killing infants who turned blue and died — and built the instruments for it. The first operation on a child was in 1944. Blalock, who had never done the procedure, asked Thomas to stand behind him and talk him through it. The surgeons on the paper became world famous. Thomas was not credited. Hopkins hung his portrait in 1971 and gave him an honorary doctorate in 1976. Generations of surgeons he personally trained insisted on it. He was paid as a cleaner while inventing heart surgery.