Who is Vivien Thomas?

Vivien Thomas was son to a carpenter and grandson to a slave. He was born in Louisiana in 1910 and moved to Nashville as a child at a time when Jim Crow segregated blacks and whites. Yet he did not let the era’s institutional racism deter…

What happened to Vivien Thomas in 1930?

In January of 1930, Vivien Thomas took a job in Alfred Blalock’s Vanderbilt University Hospital laboratory. Thomas was supposed to be in his first semester of college, and had planned to become a doctor, but his life savings was wiped out in the stock market crash that set off the Great Depression.

What did Vivien Thomas do at Johns Hopkins University?

Vivien Thomas. He was the 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. He served as supervisor of the surgical laboratories at Johns Hopkins for 35 years.

How long did Vivien Thomas work with Blalock?

Vivien Thomas spent 11 years at Vanderbilt with Blalock before moving to Johns Hopkins. By 1940, the work Blalock had done with Thomas placed Blalock 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.

Vivien T. Thomas. Dr. Vivien Theodore Thomas was born in Lake Providence, Louisiana in 1910. The grandson of a slave, Vivien Thomas attended Pearl High School in Nashville, and graduated with honors in 1929.

What are the Vivien Thomas Young Investigator Awards?

Post his death, various awards and scholarships were given in his name to deserving people, such as the Vivien Thomas Young Investigator Awards that was started in 1996. It is given by the Council on Cardiovascular Surgery and Anesthesiology.