This is a thread to go along side the Black history month that is usually marked in UK, US and a few other places. The whole idea is to educate and celebrate people and achievements of black people.

This thread is not here to pay tribute to any political party, tribe, or paddy paddy. It is instead about real achievement made by real people who have contributed to the black society and are of black origins.


Here may just be a few examples:

Otis Boykin (1920 -1982) invented electronic control devices for guided missiles, IBM computers, and the control unit for a pacemaker

James West's (1931 - ) research in sound technology led to the development of foil-electret transducers used in 90% of all microphones built today and in most new telephones being manufactured. West holds 47 U.S. and more than 200 foreign patents on microphones and techniques for making polymer foil-electrets. He was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 1999.

Frederick Jones (1892 - 1961) held over 60 patents with most of them pertaining to refrigeration. His portable air conditioner was used in World War II to preserve medicine and blood serum.

Andrew Jackson Beard (1849 - 1921) invented the "Jenny Coupler" which allowed train cars to hook themselves together when they are bumped into one another. The device is still used today.

John Love invented the pencil sharpener in 1897

The sweet thing is that all these people are black.

Taken from: http://www.biography.com/blackhistory/history/101-facts-inventions.jsp


So what can you tell us about how black people have changed the life of many in a positive way? (Again no babagidas and Micheal emagwelu or whatever please)

Was going to talk about Emeagwali but too bad,u just shut me up.

Odunnu:

Was going to talk about Emeagwali but too bad,u just shut me up.

Sorry, wasn't trying to shut you down. The guy will cause controversy etc - something I am not keen on right now.

And why shouldn't Emeagwali be mentioned.

@ OP you're a hypocrit.

afam4eva:

And why shouldn't Emeagwali be mentioned.

@ OP you're a hypocrit.

This is the precise reason - Unnecessary bickering. His actual claims are contested, but this thread is not about that and I am not keen on going back and forth.

ElRazur:

This is the precise reason - Unnecessary bickering. His actual claims are contested, but this thread is not about that and I am not keen on going back and forth.

Oops ! Who is he anyway ? Lol

Oluwaseun Osewa, created the black man's version of face
of face book. Now 1/5 of the black race have a platform to beat up each other without bringing physical harm on each other

edoyad:

Oluwaseun Osewa, created the black man's version of face
of face book. Now 1/5 of the black race have a platform to beat up each other without bringing physical harm on each other

Does Nairaland look anything like facebook to you?

edoyad:

Oluwaseun Osewa, created the black man's version of face
of face book. Now 1/5 of the black race have a platform to beat up each other without bringing physical harm on each other

Hehehe. . .a huge + to that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivien_Thomas


[close]
Vivien Thomas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Thomas' 1969 portrait by Bob Gee
Thomas' autobiography, Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and His Work With Alfred Blalock

Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) was an African-American surgical technician who developed the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was an assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country's most prominent surgeons. Vivien Thomas was the first African American without a doctorate degree to perform open heart surgery on a white patient in the United States.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Early life
* 2 Working with Blalock
* 3 Working at Johns Hopkins
* 4 Blue baby syndrome
* 5 Decisive surgery
* 6 Relations with Blalock
* 7 Institutional acknowledgment
* 8 Legacy
* 9 References
* 10 Bibliography
* 11 External links

[edit] Early life

Thomas was born in New Iberia, Louisiana. The grandson of a slave, he attended Pearl High School (named for a Union sympathizer Joshua Fenton Pearl and now known as Pearl Cohn Comprehensive High School) in Nashville in the 1920s. Even though it was racially segregated, the school provided him with a decent education. Thomas had hoped to go to college and become a doctor, but the Great Depression derailed his plans. He worked at Fisk University in the summer of 1929 doing carpentry but was laid off in the fall. In the wake of the stock market crash in October, Thomas put his educational plans on hold, and, through a friend, in February 1930 he secured a job as laboratory assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University. Although Blalock had hired Thomas to clean the cages and feed the laboratory dogs used for surgical experiments, he discovered Thomas' extraordinary eye–hand coordination developed during his carpenter work. When Blalock found that Thomas had an equally sharp intellect, Thomas began doing more laboratory work and less maintenance. Thomas was classified and paid as a janitor, despite that by the mid 1930s he was doing the work of a postdoctoral researcher in the lab.

Before meeting Blalock, Thomas married Clara and had two daughters. When Nashville's banks failed nine months after starting his job with Blalock and Thomas' savings were wiped out, he abandoned his plans for college and medical school, relieved to have even a low-paying job as the Great Depression deepened.
[edit] Working with Blalock

Thomas and Blalock did groundbreaking research into the causes of hemorrhagic and traumatic shock. This work later evolved into research on Crush syndrome and saved the lives of thousands of soldiers on the battlefields of World War II. In hundreds of flawlessly executed experiments, the two disproved traditional theories which held that shock was caused by toxins in the blood. Blalock, a highly original scientific thinker and something of an iconoclast, had theorized that shock resulted from fluid loss outside the vascular bed and that the condition could be effectively treated by fluid replacement. Assisted by Thomas, he was able to provide incontrovertible proof of this theory, and in so doing, he gained wide recognition in the medical community by the mid 1930s. At this same time, Blalock and Thomas began experimental work in vascular and cardiac surgery, defying medical taboos against operating upon the heart. It was this work that laid the foundation for the revolutionary lifesaving surgery they were to perform at Johns Hopkins a decade later.
[edit] Working at Johns Hopkins

By 1940, the work Blalock had done with Thomas placed him at the forefront of American surgery, and when he was offered the position of Chief of Surgery at his alma mater Johns Hopkins in 1941, he requested that Thomas accompany him. Thomas arrived in Baltimore with his family in June of that year, confronting a severe housing shortage and a level of racism worse than they had endured in Nashville. Hopkins, like the rest of Baltimore, was rigidly segregated, and the only black employees at the institution were janitors. When Thomas walked the halls in his white lab coat, heads turned.
[edit] Blue baby syndrome

In 1943, while pursuing his shock research, Blalock was approached by renowned pediatric cardiologist Dr. Helen Taussig, who was seeking a surgical solution to a complex and fatal four-part heart anomaly called Tetralogy of Fallot (also known as blue baby syndrome, although other cardiac anomalies produce blueness, or cyanosis). In infants born with this defect, blood is shunted past the lungs, thus creating oxygen deprivation and a blue pallor. Having treated many such patients in her work in Hopkins' Harriet Lane Home, Taussig was desperate to find a surgical cure. According to the accounts in Thomas' 1985 autobiography and in a 1967 interview with medical historian Peter Olch, Taussig suggested only that it might be possible to "reconnect the pipes" in some way to increase the level of blood flow to the lungs but did not suggest how this could be accomplished. Blalock and Thomas realized immediately that the answer lay in a procedure they had perfected for a different purpose in their Vanderbilt work, involving the anastomosis, or joining, of the subclavian to the pulmonary artery, which had the effect of increasing blood flow to the lungs.

Thomas was charged with the task of first creating a blue baby-like condition in a dog, and then correcting the condition by means of the pulmonary-to-subclavian anastomosis. Among the dogs on whom Thomas operated was one named Anna, who became the first long-term survivor of the operation and the only animal to have her portrait hung on the walls of Johns Hopkins. In nearly two years of laboratory work, involving some 200 dogs, Thomas was ultimately able to replicate only two of the four cardiac anomalies involved in Tetralogy of Fallot. He did demonstrate that the corrective procedure was not lethal, thus persuading Blalock that the operation could be safely attempted on a human patient. Even though Thomas knew he was not allowed to operate on patients at that time, he still followed Blalock's rules and assisted him during surgery.
[edit] Decisive surgery

On November 29, 1944, the procedure was first tried on an eighteen-month-old infant named Eileen Saxon. The blue baby syndrome had made her lips and fingers turn blue, with the rest of her skin having a very faint blue tinge. She could only take a few steps before beginning to breathe heavily. Because no instruments for cardiac surgery then existed, Thomas adapted the needles and clamps for the procedure from those in use in the animal lab. During the surgery itself, at Blalock's request, Thomas stood on a step stool at Blalock's shoulder and coached him step by step through the procedure, Thomas having performed the operation hundreds of times on a dog, Blalock only once, as Thomas' assistant. The surgery was not completely successful, though it did prolong the infant's life for several more months. Blalock and his team operated again on an 11-year-old girl, this time with complete success, and the patient was able to leave the hospital three weeks after the surgery. Next, they operated upon a six-year-old boy, who dramatically regained his color at the end of the surgery. The three cases formed the basis for the article that was published in the May 1945 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, giving credit to Blalock and Taussig for the procedure. Thomas received no mention.

News of this groundbreaking story circulated around the world via the Associated Press. Newsreels touted the event, greatly enhancing the status of Johns Hopkins and solidifying the reputation of Blalock, who had been regarded as a maverick up until that point by some in the Hopkins old guard. Thomas' contribution remained unacknowledged, both by Blalock and by Hopkins. Within a year, the operation known as the Blalock-Taussig shunt had been performed on more than 200 patients at Hopkins, with parents bringing their suffering children from thousands of miles away.

Thomas' surgical techniques included one he developed in 1946 for improving circulation in patients whose great vessels (the aorta and the pulmonary artery) were transposed. A complex operation called an atrial septectomy, the procedure was executed so flawlessly by Thomas that Blalock, upon examining the nearly undetectable suture line, was prompted to remark, "Vivien, this looks like something the Lord made."

To the host of young surgeons Thomas trained during the 1940s, he became a figure of legend, the model of a dexterous and efficient cutting surgeon. "Even if you'd never seen surgery before, you could do it because Vivien made it look so simple," the renowned surgeon Denton Cooley told Washingtonian magazine in 1989. "There wasn't a false move, not a wasted motion, when he operated." Surgeons like Cooley, along with Alex Haller, Frank Spencer, Rowena Spencer, and others credited Thomas with teaching them the surgical technique that placed them at the forefront of medicine in the United States. Despite the deep respect Thomas was accorded by these surgeons and by the many black lab technicians he trained at Hopkins, he was not well paid. He sometimes resorted to working as a bartender, often at Blalock's parties. This led to the peculiar circumstance of his serving drinks to people he had been teaching earlier in the day. Eventually, after negotiations on his behalf by Blalock, he became the highest paid technician at Johns Hopkins by 1946, and by far the highest paid African-American on the institution's rolls. Although Thomas never wrote or spoke publicly about his ongoing desire to return to college and obtain a medical degree, his widow, the late Clara Flanders Thomas, revealed in a 1987 interview with Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe that her husband had clung to the possibility of further education throughout the Blue Baby period and had only abandoned the idea with great reluctance. Mrs. Thomas stated that in 1947, Thomas had investigated the possibility of enrolling in college and pursuing his dream of becoming a doctor, but had been deterred by the inflexibility of Morgan State University, which refused to grant him credit for life experience and insisted that he fulfill the standard freshman requirements. Realizing that he would be 50 years old by the time he completed college and medical school, Thomas decided to give up the idea of further education.
[edit] Relations with Blalock

Blalock's approach to the issue of Thomas' race was complicated and contradictory throughout their 34-year partnership. On the one hand, he defended his choice of Thomas to his superiors at Vanderbilt and to Hopkins colleagues, and he insisted that Thomas accompany him in the operating room during the first series of tetralogy operations. On the other hand, there were limits to his tolerance, especially when it came to issues of pay, academic acknowledgment, and his social interaction outside of work.

After Blalock's death from cancer in 1964 at the age of 65, Thomas stayed at Hopkins for 15 more years. In his role as director of Surgical Research Laboratories, he mentored a number of African-American lab technicians as well as Hopkins' first black cardiac resident, Dr. Levi Watkins, Jr., whom Thomas assisted with his groundbreaking work in the use of the Automatic Implantable Defibrillator.

Thomas' nephew, Koco Eaton, graduated from the Johns Hopkins Medical School, trained by many of the same physicians his uncle had trained. Eaton trained in orthopedics and is now the team doctor for the Tampa Bay Rays.
[edit] Institutional acknowledgment

In 1968, the surgeons Thomas trained — who had then become chiefs of surgical departments throughout America — commissioned the painting of his portrait (by Bob Gee, oil on canvas, 1969, The Johns Hopkins Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives) and arranged to have it hung next to Blalock's in the lobby of the Alfred Blalock Clinical Sciences Building.

In 1976, Johns Hopkins University presented Thomas with an honorary doctorate. However, because of certain restrictions, he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws, rather than a medical doctorate, but it did allow the staff and students of Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Medical School to call him doctor. Thomas was also appointed to the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical School as Instructor of Surgery.
[edit] Legacy

Following his retirement in 1979, Thomas began work on an autobiography, Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and his Work with Alfred Blalock, ISBN 0-8122-1634-2. He died on November 26, 1985 of pancreatic cancer, at age 75, and the book was published just days later. Having learned about Thomas on the day of his death, Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe brought his story to public attention for the first time in a 1989 article entitled "Like Something the Lord Made", which won the 1990 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and inspired filmmaker Andrea Kalin to make the PBS documentary Partners of the Heart",[1] which was broadcast in 2003 on PBS' American Experience and won the Organization of American Historians' Erik Barnouw Award for Best History Documentary in 2004.[2] McCabe's article, brought to Hollywood by Washington, D.C. dentist Irving Sorkin,[3] formed the basis for the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning 2004 HBO film Something the Lord Made.

Thomas' legacy as an educator and scientist continued with the institution of the Vivien Thomas Young Investigator Awards, given by the Council on Cardiovascular Surgery and Anesthesiology beginning in 1996. In 1993, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation instituted the Vivien Thomas Scholarship for Medical Science and Research sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. In Fall 2004, the Baltimore City Public School System opened the Vivien T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy, and on January 29, 2008, MedStar Health unveiled the first "Rx for Success" program at the Academy, joining the conventional curriculum with specialized coursework geared to the health care professions. In the halls of the school hangs a replica of Thomas' portrait commissioned by his surgeon-trainees in 1968. The Journal Of Surgical Case Reports (JSCR) announced in January 2010 that their annual prizes for the best case report written by a doctor and best case report written by a medical student would be named after Thomas.[4]
[edit] References

1. ^ Hopkinsmedecine.og
2. ^ OAH.org, OAH Erik Barnouw Award Winners
3. ^ Washingtonian.com
4. ^ JSCR Website

[edit] Bibliography

* (1985) Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock (originally published as Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock), University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812216342.
* (1989) "Like Something the Lord Made", by Katie McCabe. Washingtonian magazine, August 1989. Reprinted in Feature Writing for Newspapers and Magazines: The Pursuit of Excellence, ed. by Jay Friedlander and John Lee. May also be accessed via the Washingtonian.
* (2003). Partners of the Heart. American Experience.
* (2003) Stefan Timmermans, "A Black Technician and Blue Babies" in Social Studies of Science 33:2 (April 2003), 197–229.
* (2004) "Something the Lord Made", HBO movie, Portrayed by Mos Def
* (2006) Tsung O. Cheng, "Hamilton Naki and Christiaan Barnard Versus Vivien Thomas and Alfred Blalock: Similarities and Dissimilarities" in American Journal of Cardiology 97:3 (February 1, 2006), 435–436.

[edit] External links

* Blue Baby Operation Exhibit

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivien_Thomas"
Categories: American surgeons | Johns Hopkins University faculty | Johns Hopkins Hospital physicians | 1910 births | 1985 deaths | People from New Iberia, Louisiana | Deaths from pancreatic cancer | African American surgeons
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivien_Thomas



[close]
Vivien Thomas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Thomas' 1969 portrait by Bob Gee
Thomas' autobiography, Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and His Work With Alfred Blalock

Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) was an African-American surgical technician who developed the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was an assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country's most prominent surgeons. Vivien Thomas was the first African American without a doctorate degree to perform open heart surgery on a white patient in the United States.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Early life
* 2 Working with Blalock
* 3 Working at Johns Hopkins
* 4 Blue baby syndrome
* 5 Decisive surgery
* 6 Relations with Blalock
* 7 Institutional acknowledgment
* 8 Legacy
* 9 References
* 10 Bibliography
* 11 External links

[edit] Early life

Thomas was born in New Iberia, Louisiana. The grandson of a slave, he attended Pearl High School (named for a Union sympathizer Joshua Fenton Pearl and now known as Pearl Cohn Comprehensive High School) in Nashville in the 1920s. Even though it was racially segregated, the school provided him with a decent education. Thomas had hoped to go to college and become a doctor, but the Great Depression derailed his plans. He worked at Fisk University in the summer of 1929 doing carpentry but was laid off in the fall. In the wake of the stock market crash in October, Thomas put his educational plans on hold, and, through a friend, in February 1930 he secured a job as laboratory assistant to Dr. Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University. Although Blalock had hired Thomas to clean the cages and feed the laboratory dogs used for surgical experiments, he discovered Thomas' extraordinary eye–hand coordination developed during his carpenter work. When Blalock found that Thomas had an equally sharp intellect, Thomas began doing more laboratory work and less maintenance. Thomas was classified and paid as a janitor, despite that by the mid 1930s he was doing the work of a postdoctoral researcher in the lab.

Before meeting Blalock, Thomas married Clara and had two daughters. When Nashville's banks failed nine months after starting his job with Blalock and Thomas' savings were wiped out, he abandoned his plans for college and medical school, relieved to have even a low-paying job as the Great Depression deepened.
[edit] Working with Blalock

[b]Thomas and Blalock did groundbreaking research into the causes of hemorrhagic and traumatic shock. This work later evolved into research on Crush syndrome and saved the lives of thousands of soldiers on the battlefields of World War II. In hundreds of flawlessly executed experiments, the two disproved traditional theories which held that shock was caused by toxins in the blood. Blalock, a highly original scientific thinker and something of an iconoclast, had theorized that shock resulted from fluid loss outside the vascular bed and that the condition could be effectively treated by fluid replacement. Assisted by Thomas, he was able to provide incontrovertible proof of this theory, and in so doing, he gained wide recognition in the medical community by the mid 1930s. At this same time, Blalock and Thomas began experimental work in vascular and cardiac surgery, defying medical taboos against operating upon the heart. It was this work that laid the foundation for the revolutionary lifesaving surgery they were to perform at Johns Hopkins a decade later.[/b]
[edit] Working at Johns Hopkins

By 1940, the work Blalock had done with Thomas placed him at the forefront of American surgery, and when he was offered the position of Chief of Surgery at his alma mater Johns Hopkins in 1941, he requested that Thomas accompany him. Thomas arrived in Baltimore with his family in June of that year, confronting a severe housing shortage and a level of racism worse than they had endured in Nashville. Hopkins, like the rest of Baltimore, was rigidly segregated, and the only black employees at the institution were janitors. When Thomas walked the halls in his white lab coat, heads turned.
[edit] Blue baby syndrome

In 1943, while pursuing his shock research, Blalock was approached by renowned pediatric cardiologist Dr. Helen Taussig, who was seeking a surgical solution to a complex and fatal four-part heart anomaly called Tetralogy of Fallot (also known as blue baby syndrome, although other cardiac anomalies produce blueness, or cyanosis). In infants born with this defect, blood is shunted past the lungs, thus creating oxygen deprivation and a blue pallor. Having treated many such patients in her work in Hopkins' Harriet Lane Home, Taussig was desperate to find a surgical cure. According to the accounts in Thomas' 1985 autobiography and in a 1967 interview with medical historian Peter Olch, Taussig suggested only that it might be possible to "reconnect the pipes" in some way to increase the level of blood flow to the lungs but did not suggest how this could be accomplished. Blalock and Thomas realized immediately that the answer lay in a procedure they had perfected for a different purpose in their Vanderbilt work, involving the anastomosis, or joining, of the subclavian to the pulmonary artery, which had the effect of increasing blood flow to the lungs.

Thomas was charged with the task of first creating a blue baby-like condition in a dog, and then correcting the condition by means of the pulmonary-to-subclavian anastomosis. Among the dogs on whom Thomas operated was one named Anna, who became the first long-term survivor of the operation and the only animal to have her portrait hung on the walls of Johns Hopkins. In nearly two years of laboratory work, involving some 200 dogs, Thomas was ultimately able to replicate only two of the four cardiac anomalies involved in Tetralogy of Fallot. He did demonstrate that the corrective procedure was not lethal, thus persuading Blalock that the operation could be safely attempted on a human patient. Even though Thomas knew he was not allowed to operate on patients at that time, he still followed Blalock's rules and assisted him during surgery.
[edit] Decisive surgery

On November 29, 1944, the procedure was first tried on an eighteen-month-old infant named Eileen Saxon. The blue baby syndrome had made her lips and fingers turn blue, with the rest of her skin having a very faint blue tinge. She could only take a few steps before beginning to breathe heavily. Because no instruments for cardiac surgery then existed, Thomas adapted the needles and clamps for the procedure from those in use in the animal lab. During the surgery itself, at Blalock's request, Thomas stood on a step stool at Blalock's shoulder and coached him step by step through the procedure, Thomas having performed the operation hundreds of times on a dog, Blalock only once, as Thomas' assistant. The surgery was not completely successful, though it did prolong the infant's life for several more months. Blalock and his team operated again on an 11-year-old girl, this time with complete success, and the patient was able to leave the hospital three weeks after the surgery. Next, they operated upon a six-year-old boy, who dramatically regained his color at the end of the surgery. The three cases formed the basis for the article that was published in the May 1945 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, giving credit to Blalock and Taussig for the procedure. Thomas received no mention.

News of this groundbreaking story circulated around the world via the Associated Press. Newsreels touted the event, greatly enhancing the status of Johns Hopkins and solidifying the reputation of Blalock, who had been regarded as a maverick up until that point by some in the Hopkins old guard. Thomas' contribution remained unacknowledged, both by Blalock and by Hopkins. Within a year, the operation known as the Blalock-Taussig shunt had been performed on more than 200 patients at Hopkins, with parents bringing their suffering children from thousands of miles away.

Thomas' surgical techniques included one he developed in 1946 for improving circulation in patients whose great vessels (the aorta and the pulmonary artery) were transposed. A complex operation called an atrial septectomy, the procedure was executed so flawlessly by Thomas that Blalock, upon examining the nearly undetectable suture line, was prompted to remark, "Vivien, this looks like something the Lord made."

To the host of young surgeons Thomas trained during the 1940s, he became a figure of legend, the model of a dexterous and efficient cutting surgeon. "Even if you'd never seen surgery before, you could do it because Vivien made it look so simple," the renowned surgeon Denton Cooley told Washingtonian magazine in 1989. "There wasn't a false move, not a wasted motion, when he operated." Surgeons like Cooley, along with Alex Haller, Frank Spencer, Rowena Spencer, and others credited Thomas with teaching them the surgical technique that placed them at the forefront of medicine in the United States. Despite the deep respect Thomas was accorded by these surgeons and by the many black lab technicians he trained at Hopkins, he was not well paid. He sometimes resorted to working as a bartender, often at Blalock's parties. This led to the peculiar circumstance of his serving drinks to people he had been teaching earlier in the day. Eventually, after negotiations on his behalf by Blalock, he became the highest paid technician at Johns Hopkins by 1946, and by far the highest paid African-American on the institution's rolls. Although Thomas never wrote or spoke publicly about his ongoing desire to return to college and obtain a medical degree, his widow, the late Clara Flanders Thomas, revealed in a 1987 interview with Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe that her husband had clung to the possibility of further education throughout the Blue Baby period and had only abandoned the idea with great reluctance. Mrs. Thomas stated that in 1947, Thomas had investigated the possibility of enrolling in college and pursuing his dream of becoming a doctor, but had been deterred by the inflexibility of Morgan State University, which refused to grant him credit for life experience and insisted that he fulfill the standard freshman requirements. Realizing that he would be 50 years old by the time he completed college and medical school, Thomas decided to give up the idea of further education.
[edit] Relations with Blalock

Blalock's approach to the issue of Thomas' race was complicated and contradictory throughout their 34-year partnership. On the one hand, he defended his choice of Thomas to his superiors at Vanderbilt and to Hopkins colleagues, and he insisted that Thomas accompany him in the operating room during the first series of tetralogy operations. On the other hand, there were limits to his tolerance, especially when it came to issues of pay, academic acknowledgment, and his social interaction outside of work.

After Blalock's death from cancer in 1964 at the age of 65, Thomas stayed at Hopkins for 15 more years. In his role as director of Surgical Research Laboratories, he mentored a number of African-American lab technicians as well as Hopkins' first black cardiac resident, Dr. Levi Watkins, Jr., whom Thomas assisted with his groundbreaking work in the use of the Automatic Implantable Defibrillator.

Thomas' nephew, Koco Eaton, graduated from the Johns Hopkins Medical School, trained by many of the same physicians his uncle had trained. Eaton trained in orthopedics and is now the team doctor for the Tampa Bay Rays.
[edit] Institutional acknowledgment

In 1968, the surgeons Thomas trained — who had then become chiefs of surgical departments throughout America — commissioned the painting of his portrait (by Bob Gee, oil on canvas, 1969, The Johns Hopkins Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives) and arranged to have it hung next to Blalock's in the lobby of the Alfred Blalock Clinical Sciences Building.

In 1976, Johns Hopkins University presented Thomas with an honorary doctorate. However, because of certain restrictions, he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws, rather than a medical doctorate, but it did allow the staff and students of Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Medical School to call him doctor. Thomas was also appointed to the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical School as Instructor of Surgery.
[edit] Legacy

Following his retirement in 1979, Thomas began work on an autobiography, Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and his Work with Alfred Blalock, ISBN 0-8122-1634-2. He died on November 26, 1985 of pancreatic cancer, at age 75, and the book was published just days later. Having learned about Thomas on the day of his death, Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe brought his story to public attention for the first time in a 1989 article entitled "Like Something the Lord Made", which won the 1990 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and inspired filmmaker Andrea Kalin to make the PBS documentary Partners of the Heart",[1] which was broadcast in 2003 on PBS' American Experience and won the Organization of American Historians' Erik Barnouw Award for Best History Documentary in 2004.[2] McCabe's article, brought to Hollywood by Washington, D.C. dentist Irving Sorkin,[3] formed the basis for the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning 2004 HBO film Something the Lord Made.

Thomas' legacy as an educator and scientist continued with the institution of the Vivien Thomas Young Investigator Awards, given by the Council on Cardiovascular Surgery and Anesthesiology beginning in 1996. In 1993, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation instituted the Vivien Thomas Scholarship for Medical Science and Research sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. In Fall 2004, the Baltimore City Public School System opened the Vivien T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy, and on January 29, 2008, MedStar Health unveiled the first "Rx for Success" program at the Academy, joining the conventional curriculum with specialized coursework geared to the health care professions. In the halls of the school hangs a replica of Thomas' portrait commissioned by his surgeon-trainees in 1968. The Journal Of Surgical Case Reports (JSCR) announced in January 2010 that their annual prizes for the best case report written by a doctor and best case report written by a medical student would be named after Thomas.[4]
[edit] References

1. ^ Hopkinsmedecine.og
2. ^ OAH.org, OAH Erik Barnouw Award Winners
3. ^ Washingtonian.com
4. ^ JSCR Website

[edit] Bibliography

* (1985) Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock (originally published as Pioneering Research in Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery: Vivien Thomas and His Work with Alfred Blalock), University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812216342.
* (1989) "Like Something the Lord Made", by Katie McCabe. Washingtonian magazine, August 1989. Reprinted in Feature Writing for Newspapers and Magazines: The Pursuit of Excellence, ed. by Jay Friedlander and John Lee. May also be accessed via the Washingtonian.
* (2003). Partners of the Heart. American Experience.
* (2003) Stefan Timmermans, "A Black Technician and Blue Babies" in Social Studies of Science 33:2 (April 2003), 197–229.
* (2004) "Something the Lord Made", HBO movie, Portrayed by Mos Def
* (2006) Tsung O. Cheng, "Hamilton Naki and Christiaan Barnard Versus Vivien Thomas and Alfred Blalock: Similarities and Dissimilarities" in American Journal of Cardiology 97:3 (February 1, 2006), 435–436.

[edit] External links

* Blue Baby Operation Exhibit

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivien_Thomas"
Categories: American surgeons | Johns Hopkins University faculty | Johns Hopkins Hospital physicians | 1910 births | 1985 deaths | People from New Iberia, Louisiana | Deaths from pancreatic cancer | African American surgeons
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John Richard Archer – First Black Mayor in UK
John Archer was the first person of African descent to hold civic office in London. He was also the first British black person to represent his country at an international conference abroad, and the first black person to become an election agent for a constituency Labour Party.
John Archer, born on 8th June 1863, in Liverpool to Richard, a ship's steward from Barbados, and Mary Theresa, who was Irish. Almost nothing is known of his early life. He was in his late 20s when he and his wife, a black Canadian, set up home at 55 Brynmaer Road, at the south end of Battersea Park.
Archer earned his living as a photographer, with a studio in Battersea Park Road; he appears to have been successful as a photographer, for his work won many prizes. He later turned his interest to local politics, and was elected to Battersea Borough Council in 1906, as one of the six councillors for the Latchmere ward, where he topped the poll with 1,051 votes.
He lost his seat in 1909, but won it again three years later. On 10th November 1913, he was elected mayor of Battersea. The population at the time was 167,000 and the council's annual income from rates was over £400,000. The newly elected mayor told the council,
"You have made history tonight…Battersea has done many things in the past, but the greatest thing it has done is to show that it has no racial prejudice, and that recognises a man for the work he has done"
He successfully defended his seat in 1919, and then became a successful political agent and alderman. He returned to the council in 1931, and died suddenly the following year. His record of service to the local community was extraordinary.
Source: Great Black Britons

Vivian Alexander Anderson – First Black Footballer for England
Viv Anderson MBE (born 29 August 1956 in Clifton, Nottingham) is an English football player and coach, who played for clubs including Nottingham Forest, Arsenal, Manchester United and Sheffield Wednesday, in the 1970s and 1980s. He is also notable for being the first black football player to represent England in a full international match.
During a long and glittering career with some of England's leading clubs, he won everything the domestic game had to offer. Viv won the European Cup 1979, 1980; European Supercup 1979 and played for Nottingham Forest, Arsenal, Manchester United, Sheffield Wednesday, Barnsley, and Middlesbrough during his distinguished career.
Anderson regards his selection for England in the friendly international against Czechoslovakia at Wembley in November 1978 as, above all, a cause for professional satisfaction.
‘At the time all I thought about was doing my job and trying to impress the manager enough to get selected again,' Anderson recalls. ‘It is only looking back that I realise the importance of it all, and the responsibility I was carrying.'
It's not every player, after all, who receives a ‘Good Luck' telegram from the Queen. At the age of only 22, Anderson won universal praise for his dignified assurance as a role model.
Anderson was voted the best right-back of the 1970s in a poll of managers, and was awarded an MBE in January 2000. He was later inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame in 2004, in recognition of his impact on the English league. He remains a keen supporter of the National Football Museum and regularly attends special events at the museum.
As of 2005, Anderson runs a sports travel agency and also works as a goodwill ambassador for the Football Association. Anderson appears as an occasional guest pundit on MUTV - Manchester United's official TV station.
Source: Great Black Britons

Sir Trevor McDonald – First Black UK TV Anchorman
Trevor McDonald OBE (born 16 August 1939) is a Trinidadian-born British newsreader and journalist. He is a news presenter with Independent Television News (ITN), notable for having been the first black news reader in the UK. He has won more awards than any other British reporter. McDonald was knighted in 1999 for his services to journalism.
After working as a print and broadcast journalist in Trinidad during the 1960s, in 1969 McDonald was employed by BBC Radio as a producer, based in London but still broadcasting to the Caribbean.

In 1973, he began his long association with ITN, first as a general reporter, later as a sports correspondent, but ultimately concentrating on international politics. In the 1980s he spent some time with Channel 4 News, but returned to ITN in 1989, presenting the early-evening news. Twice voted “Newscaster of the year”, McDonald is perceived as the face of ITN after years of fronting its flagship 'News at Ten' bulletin.
An accomplished journalist, he has penned several books including autobiographies on cricketers - Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards. His own biography, 'Fortunate Circumstances', was published in 1993.
Once viewed as the best-spoken person in the country and was reported to have fronted a two-year inquiry into the state of language learning. It warned that government education policy failed to teach pupils the necessary language skills needed for later life.
In 1993, he received an OBE in the Queen's Honours List, and received a knighthood in 1999 for his services to journalism.
Source: Great Black Britons