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Vivien Thomas Research Paper

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Do you normally get everything the way you planned? Vivien Thomas was an African-American man who saved thousands of babies' lives. Was everything easy for him? No, it wasn’t, he worked almost his entire life so that he could go to college, then the Great Depression came around and he lost everything. When Vivien Thomas lost his money in the Great Depression. Because he lost his money, he couldn’t attend college. Since Vivien lost his job and money and couldn’t go to college, he worked to get a new job at Vanderbilt University as a lab assistant for Dr. Alfred Blalock. While he was working with Blalock, they studied shock together and came up with a treatment for it. Although Vivien was working as a lab assistant, he was paid as much as a janitor just because he was black. News got around that they had come up with a treatment for shock, so Johns Hopkins hospital asked Blalock to come work at the hospital. Blalock told them only if Thomas could go with him. They obviously wanted him so they agreed to let Vivien come to Johns Hopkins hospital. …show more content…

She asked them to complete a really tough task, she asked them to find a way to create a new passage from the heart to the lungs which had never successfully been done before. This is called blue baby syndrome. Blue baby syndrome is something that happens to some babies when they are born which doesn’t allow enough air to get to parts of your body in which, they turn blue. So the task they were given was to create a new blood way from your heart to your lungs. Thomas worked 16 hours each day trying to find a way to create a procedure, he would take a stack of medical books home each night study. Vivien finally found a procedure, but he needed to try it on something besides a person first, so he tested it on

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