Portrait of Vivien Thomas by Bob Gee

After reading Jim Murphy’s Breakthrough! How Three People Saved “Blue Babies” and Changed Medicine Forever, our current nonfiction review of the week, I mentioned it to my cousin Dr. Anne Murphy, a pediatric cardiologist at Johns Hopkins. It turns out she knew two of those three, which is both pretty neat and means that, yes, we are old. My pal Karen Walsh at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt kindly sent Anne a copy of no-relation-Murphy’s book, and here are her thoughts:

“I walk by Vivien Thomas’s portrait every day. As a self-professed Johns Hopkins Medicine ‘lifer’, the story of the Blalock-Taussig procedure is ingrained in my DNA, and  I was delighted to read the book Breakthrough which recounts this story.  Although Dr. Alfred Blalock died before I arrived at Johns Hopkins, I was fortunate enough to meet Dr. Helen Taussig and found her to be energetic and feisty.  I also heard at first hand from her former patients about her devotion to those in her care.  Mr. Vivien Thomas was still teaching medical students in my day. During our two-month rotation in surgery, we students spent an afternoon a week in the surgical labs, where Mr. Thomas was a distinguished, soft-spoken instructor who took a particular interest in my classmates who were skilled with their hands. It is tragic that he did not initially receive recognition for his crucial role in this remarkable advance that has saved many lives over the 70 years since it was first performed.  I am grateful that this book introduces this remarkable man to a new generation of readers.”

Anne also told me that Dr. Robert Gross, presented in Murphy’s book as a gifted surgeon but early discourager of Taussig, operated on my younger brother Rand when he was a baby. (Did you know that, Rand?) So he couldn’t have been all bad.

I spent much of my childhood in insomniac nights, immersed in my parent’s collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, each volume of which, it seemed, contained at least one gripping nonfiction account of one medical breakthrough or another. Ten-year-old me would have loved this book just as much as I do now.

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