I found this to be an excellent and inspiring story. I have to admit I was disappointed that there was no indication (and I'm sure that is because it didn't happen) that the two doctors Vivien had worked so closely with and whose life saving surgery was successful because of his experiments never insisted that he also be given credit. I thought that Gwendolyn Hooks presented the obstacles Vivien Thomas faced because of his race with clarity and dignity. It remained up to the doctors he has subsequently trained in his procedure to do that in 1971, and finally, in 1976, Johns Hopkins awarded Vivien an honorary doctorate and appointed him to the faculty as Instructor of Surgery (with the appropriate salary, hopefully). Taussig? No, not until 26 years after the first successful blue baby surgery. Was Vivien's procedure a success? Yes, it was, with articles about it in Time and Life magazines, and eventually a Nobel Prize nomination. Thanks to his patient and meticulous research and experiments, Vivien was able to develop a procedure for delivering blood directly to the lungs to provide oxygen to a baby's body, using the tiny needle Vivien invented to make the tiny stitches needed to suture the arteries involved. Helen Taussig's research on 'blue babies,' patients born with a heart defect that made their skin appear bluish because they did not get enough oxygen and usually died.

Maryland is a southern state, and Johns Hopkins was more segregated that Vanderbilt was, so Vivien faced a more strident racism than he was used to.īut it was there that Vivien got involved in the research Dr. Blalock moved to Johns Hopkins in Maryland, Vivien and his wife and two daughters went with him.

Blalock, asking for and receiving the same paid as white technicians. But when he learned that his official job title was janitor because he was African American, he was insulted. Blalock, Vivien learned how to write lab reports and conduct experiments with the same kind of meticulous care he had used while working for his father, so it wasn't long before he was doing his own experiments. Alfred Blalock's Vanderbilt University laboratory. Luckily, he was able to get a job as a lab assistant working in Dr. Vivien saved his money for medical school, but by the time he was ready to go, the stock market had crashed and he lost all his savings. As a teen, Vivien helped his father, a master carpenter in Nashville, Tennessee, who taught him the value of patient measuring, cutting and fitting together pieces of wood, skills that would definitely be valuable to Vivien later on. When Vivien Thomas was a young boy, his dream was to enter the medical field. Tiny Stitches is an excellent picture book for older readers about this fascinating life-saving pioneer in heart surgery.

Tiny Stitches by Gwendolyn Hooks