Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Vivien Thomas

Episode Date: May 18, 2017

We mentioned him in our last episode, but Vivien Thomas deserves his own episode. Join Dr. Sydnee and Just as they explore the life of the high-school educated grandson of slaves that changed the face of surgery. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. I'm Hello everybody welcome to saw bones a marital tour of Miss Guy's Medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McAroy.

And I'm Cindy McAroy. Hi, Syd. Hi Justin, how are you this week? I'm good. I'm doing very well. I'm excited to hear what you've cooked up for us. Oh, so I should just like jump right into it. Just jump right into it, I'm ready. No preamble. Well, that's fine because I actually was inspired to do this episode while I was researching last week's episode.

That's right. Folks, it's another famous solbona combo combo. Don't say that because then they'll expect us to just keep going. Remember, we did that for a while. How long did we do that? We had like a six episode chain. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know that I'm ready for that. No, no, absolutely. I'm not going to commit that far. But while I was, if you listened to our episode last week, it was about Tetrology of Fulow and the kind of the development of the procedure that fixed that and where that, what the history of that was. There was a hole in the heart that was brought to our attention by Jimmy Kimmel's story on his show. Yes. It is much more than just a hole in the heart. I did a whole episode. You were my co-host about it. There were... There's an overflow from one chamber and another back. Yeah. Okay. There you go. I hop. Remember I hop. Right. Got it it now you've got it. I heart oops

Porthole No, that wasn't right. I don't know. I'm sorry. That's really wrong. I really messed it up Is there any medical students listening that is not what that stands for? Please don't use that on your next exam? Sydney why are we talking about Tralogy of follow-again? Well, we're not going to talk about tetralogy of follow-again. We're going to talk about somebody that I only briefly mentioned in our last episode. When I was discussing the procedure that was developed to fix tetralogy of follow, we talked about alpha-blade lock and we talked about Helen Tossig.

And I mentioned very briefly that Alpha Blaylock's assistant was Vivian Thomas, but I didn't say much else about him because this needs to be a whole episode. All right. So thank you to Janet, who wrote an email suggesting this topic. I'm not gonna give you full credit, Janet, because I was already gonna do it. Thank you anyway.

Yeah, that's nice of you. We'll get, we'll share it. We'll share it. We'll just get a first shot. I'll share it, I'll share the credit. So Vivian Thomas was born on August 29th. Vivian Thomas, not a woman, which I'm not sure we clarified that in the last episode.

No, well, I don't think I did. I don't think I commented one way or another because I knew, I didn't want to spoil it. I didn't want spoilers. I knew this would be a whole great episode all unto itself But no Vivian Thomas. I know we kind of traditionally think of Vivian more as a as the name of a female But now Vivian Thomas. So it was male born on August 29th 1910 in New Iberia, Louisiana grandson of a slave. I only mentioned that because he he goes on to do amazing things and came from humble beginnings.

Uh, he attended high school in Nashville and he intended on becoming a physician. That was his plan all along. He was fascinated with medicine and intended on going to saving up, going to college and going to medical school and becoming a doctor. going to saving up, going to college, and going to medical school, and becoming a doctor. He saved up some money kind of following in his dad's footsteps, working at Vanderbilt as a carpenter for a bit, trying to save up some money. He also worked as an orderly and a hospital. It's a less traditional, from here, he's a less traditional path of the surgery. But if you think about it, cutting, cutting, it's the same thing. Wood, human flesh.

Fergely is carpentry of the body. Body carpentry. I'm starting to sound like a bad science fiction novel. He's a body carpenter. To be fair, orthopedics. I mean. Yeah, right. Thank you.

You know. I don't know what that means. I'm sure it's a sterical, but I will ask that you move on to this point. So he worked, he also worked as an orderly for a while. He saved up his money and he enrolled in the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College intent on studying pre-med. However, he lost a lot of money after the crash of 1929. Yeah. And this kind of threw a wrench into his plans.

Put a lot of plans on old. Yes. For a lot of people and obviously so did the a wrench into his plans. Put a lot of plans on old. Yes, for a lot of people, and obviously so did the resulting great depression that followed. And so he had to pursue work and making money and that kind of thing instead. And just to kind of add in here, not all at the exact same time, but in the early 30s, he also got married to Clara

and had, would end up having two daughters Olga Fey and the adoja Apologies to everyone who is now saying dear the adoja to themselves in their cars That may have been specifically why just I really wanted to get his daughters knows in their The adoja we didn't think about that if we're gonna have Another girl you think Well, table it. It's a pretty name. Anyway, so I think also adding to this need for a career was a family support.

You think there's gonna be a lot of theodeges kicking around here in about 10 years? I think for sure. Hey little girl, let me tell you about your parents. They love the theater. Correct? Yes. Thank you.

I'm Crescan Jr. Crescan son, the next generation. Hey, there's another great name. Crescan. You know, you're talking. So he landed, he was looking around for a job. And through a friend, he found out about a position as a surgical research assistant, like a technician that would work with a surgeon, name Dr. Alfred Blaylock. And he found out about this job and he thought he would go kind of check it out. Blalock by the way was a descendant of Jefferson Davis kind of what you would think of as like a very traditional southern aristocratic type gentleman. He was known to be very difficult to get along with.

A lot of people had had issues with him. He was straight to the point about things though. He was very blunt, very plain spoken and he needed an assistant and he interviewed Thomas and he seemed to be bright and catch on really quickly and he liked that he was also hardworking and straightforward and got right to the point as well and the two of them Kind of hit it off from the from the very first meeting So he hired him and on his first day of work

He helped to operate on a dog now We mentioned in the last episode that a lot of the procedures that they would end up doing on the human heart They practiced in dogs. Dr. Blaleck was already starting to work on some different procedures. Right now he was more working on shock, traumatic shock. What happened to the body if you went into shock, what the cause was, and thereby what we can do to treat it. I'm staring you intently to try to keep myself from visualizing what they did to put dogs

in shock. So just keep stay with me here. Okay. Well, I don't have any details. I'm not going to upset you with any detail. Let me say that a lot of the work that was done, and so we'll mention, this won't be the only time in this episode that we'll mention, that they practiced a lot of these procedures on dogs.

And I think while obviously it's not something that we want to dwell on, and certainly we don't want to think about or visualize clearly, I think it's important to mention that these animals made a huge sacrifice through the human race and saved many lives. And so honoring that sacrifice and recognizing their contribution. I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. And we let the vast majority of their brethren just chill and poop on the floor and get free food. So like we're doing well by most of them. Sure, you could make that case. That's not good morality though. Yeah, that's not really. That's not really. Troublemly, I'm my foot on. I'm trying to say that these dogs saved lives.

Let's focus on that. Yeah, let's stick with that. Yours was better. I shouldn't try to file on. So the first day of work, you helped operate on a dog. And at the end of the day, Blaylach said, look, tomorrow morning, now that you see what I do here, tomorrow morning, what I want you to do is come on in bright and early,

prep another one for surgery. So go ahead get another dog like get them under anesthesia and have them ready to go tomorrow morning Second day on the job. Can you imagine that your two second day on the job and they're telling you like You don't know how to use anesthesia. You've never done this before just figure it out and have it done tomorrow morning When I get here so that we can start doing surgery right away. When I worked at a walk bus driver, I didn't learn how to mop until three months in. They only let me put tapes back.

Because mopping that hard? I always feigned like I didn't know how to do it right, so I wouldn't have to. I figured if I'd never have learned, if no one ever taught me how to mop, then I would never have to do it. And everybody just didn't know what to say when you said I don't know how to mom.

My mommy mumps. Can I put some tapes away now? By the end of the month, like I already mentioned, Vivian Thomas caught on very quickly. And by the end of the month, he was starting the procedures by himself. So he would come in. He was able to do, I mean, we're talking about a lot of like complex kind of mathematical equations and things, forget the physiology and like how to find line with anesthesiology. Exactly.

The dosing to put these dogs to sleep and then to actually start the surgical procedures by himself and also to record all the results, which included like using very complex equipment to measure the amount of oxygen and blood and that kind of thing. And again, a lot of long hand equations went into those at the time. Now when I want to know those things, I just order a lab and keep clicking a button in the computer until numbers pop up. So he began to do these procedures and he was very skilled at them very quickly. He did, I thought it was an interesting little anecdote because he, by the way, just to kind of spoil ahead of time, Vivian Thomas did write an autobiography about his life.

And so a lot of this also comes from the autobiography. But he recorded that at one point, he really felt like his relationship with Blalock took off after he messed something up, Thomas did something that he was supposed to be prepping. He didn't do it exactly right. And Blaylock kind of lost it and showed, I think some of that personality that he was already somewhat notorious for. And he cursed and yelled and screamed and called him names.

And Thomas basically just said, give me my pay and I'm leaving. You're not going to talk to me that way. That's not, I'm sorry, it's not worth it to me. You know, basically like my dignity isn't worth any job. And Blaylux basically just backed down immediately and apologized and said, all right. And they got along really well after that. Now here's a crazy thing. So he was doing all this as a surgical research assistant. And he was listed and paid as a janitor. Oh

Yeah His official title was a janitor there and he was paid accordingly And this is this is true throughout a lot of his early career And he was still trying to support a family too almost A lot of the initial work as I I kind of already mentioned, that they were doing focused on shock. They were worried about people who go into shock usually because of some sort of extreme trauma as physical trauma.

I don't mean emotional trauma. I mean, they go into shock because they get in a horrible car accident and, you know, limb gets severed, something like that. And the prevailing theory was that there were some sort of toxin in the blood that was making all your organ shut down and making you so sick when shock occurred. And what Blalock believed is that it was probably more related to fluid loss. Mm-hmm. How would that work? Blood loss and fluid loss from giant trauma. Oh, okay, from the trauma.

Yeah. Yeah, and so, and right now, this sounds like a really obvious thing, but it's because we know it now. You know, sure, everything's in hindsight. We didn't know it. So, the research would take them really long hours in the lab, like monitoring all these different experiments,

to see what would happen with fluid loss and trying to replete it and what kind of changes went on in the human body and trying to mimic what we would think of today as like crush injuries, just completely smashing a bunch of blood vessels and seeing what happens to the tissue. In addition, Blalock and Thomas developed this relationship where Blalock would just kind of sit and think and muse. I wonder what would happen if this and this in the human body went wrong and we try to do this to fix it.

And when he would come up with these kinds of off-the-wall thoughts, Vivian Thomas' job was to then put it into a dog, was to make it happen. Do this to a dog. Hey, Viv, do this to a dog for me. Yep, that was basically it. And then he had to figure out how to replicate this condition and fix it. So not just how to fix the problem, but how to first create the problem

in a lab in a way that it could then be fixed. So, you know, all of the protocols and things that came out of these largely were Thomas developed, were because Thomas developed them. I mean, yes, the ideas may have originated in some cases with Blaylock kind of wandering them, but it was all up to Vivian Thomas to actually make it into real world solutions. All of this with hemorrhagic shock and traumatic shock, all this work that they did led to a huge breakthrough in research in that area and would be instrumental in saving a lot of lives in World War Two. Yeah, because then we knew about, you know, what we'd think of as very simplistic things now, like giving people a bunch of ivy fluids to support their blood pressure or giving people plasma transfusions if they've lost a lot of blood and that kind of stuff.

This was huge groundbreaking research that they were doing. Because of all this stuff that they were doing and publishing and talking about with shock, Blalock began to get some attention in the medical world. Because I mean, you gotta remember a lot of this for the most part was just being published as Blalock's work. Right, of course. Yeah, I mean Thomas was not given much if any for the most part mentioned in these in these kinds of papers and things. So Blaylock was offered a position at Henry Ford hospital in Detroit as a result of all this. And he said he would come, but that Vivian Thomas was part of the package deal that they came as a team because he was instrumental to his work. And they said, no way.

That's a deal breaker. We don't the only reason we would allow a black man to work in our hospital is as a janitor. And Blaleck said, okay, I'm not coming then. Either we come as a team or I don't come at all. And so he passed that up. They also at this point begin practicing surgical procedures on the hearts of dogs as well. And like we've already said, this was huge and what would come soon. This was very taboo not to do procedures on dogs, but to do any kind of heart procedure.

The idea that you could operate on the heart was unthinkable. The thought was that you would just by cutting into the heart by having to clamp vessels that it would, there's no way a patient could ever survive such a surgery, so why even bother trying. Even if you could fix the defect, it wouldn't matter because your patient would die on the table. Was the thought. So this was huge, the thought that they were talking about doing surgery on hearts was like a major, I can't believe you'd even consider such a thing. So this was a huge deal, nobody thought it was possible, they were gonna do it anyway. And again, they were getting more attention for these different things they were doing.

So Blalock was offered another position this time at Johns Hopkins. And again, he told him the same deal, I'm only coming if I can bring Vivian Thomas with me. And John Hopkins took him up on it. So he actually had to convince Thomas to move with him. He wasn't thrilled about it at first. He just wasn't sure that it was the best thing for his family. That was his main concern. He was worried about making enough money there. And it was much more expensive. When they actually, when they first got there, they didn't realize how much more expensive it was going to be to live in Baltimore than in Nashville. And there was no way when they first got there that he was going to be able to pay just for, I mean, the basics, such rent and food and sending his kids to school and all this stuff. And

he basically said, listen, I'm sorry. Now, I got to go back. I'm going back to Nashville. Like, I can't, I can't survive here. I can't can take care of my family. I mean, I'm going to have to get a different job. I can't work the job that you got me because it doesn't pay enough. And Blalock suggested actually, why don't you let your wife work too. And then that'll work. And he took great exception to that and said, like, listen, that's not, that's not the deal. I can support my family. I'm capable of it. If I can't do it here, I'll move back to Nashville, because I know I can do it there. And so Blaleock actually went and had some kind of meeting with officials at Hopkins and actually negotiated for a higher salary for Thomas to get him to stay because he needed him.

Yeah, it was. I mean, it sounds like so he's doing him this, this favor. And I mean, I'm, yes, it was a nice thing to do, but it was also because he was absolutely necessary and Blaleck knew that for him to do the work that he was doing. Right. He could not do it without Vivian Thomas. He had to have him there. And this, this was a big deal in another way.

Baltimore was segregated in a way that they had not seen in Nashville. Just look at the movie, Hairspray. Exactly. Just like in Hairspray. It's just like here. At this point, just stop the podcast and watch Hairspray and you already know the rest of the story. You get it basically.

Basically get the just. So to have him working in a position like he held there at Hopkins was completely unheard of. In Baltimore, it stood out even more so than in Nashville. And it actually the first time that he walked the halls wearing his lab coat. It was just silence and people staring because they didn't know what to make of this. They didn't know who was this guy, who does he think he is, what in the world is he doing here?

It garnered huge attention. So moving to Baltimore was a big deal for Vivian Thomas and his family. It was a big sacrifice he was willing to make, not just for playlock, but I think for the work he knew he was doing and how important it was. Is this about the time they start working on the tetragio flow stuff? Well, that's exactly right, Justin. But before I get into that, why don't we head to the billing department?

Let's go. So, we're about to get to tetralogy of flow again. That's right. So, at this point, play lock and Thomas are starting to work at Hopkins, and that's when Helen Tossig approaches them and says, I'm waiting for you guys. I understand you know how to do some surgeries on some dogs. I don't need you to do that. But, you're sure?

Because we're going. No, I'm really hoping maybe you could do those in humans. Oh, humans. That's like a big dog, huh? It's like a really big dog. And it's funny because I've read accounts now of this exchange from both Helen Tossig and now Vivian Thomas's perspective. And who knows who came up with the idea first, but from her perspective, she said, Hey, you know that that Dr. Sartiriosis

that that babies have before they're born. Well, I think you could replicate that and it would fix tetrology of below. And I think you need replicate that and it would fix tetralogy of flow. And I think you need to make a shut just like that and that would fix things. And from Thomas's perspective, it was more like, basically she said, couldn't you just fix that by connecting some blood vessels in there somewhere? And we came up with the idea of what to do.

So one way or another, between these three brains, smart things happened. They came up with a shunt procedure to fix tetrology aflough that would allow blood to flow through the lungs. Shunt's basically in the blood. The tube, right? Yeah, the tube. Yeah.

They constructed duct, if you remember. Yes. Constructed duct. So, and Blaylock and Thomas, to be be fair had actually already created a similar procedure. Thomas had used it to simulate a heart condition in a dog intentionally and then fixed it. And so he knew how to construct it because he had had to do it in a dog to simulate a heart condition because he had to do that right. He had to make the problem and then he had to fix it, so he knew how to do this.

So Vivian Thomas was the one who worked on those two, somewhere into 200 to 300 dogs trying to first induce a tetralogy of flow sort of condition. He wasn't able to completely replicate that, two of the four defects he was able to, but he couldn't completely replicate all four. But he created these situations and then fixed them. And he was the one, he was the one to do all that.

We mentioned in the last episode that it was practiced two or three hundred times by Vivian Thomas. Yeah. He was the one doing this, not Laylock. Laylock was not the one practicing on dogs, all just Vivian Thomas. And by the way, the first dog that survived the procedure, who was actually like Thomas's pet for a while, was named Anna. And her picture was hung in the halls of Johns Hopkins. That's nice. Which is pretty cool. I think that's pretty cool. Pretty cool dog. Yeah. I was hoping you would say Marmaduc, because that would explain

so much. And that's the history of Marmaduc. And that's why they don't throw that dog on the street. I said, this is a hero. So once Thomas had perfected the procedure in dogs, it was kind of up to Blalock to do it in humans, because at the time it would have been illegal for Thomas to do any surgery. He would not have been allowed to. Certainly, at the university level, and I can imagine there would have been state officials, government officials who would have gotten involved. So they weren't, they weren't going to be able to break that barrier. But Blaleck could only do it if Thomas basically told him how because he was done with all the experience tonight.

Exactly. Throughout all of those trials on dogs, Blalock had only ever participated once, and it was as Vivian Thomas' assistant. So they were pretty sure they were ready to do it. They actually had a patient, the first patient that they tried it on who had been there sick in the hospital for a while and they were worried wasn't going to make it much longer. And that's when finally, Blalock said, listen, we're going to do surgery. We're going to operate on a heart, which was again a huge deal.

And we're going to see if we can fix this. So Thomas wasn't allowed to do the procedure, but Blalock got everything set up and actually Thomas wasn't gonna even attend. Really? At first. He was like, I'm afraid I'll make him too nervous. I'm just gonna wait outside the theater and find out how it goes. And Blalock was like, whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no right behind me, you're going to stand on this stool directly over my right hand shoulder and you're going to talk me through this whole thing. Jesus. Imagine this scene. Because I mean, this was a time where there were operating theaters and probably visiting surgeons watching the procedure.

Imagine that scene. You've got Alfred Blalock, who is supposed to be this world-renowned surgeon standing there at the operating table scrubbed in. He's got his texts and his nurses and his anesthesiologists and everybody all surrounding, you know, to do the procedure and over his shoulder, not touching anything, not scrubbed in, not going to do anything, but standing directly over his shoulder, leaning over into his field and telling him what to do over his shoulder leaning over into his field and telling him what to do is Vivian Thomas. And this would have been the first time I'm certain that most of these surgeons would ever have seen a black man in the OR. And not only is he there, he is telling this world-renowned surgeon.

And the surgeon is looking back at him and saying, do those sutures look good Vivian? Does this look right? Are you sure? Am I connecting this right and correcting him? No, no, no, not that direction Alfred. Go the other direction. Wow. So it was amazing and we've already talked about that. Obviously the procedure was successful. It took him a while to perfect it, but it was successful. And the shunt is rightly known as the is the Blalock Thomas Tossig Shunt. Maybe even Thomas Blalock, you could probably flip those technically. And Thomas actually even made the needles for the first procedure. Really? Got the silk from his own lab and made the needles because they had to make them little.

So after they did the procedure and they did more procedures and they got tons of attention for it as we've already mentioned, the medical community just went wild over this. Blalock was given more respect, but he wasn't really quick to share it with Thomas. As I already alluded to, a lot of the papers describing the technique and the results and even like photos of the surgical team, no mention of Vivian Thomas, no mention of all the work he did, no mention the fact that he really developed the procedure. Yeah, that he told him how to do it. Despite this, Thomas continued to do his work and his work got much more demanding because there was a huge flood of patients at this point

that showed up at Johns Hopkins with their sick children saying, I understand you can fix this problem. At the time, they would mostly call them blue babies was kind of like the common of the colloquial expression. So people showing up all the time with blue babies saying, please help us. We don't know where else to go. He was working 16 hour days doing all of this

as well as doing all of these blood tests and labs and all of this other kind of work that he was expected to do. In addition to, you know, telling Blalock how to do every one of these surgeries, he would have to stay up all night monitoring experiments. And he in all of his spare time was reading anatomy and physiology books because he didn't have that degree that he had always wanted, but he wanted all that information anyway. He never wanted that to hold him back. In this time, he actually began developing even more procedures

on the heart so specifically a lot of cardiac procedures and as part of his job He also began training more Technicians and it's actually really cool. He took this opportunity to train technicians to bring more Black to bring more black surgical assistance and technicians into the field. He went and sought out people to say, you know what, I can teach you how to do this and you are capable of doing this. And you know, this could be a really great thing. And so he took that opportunity he had had and passed that on, which is really a beautiful thing that he did. And then of course, he also taught the procedures to residents.

Some of the world's most renowned cardiac surgeons trained under Vivian Thomas, who again, has only a high school education. Like, didn't cool Lee, who would later go on to perform the first implantation of an artificial heart trained under Vivian Thomas. He trained Hopkins first, black resident Levi Watkins, and then assisted him in placing the first defibrillator,

the first implanted defibrillator done by Vivian Thomas and Levi Watkins. He won cool stories. He, the elevator operator at Hopkins, he went and sought him out and said, listen, I can teach you how to do this stuff. You can do this. And this is a better life for you and your family.

If you take the time to learn how to do this stuff. So his name was Raymond Lee. He taught him to be a technician. He would go on to become a physician's assistant and be part of the team that would assist in the first double heart lung transplant and a famous separation of conjoined twins that was done at Hopkins later on. Now, through all of this, he was still paid very little, especially considering the caliber of work that he was doing.

And he actually had to work part-time sometimes as a bartender, specifically at parties hosted by Alfred Blaylock. Really? That was the only way he ever attended any of his affairs was as a bartender there serving his surgeon friends. The surgeons that he would train in the day, the residents that he would train had to do procedures all day long and teach.

He'd have to go serve them drinks in the evening. His salary was about 12 bucks a week, kind of for a reference. Eventually, this was corrected. Laylock lobbied on his behalf to have his salary raised. They kind of created a tier in the salary ladder for people who were doing work. They were surgical tech work, but it was beyond that. So it was the highest-paid surgical tech position because they created it specifically for him

because they recognized that he was not making nearly as much as he should have been for what he was doing. His wife would later talk about him, Vivian Thomas' wife Clara, that he always considered going back to college, Like throughout all this time, as he became more famous and helped train more people and more well-known and well respected, he kept to him with the idea of, should I go back to college in med school

and get the degrees and do it? But it just never happened. It was just never the right time. He, at every turn, he made the decision to support his family instead, make sure that his kids got the degrees he didn't get to get Yeah, and when he actually Truly investigated it. He was looking at not finishing College and med school until he would turn 50

It would be the year of his 50th birthday and he said is why his wife said he just found it to discouraging and he decided not to go for it It makes sense in 1968 a lot of the surgeons he had trained, who were known as by the way the Old Hands Club. Huh. Sorry, I don't mean to say a shade. Sometimes us doctors really like ourselves, don't we? So the Old Hands Club commissioned a portrait of him in 1968 to be hung in Johns Hopkins kind of a cross from Blaylocks, which was a nice representation because of

he wrote about in his autobiography the years that they spent sitting across the lab bench from one another looking at each other trying to figure out as they both pondered how to solve different problems. So in 1976 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the school, and was finally able to be called doctor by all of the residents and students that were training under him already, and thinking of him as a doctor, just finally he was able to get that title.

He was added to the faculty of the school of medicine as well at this point. In 2005, I think this is really cool. Hopkins began dividing incoming medical students into four different colleges and they named each college after four of their famous grads. And the colleges are Tossigs, Sabin, Nathan's, and Thomas. It's one of the four colleges you can be in. Wow, that's cool.

It's really true. There's a movie based on his life, if you're interested. I, in addition to his autobiography, which is called Pioneering Research and Surgical Shock and Cardiovascular Surgery. Not the most. I wouldn't say that's the most intriguing title. I'm out of pain. Don't let it fool you. It's an amazing story, so it's worth the read.

But there is also a movie called Something the Lord made, which is based on his life. Most definitely Alannarckman. Yeah, you've seen it. No, but I looked it up on IMDB. Very good. Sounds smart. Do you know? I got too honest. Do you know why it's called that? No, I don't. I think this is a cool story. I looked up the origin of that title, something the Lord made. It's a reference to a comment that was made at one point by Blalock after Thomas had actually sutured up a defect between two chambers of the heart and Blalock was looking over at the the suture line

because Thomas was an amazing surgeon. I don't know if I've underlined that enough. Despite the fact that he wasn't actually able to operate on humans, he was amazingly technically skilled. His hands were amazing. And when he did sutures, when he did these surgeries on dogs, I mean, the precision, the efficiency, not a movement was wasted.

I mean, everything about it was beauty and perfection from a surgical standpoint. And so at one point, he's doing these sutures and Blalock looks over and he's trying to find the line, the suture line that he has just put in and he can't even see in the tissue, in the heart tissue, where the sutures have been placed. And he said, well, Thomas, this looks like something that the Lord, something the Lord made. Meaning it looks, you know, just as good as the original. Oh, I thought that was, that was really beautiful.

That is beautiful. A beautiful story said. I mean, there are tons of awards, scholarships, there's a medical arts academy name for him. He's had lots of recognition since then, but still not enough because In the story the Blaylock Tossig Shunt is still called that sometimes and it shouldn't be if you hear someone call that in your daily conversations Make sure you correct them. Yeah, cuz I mean if Vivian Thomas did that procedure and in a different time and place

He would have been the surgeon performing it on humans as well. Well, Sidney, thank you for filling me in on that. I'm glad we could expand on that story. Thank you for sharing it with me. How much is the movie now? I think we should watch the movie. I think it would be excellent. I want to tell you a story. Vivian Thomas. I want to say thank you to the taxpayer for letting the user song medicines as the intro and outro program. Hey, this is exciting.

We're going to be at the Philadelphia podcast festival and you could come and see us if you wanted to. All you got to do is go to bit.ly for itthslash-solbones-filly. And there's a code P, P, F, 17. But you have to enter during this pre-sale period, which I think probably ends today for listening to this on Thursday. But I think after that, you can just go to that link. That's bit.ly-forthslash-solbones-filly. It's going to be the Tricardero Theater, Sunday, July 16th. Dores are at 130, it shows at two, and it's tickets around 24 bucks. So you should come out and see us, another great Max Fun Show, the Flapp House,

is gonna be performing after us at 5 p.m. so make sure you pick up tickets to their show as well. And you can find out more by going to the website for the Philadelphia podcast festival, which you can find on Google by Google like it, because I don't know that off the top of my head. So come see us. Come see us. Seats are still available for that. I hope you'll come on out. Is there anything else in? I think that'll do it. Well folks, that's going to do it for us. Thank you so much. And until next week, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. As always don't drill a hole in your head. Alright!