Vivien Thomas Role Model

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People have role models in the world and want to grow up just like them. They want to meet the someday in real life and hang out with them and just be friends with them and they will want to hang out in their house and party or something. My role model is Vivien Thomas he was the man that for the cure for blue babies. If he did not find a cure than babies with the heart would die for blue babies so that is why he is my role model. Vivien Thomas was an African-American surgical technician who developed the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was the assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. He served as supervisor of the surgical laboratories …show more content…

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-Taurus shunt had been performed on more than 200 patients at Hopkins, with parents bringing their suffering children from thousands of miles away. Thomas's 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. 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 Vivian 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. Vivian Thomas was a great role model for me he was a great man and found the cure for the blue baby’s. Surgeons like Cooley, along with Alex Heller, 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