<v Speaker 1>Let me take you inside an operating room. But it's

<v Speaker 1>not just any old OR. Inside this OR, everything is

<v Speaker 1>about to change. It's one of the ORs at Johns

<v Speaker 1>Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore on the 29th of November, 1944.

<v Speaker 1>On the table is a baby. Her name is Eileen Saxon.

<v Speaker 1>Little Eileen is just 15 months old, and she's blue.

<v Speaker 1>Blue lips, blue fingers, blue skin, all because her tiny

<v Speaker 1>heart is malformed and can't get enough oxygen into her blood.

<v Speaker 1>The doctors call them blue babies. And on any other day,

<v Speaker 1>in any other OR, up until this moment, a blue

<v Speaker 1>baby met a soon-to-be deceased baby. There's nothing anyone can do.

<v Speaker 1>There's never been anything anyone can do. But this isn't

<v Speaker 1>an ordinary OR. Standing at the table is Dr. Alfred Blaylock,

<v Speaker 1>one of the most celebrated surgeons in America. He's about

<v Speaker 1>to attempt an operation no one has ever performed on

<v Speaker 1>a living child. To reroute the vessels around that failing

<v Speaker 1>little heart and turn a blue baby back to pink.

<v Speaker 1>The future of heart surgery is about to begin right here,

<v Speaker 1>right now, in this OR. Now, if you're picturing this

<v Speaker 1>in your mind and you see Dr. Blaylock standing by

<v Speaker 1>the table, scalpel in hand, staring down at that little girl,

<v Speaker 1>zoom out a bit because you're not seeing everything. Look

<v Speaker 1>behind Dr. Blaylock at the man standing on a small

<v Speaker 1>step stool so he can see over Blaylock's shoulder. He's

<v Speaker 1>not another surgeon. In fact, he's not a doctor at all.

<v Speaker 1>And yet Dr. Blaylock, the great surgeon, the man whose

<v Speaker 1>name is about to go in every medical textbook for

<v Speaker 1>all time, keeps glancing back over his shoulder at him

<v Speaker 1>and saying, is this right? Is this how it goes?

<v Speaker 1>He was asking because the man on the stool is

<v Speaker 1>the guy who invented this operation. He had performed it

<v Speaker 1>in a lab some 200 times. Dr. Blaylock had even

<v Speaker 1>assisted him one of those times. The man on that

<v Speaker 1>stool is Vivian Thomas. Oh, he's an employee, just not

<v Speaker 1>one you'd expect to see in the OR during a

<v Speaker 1>groundbreaking historic procedure. Especially if you saw the paperwork in

<v Speaker 1>his file. Because according to that paperwork, Vivian Thomas is

<v Speaker 1>a janitor. I'm Jerry Broadway. From Hey Dad Productions, this

<v Speaker 1>is Anonymous America. Vivian Thomas grew up in Nashville, Tennessee.

<v Speaker 1>He was a skilled young carpenter, the grandson of slaves,

<v Speaker 1>and a gifted student with a plan. He wanted to

<v Speaker 1>go to college, and then he wanted to go to

<v Speaker 1>medical school and become a doctor. He had the mind

<v Speaker 1>for it, and he had the discipline. And he had

<v Speaker 1>saved his money dollar by careful dollar so that he'd

<v Speaker 1>be able to pay his own way. But when the

<v Speaker 1>stock market crashed in 1929, ultimately causing Vivian's bank to fail,

<v Speaker 1>every single penny that he had saved was just gone overnight.

<v Speaker 1>The plan died before it ever even began. So Vivian

<v Speaker 1>took the only work he could find, a job as

<v Speaker 1>a lab assistant to a young doctor at Vanderbilt University

<v Speaker 1>Medical Center named Alfred Blaylock. The paperwork classified him as

<v Speaker 1>a janitor and paid him like one. He was expected

<v Speaker 1>to sweep up and tend the animals. Except Blaylock quickly

<v Speaker 1>discovered that this janitor had hands and a mind unlike

<v Speaker 1>anyone in that building. Within just a few weeks, Vivian

<v Speaker 1>was running delicate experiments. Within a couple of years, he

<v Speaker 1>was performing surgical procedures on his own that trained doctors

<v Speaker 1>struggled to master. He taught himself anatomy, physiology, chemistry, everything

<v Speaker 1>a medical student would learn without ever going to med school.

<v Speaker 1>He and Blalock did groundbreaking work that would go on

<v Speaker 1>to save countless lives on the battlefields during the Second

<v Speaker 1>World War. When Blalock was offered the top surgical post

<v Speaker 1>at Johns Hopkins in 1941, he took the job on

<v Speaker 1>one condition. Vivian Thomas had to be part of the deal.

<v Speaker 1>And so Vivian arrived in Baltimore, a black man in

<v Speaker 1>a segregated hospital, a research genius still carried on the books...

<v Speaker 1>As a tech, it was at Johns Hopkins that a

<v Speaker 1>pediatric cardiologist, Dr. Helen Taussig, came to Dr. Blalock with

<v Speaker 1>the problem of the blue babies. And it was Vivian

<v Speaker 1>Thomas who went into the lab, spent months and hundreds

<v Speaker 1>of operations working on how to do the impossible. He

<v Speaker 1>even invented the tools for the surgery. He devised a technique,

<v Speaker 1>and he proved it could be done. Which is why

<v Speaker 1>on that November day in 1944, when the great Dr.

<v Speaker 1>Blaylock finally opened the chest of a dying baby to

<v Speaker 1>try it on a human being for the very first time,

<v Speaker 1>he asked Vivian Thomas to stand on a stool behind him,

<v Speaker 1>look over his shoulder, and talk him through it step

<v Speaker 1>by step. The teacher, standing behind the student, in a

<v Speaker 1>room he technically wasn't allowed to be in during a procedure.

<v Speaker 1>The operation was a massive success. The baby turned pink again,

<v Speaker 1>and the news went out around the world. The Blalock

<v Speaker 1>Tossig Shunt, they called it. Surgeons came from everywhere to

<v Speaker 1>learn it. And it was Vivian Thomas, the janitor, who

<v Speaker 1>taught most of them, guiding the future leaders of American surgery.

<v Speaker 1>And for his effort, for many years, Vivian Thomas was

<v Speaker 1>paid so little that he literally tended bar at Dr.

<v Speaker 1>Blalock's private parties to make ends meet. sometimes serving drinks

<v Speaker 1>to the very doctors he had trained earlier that day.

<v Speaker 1>His name appeared in none of the early papers. The

<v Speaker 1>world looked at Dr. Blaylock and thanked him. The world

<v Speaker 1>had never heard of Vivian Thomas. But the story's not finished.

<v Speaker 1>The surgeons Thomas trained never forgot him. And in 1976,

<v Speaker 1>more than three decades later, Johns Hopkins University awarded Vivian

<v Speaker 1>Thomas an honorary doctorate and named him to its faculty.

<v Speaker 1>The self-taught carpenter's assistant, the man they all thought was

<v Speaker 1>a janitor, was now officially Dr. Vivian Thomas. They commissioned

<v Speaker 1>a portrait of him in oils and hung it in

<v Speaker 1>the great hall of the institution directly across from the

<v Speaker 1>portrait of Alfred Blaylock. The two men face to face

<v Speaker 1>on the wall forever. Where every young surgeon walking those

<v Speaker 1>halls would have to ask, hey, who's that guy? And

<v Speaker 1>someone would get to say, oh, that's Dr. Vivian Thomas.

<v Speaker 1>He's the guy who invented open heart surgery on babies

<v Speaker 1>from a step stool. A janitor who invented the procedure

<v Speaker 1>to save blue babies. Then stood behind the surgeon who

<v Speaker 1>did it first to make sure he got it right.

<v Speaker 1>That's Vivian Thomas, and that's Anonymous America.