Unlike the very popular “Hidden Figures” movie that exposed the hidden history of three women at NASA the HBO made for television “Something the Lord Made” staring Mos Def as Vivien Thomas exposed many to the history making Thomas but not as broad as the women of NASA.
“Something the Lord Made” is a film that tells the story of the 34-year partnership that begins in Depression Era Nashville in 1930 when Alfred Blalock (Alan Rickman) hires Vivien Thomas (Mos Def) as an assistant in his Vanderbilt University lab, expecting him to perform janitorial work. But Thomas’ remarkable manual dexterity and intellectual acumen confound Blalock’s expectations, and Thomas rapidly becomes indispensable as a research partner to Blalock in his forays into heart surgery.
The film traces the two men’s work when they move in 1943 from Vanderbilt to Johns Hopkins, an institution where the only Black employees are janitors and where Thomas must enter by the back door. Together, they attack the congenital heart defect of Tetralogy of Fallot, also known as Blue Baby Syndrome, and in so doing they open the field of heart surgery.
Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 – November 26, 1985) 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 Nashville, Tenn, and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. He served as supervisor of the surgical laboratories at Johns Hopkins for 35 years. In 1976 Hopkins awarded him an honorary doctorate and named him an instructor of surgery for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.[2]
Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country’s most prominent surgeons.
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