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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Tracy Wilson. And I'm Holly. Today we have the second episode in our not exactly a two parter about the development of a surgical treatment for blue babies, but is children who have cyanotic heart conditions, particularly tetralogy of below. The earlier episode was on Dr. Helen Tausig, and these two episodes are really pretty much standalone. But Doctor Tasks name is going to come up a lot in this one and the like.

Anatomical detail about what Tetralogy of Flo is we talked about earlier. I think you can understand the surgery without knowing all that detail, if you like. But I didn't I didn't listen to that one yet. It'll be OK. Today, though, we are going to talk about surgical technician Vivian Thomas. Thomas was the one who really worked out how to do this surgery. And when Dr. Alfred Blaylock performed it for the first time, Thomas was standing behind him, walking him through it.

Blaylock was the surgeon in chief at Johns Hopkins at this point. And Thomas's presence and the operating room was baffling or maybe even offensive to other observers. This was in 1944, and Thomas was a black man working at an institution whose only other black employees did janitorial work. He also had not ever attended medical school or even college, although Thomas's work that we're talking about today involved research on animals. And we're not going to have a ton of detail about that, but it is in there.

Vivian Theodore Thomas was born on August 29th, 1910, in Lake Providence, Louisiana. A lot of sources list his place of birth as New Iberia, and it is not entirely clear what is behind that discrepancy. The two cities are well over 200 miles apart. And Thomas's autobiography says New Providence, his autobiography also says that he liked to joke that his parents named him Vivian because they thought they were going to have a girl. They'd already had a daughter, followed by two sons and thought another daughter was on the way.

Vivian's father, William, was a carpenter and his mother, Mary, was a seamstress.

I don't know if he was named after any one in particular, but that was a story you like to tell. Not sure what his parents thought of that story when Vivian was to the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee. And as he got a little older, Vivian started helping his father with the carpentry business. In 1929, Vivian graduated with honors from Pearl High School, which was the only high school in the area that admitted black students and which also had just an excellent reputation.

He dreamed of going to medical school and in addition to his carpentry work for his father, he had taken a job as an orderly to try to earn enough money for it. Vivian also spent his summers doing maintenance work at Fisk University. Later in life, he described a formative experience he had at this job. After he replaced some worn out flooring, his foreman told him that his work was unacceptable. The foreman could still see where the repair had been made.

Vivian did it over, and later his foreman pointed out that he could have just done it right. The first time Vivian really took this to heart.

And the fall of nineteen twenty nine, Vivian Thomas enrolled in the premed program at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College, which is now Tennessee State University, the historically black Land Grant University. He hoped to go from there to Mary Medical College following the 1910 release of the Flexner Report, which we talked about on the show earlier this year. This was one of only two remaining medical schools that accepted black students.

But the Great Depression made Thomas's medical school aspirations impossible. The bank where he had deposited his savings closed and he lost it all. Carpentry work dried up as well. And he started working a collection of odd jobs just to try to make ends meet.

In early 1930, Thomas asked his friend Charles Manlove, who worked at Vanderbilt University, whether he knew of any job openings there. And Manlove answered that he did know about a job assisting in a laboratory. But the doctor running that lab, Dr. Alfred Blalock, was, in his words, held to work with.

So we're just a little on Blaylock. He had been born in Georgia in 1899. He attended Georgia Military Academy and served in the army during World War One before going on to the University of Georgia. From there, he studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Blaylock was not a particularly great student, not bad, but also not exceptional. Consequently, he lost the general surgery residency that he wanted because his grades just weren't good enough.

So Blaylock started a residency in urology instead. After a while, he did manage to move back over to general surgery. But he had some kind of dispute with the. Surgical residents and ultimately resigned, he wound up finishing his surgical residency at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, which is the place he described as a backwater. After he finished that residency, Blaylock continued to work at Vanderbilt in addition to his work as a surgeon. He was researching the nature of shock at the time.

The prevailing theory was that shock brought on by trauma to the body was caused by toxins, and doctors did not really know how to treat it. So after finding out about Vivian Thomas's background, including that he wanted to go to medical school, Blaylock hired him. But he lacks research needed. Really careful monitoring. So he wanted somebody who could set up and monitor experiments in the lab. While Blaylock was treating patients in the hospital, Blaylock described it to Thomas as wanting someone he could train to do anything that he could do and maybe some things he couldn't.

Thomas started this new job on February 10th, 1930. The pay was twelve dollars a week. The previous summer, he had earned twenty dollars a week as a carpenter. So at first Thomas was a little reluctant. At the same time, he imagined that this was temporary. The carpentry jobs were going to come back with warmer weather in the spring. So he saw this is just something to carry him over.

In the meantime, most of Blalock's research was being conducted on dogs and Thomas started out weighing them, taking measurements, anesthetizing them, preparing them for surgical procedures, monitoring them and keeping records. But it quickly became clear that his abilities went beyond all that. He started learning to make incisions and to suture. And Dr. Joseph Beard, who was one of Blalock's research fellows, tutored Thomas in anatomy, physiology and chemistry. A couple of months into Thomas's work with Blaylock, he made some kind of error by the time he wrote his autobiography many years later to describe this, he no longer remembered the details of exactly what he had done wrong.

But when Blaylock discovered it, he was livid, shouting and swearing in what Thomas described as almost a temper tantrum full of foul language. After Blaylock left the room, Thomas asked one of the lab assistants how often that happened. The answer was any time Blaylock had previously had a bad night, meaning that he had drunk to excess. So Thomas went into Blalock's office and told him that while he was doing his best, that he might make mistakes sometimes and that he could not work for Blaylock if he was going to be spoken to that way every time it happened.

Thomas went on to say that he had not been raised to use or to take that kind of language. Although the other assistants expressed some doubts that Blalock's behavior would ever improve. Thomas said that he never faced this kind of an outburst from Blaylock again, just in case you're thinking, hey, wasn't this during prohibition?

Yup. The answer was yes. Blaylock had an illicit keg of whiskey hidden in the lab, and eventually his and Thomas's relationship progressed to sometimes having a drink together. But they only socialize this way within the confines of the lab, always out of public view.

By 1933, Thomas had reached the point that he would prepare a dog for surgery and open and close, while Blaylock only did the actual surgical procedure that they were developing. And then this progressed to Thomas doing the surgical procedures himself from beginning to end. That started one day when Blaylock had asked for an animal to be prepared for surgery, but then he didn't arrive in the lab. As expected, Thomas's work went way beyond what other technicians in the lab were typically doing.

Blaylock would have an idea. Thomas would work out and document how to do it before teaching it to Blaylock. And Blaylock relied on Thomas's work extensively. He published papers that were based on techniques that Thomas had developed and perfected, and he used data that Thomas had gathered. When drafting papers. Blaylock would call on Thomas to check his wording to make sure that what he was describing was accurate, since Thomas was the one who had the most thorough knowledge.

In 1933, Blaylock delivered a groundbreaking lecture on the nature of traumatic shock. Based on their work together, he connected shock to blood and fluid loss and described it as treatable with blood transfusions or plasma, or if neither of those was available with sailing. That same year, Vivian Thomas married Clara Flanders, they would go on to have two daughters, Olga Fei, born in 1934 and Theodosia born in 1938. When the girls were still young, the family moved and we're going to get into that after a sponsor break.

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The research that Alfred Blaylock, Vivien Thomas and others in the research lab at Vanderbilt were doing in the 1930s and into 1940 led to life saving treatment for wounded soldiers during World War Two. But Thanasis contributions were really not acknowledged at the time. His pay was also low enough that he had to moonlight as a bartender to make ends meet. Secluded at parties hosted by Dr. Blaylock, where Thomas sometimes had to serve drinks to his colleagues from the lab. Over the years, the possibility of going to medical school faded away.

Even after the end of the Great Depression, there just wasn't enough money to save for school while also supporting a family. Even though Thomas was doing the work of a senior research fellow, he was being paid and classified as a janitor. When Thomas realized this and asked for a raise, he was given one. But he wasn't sure if he was moved into a technician's position or if he was just being paid more and was still being listed as a janitor.

In 1937, Blaylock was offered a job as chief of surgery at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, and this would have been a huge step up for his career. But when Blaylock asked about bringing Thomas with him as his assistant, the hospital made it clear that it did not hire black people. Blaylock turned down the job not because of any kind of sense of fairness, but because he knew that Thomas was critical to his work. In nineteen thirty eight, Blaylock and Thomas started researching pulmonary hypertension.

Their experiment involved rerouting the blood flow around the pulmonary artery and back into the lungs. It did not work as they had hoped, but that will come up again later in the episode. In 1941, Blaylock was offered another job, this time at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, again as surgeon in chief. Once again, Blaylock asked about bringing Thomas with him as his assistant, Johns Hopkins.

Only black employees at the time were working in janitorial roles, but they ultimately agreed. But Thomas wasn't sure that he wanted to go.

It meant relocating his whole family from Nashville to Baltimore, a city that he had never been to and where they didn't know anybody. But it also seemed unlikely that he could find a job related to medicine without his connection to Blaylock. And with World War Two looming, Thomas thought the job might offer him some protection. If he were drafted, he might wind up in a medical unit. Ultimately, Thomas did decide to go with Blaylock, and this move turned out to be a lot harder than expected.

Blaylock had negotiated their salaries without a clear sense of how much more expensive Baltimore was. The Nashville. It's affected both of them, obviously, but it affected Thomas, who was making a lot less money, a lot more profoundly, and it turned out that Thomas pay just was not enough to support his family.

The two cities were also quite different for their black residents in Nashville. The Thomases had lived in a thriving black neighborhood with black owned businesses and a robust middle class. But most of Baltimore's black residents were living in overcrowded tenements and many were living in poverty. Thomas described many of the apartments he saw while looking for a place to live in the only neighborhoods where he would be allowed to live as barely fit for human habitation.

Johns Hopkins refused to increase Thomas's pay from what had originally been negotiated, so Blaylock convinced neurosurgeon Walter Dandi to make a gift to the medical school earmarked for Thomas's salary. That made Thomas's living situation more comfortable in terms of finances. But he was still having to face segregation and racism at work every day. Johns Hopkins treated black patients, but they entered the facility through a separate door. Some departments had segregated wards and others saw black and white patients. On different days of the week, blood banks and morgues were also segregated by race.

Also, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, the only other black employees there were doing things like janitorial work. And so after being openly stared at while walking through the building, wearing his white lab coat, Thomas decided just not to wear it outside of the lab again.

The lab was the old country and laboratory, and it was also in disrepair. Thomas had to repaint, make repairs and order new equipment before it was really workable. Once they were settled in, Blaylock and Thomas began working on finding ways to treat narrowed aorta's in babies and children, including developing techniques to suture blood vessels together. In 1942, pediatric cardiologist Dr. Helen Tausig approached Dr. Blaylock about trying to find a surgical treatment for cyanotic heart disease or heart conditions that caused the skin in the mucous membranes to look blue because of a lack of oxygen.

This is also known as Blue Baby Syndrome. In particular, she was interested in a treatment for Tetralogy of Fellow. And as we talked about in more detail on the episode on Tausig, this is a collection of four congenital malformations that causes blood to circulate through the body without carrying enough oxygen and without treatment. About half of children born with tetralogy of flu die before their third birthday, and the vast majority don't live to adulthood. There's a bit of debate about who came up with which piece of the idea for a surgical treatment for this condition.

Various versions credit Blaylock, Tausig and Dr. Edwards Park, who is chief of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, with specific details, including which specific blood vessels to focus on. But it's generally agreed that Tausig suggested that Blaylock look for a surgical treatment for the tetralogy of flu and that Thomas was the one who worked out the process and by worked out the process. Blaylock and Thomas's 1938 attempts at inducing pulmonary hypertension provided a starting point. So first, Thomas worked out how to surgically replicate a condition similar to tetralogy of flow in dogs.

And then he worked out how to connect the subclavian and pulmonary arteries, basically allowing more blood to travel back into the lungs to pick up more oxygen.

It took Thomas two years of work and hundreds of surgeries to perfect this process, starting on dogs and then moving on to human cadavers because there were no suturing needles small enough to work on the blood vessels of babies and small children. Thomas had to manually file them down from larger needles. He also had to improvise suturing silk as no silk had been developed. That was made specifically for working on blood vessels. In addition to all of that, there were worries about whether children who were sick enough to need this surgery could actually survive being anesthetized for it.

Thomas felt pretty confident in the process that he had worked out by late 1944. And we will talk about the first time Blaylock performed it on a human patient after a sponsor break. Hi, I'm Holly Fry. And I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and together we host a show called Stuff You Missed in History Class.

As the name suggests, we talk about some things that maybe either you didn't remember from history class or they weren't covered at all. There have always been women in history. There have always been black people and other people of color. There have always been people all over the LGBTQ spectrum as a part of the historical record. Tracy, we've had some really interesting episodes recently. What's one of your favorites? The history of beekeeping, which we had to abridge, because that's very involved.

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Catch for premiere episode starting Friday, November 6th, featuring the inductions of the Beatles, Stevie Nicks, the Eagles and NWA Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction vault available now with new episodes every Friday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your iPod. Eileen Thaksin was born August 3rd, 1943, seven weeks before her mother was due to give birth and she had tetralogy of flu by the age of 15 months. Her prognosis was grave.

She weighed only nine pounds and she had spent several months living in an oxygen tent. So because this was a brand new surgery that had never been done on a living person, it was inherently incredibly risky. So the surgical team was looking for a patient who simply could not survive without it. Eileen fit that description. Blaylock and Tausig wanted to avoid pressuring Eileen's parents one way or another, but they also wanted them to be able to make an informed decision.

So Blaylock and Tausig carefully explained what was involved in what the risks were, including showing Eileen's parents before and after diagrams. Eileen's parents ultimately agreed to the surgery, which was conducted on November 29th, 1944.

Dr. Blaylock was the surgeon, and Dr. Helen Tausig was also in the operating room standing behind Blaylock. And just to his left was Vivien Thomas, who walked Blaylock through the surgery step by step. Thomas had not planned to attend the surgery at all, but Blaylock wound up sending for him. Blaylock had never actually done this procedure himself. He had seen Thomas do it. He had assisted Thomas on one surgery on a dog. There just had not been time for Blaylock to practice beyond that because Eileen's condition took a turn for the worse.

Eileen survived this surgery, although the first published paper about it describes her post-operative course as, quote, Stormy, she was able to go home about two months later, although she died during a follow up surgery later on in 1945.

By that point, Blaylock had operated on two more human patients, an 11 year old girl on February third and a six and a half year old boy on February 10th. They chose older patients because Eileen's blood vessels had just been so, so tiny. They were less than half the size of the dog's vessels that Thomas had developed this procedure on. Both these procedures were successful, though, and in the February 10th surgery, the patient's coloring dramatically shifted from blue to pink while he was still on the operating table, even though they had only done this surgery three times.

By May of 1945, Blaylock and Tausig were confident enough in the results that they published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Anesthesiologists, nurse anesthetists and people who were part of patient's post-operative care were mentioned in this article. But Vivien Thomas was not. By 1946, medical professionals were calling this the Blaylock Tausig operation, or sometimes just the Blaylock operation. Within a decade, it was the standard treatment for tetralogy of follow. And it's possible that the success with the surgery saved Blalock's career.

He had attempted several complicated surgeries and the months leading up to all this, several of them had not gone very well. And his reliance on a black surgical technician had also raised some eyebrows. Basically, before this, people had started to question his abilities both as a surgeon and as the chief of surgery. But after word started to spread about the success of the Blaylock Tausig operation, new patients flooded Johns Hopkins so many that a portion of the children's surgical ward had to be designated the test room for patients with tetralogy of fellow and other cyanotic conditions.

Vivien Thomas was present in the operating room for the first 100 of these surgeries that Blaylock performed, advising him and correcting all kinds of details like how big the sutures were, how far apart they were, and whether they were in the right direction. If anyone tried to stand behind and to the left of Blaylock, he would tell them that only Vivian was to stand in that spot over the course of six years. Blaylock performed this surgery 1000 times on children with several different cyanotic heart conditions, about seventy five percent of them with tetralogy of Ferlo.

So as we noted earlier, Johns Hopkins did treat black patients, but there were some racial disparities among the children that Blaylock treated for cyanotic heart conditions. Only a few of those first thousand patients were black in a 1977 paper reporting the long term outcomes of these surgeries, Tausig attributed this to a collection of factors that affected black patients. The first was the cyanosis was harder to see in patients who had darker skin. She also noted that doctors who were treating black patients might be less experienced and that families involved might not have the means to pay for the operation or be aware of sources of funding that were available that might help them pay for it.

In 1944, Thomas became lab super. I it had become something of a tradition to use the lab as a veterinary clinic on Friday afternoons, and after a while Thomas became the go to veterinary surgeon for Johns Hopkins faculty and staff. The first dog to survive the blue baby procedure, a dog named Anna, also became something of a laboratory pet under Thomas's care and a public relations phase for the hospital, which faced ongoing vocal criticism from anti vivisectionist for this work in 1946.

Thomas seriously considered leaving Johns Hopkins and moving back to Nashville. Demand for carpenters had really surged during the construction boom that followed World War Two. Thomas had the opportunity for far more lucrative work just before Christmas of that year. Blaylock presented him with an offer that would more than double his salary. After Thomas had already accepted it, Blaylock told him that was going to be the last conversation they would ever be having about his pay. Thomas said he would not have accepted that offer had he known about that condition.

I think it's fair, it's absolutely fair. Kind of infuriates me. They went back and forth about it with Blakelock going back to the Johns Hopkins board of trustees. And in the end, a new salary bracket was created for people like Vivian Thomas, people who are in highly skilled, critically necessary positions, but who didn't have degrees.

Thomas was placed in this bracket, meaning that he wasn't at a dead end in terms of his salary they had before this point, I mean, in addition to, you know, moonlighting as a bartender that we talked about earlier, there was a time when he was also trying to moonlight as a pharmaceutical sales rep.

And with this, they were like, OK, you cannot do this pharmaceutical sales thing anymore as almost a whole separate thing. So Thomas and Blaylock continued to work together. For decades later, Thomas developed a procedure called atrial septet. To me, this involves making a small hole in the wall between the heart's left and right atria. And that can help treat pulmonary hypertension and some congenital heart diseases, including when a person's blood vessels around their heart are transposed.

This procedure is something that Thomas had worked on discreetly. He kept it a secret and showed Blaylock his success only after he was sure that it had worked. This was the procedure that Blaylock described as looking, quote, like something the Lord made that became the title of a 1989 article in The Washingtonian that was many people's first exposure to Vivian Thomas, as well as the title of the HBO film that dramatizes this relationship.

In 1951, Thomas was credited in a published paper for the first time after a visiting fellow from Canada included him among the authors. Not realizing all this social and racial implications involved, other doctors included Thomas in the years that followed. Although he was never credited on Blalock's publications.

In 1959, Blaylock turned 60 and Thomas was not invited to the faculty party in his honor. Some of the organizers sneaked him in and he watched from behind the plants, which is something that he later described as humiliating.

Blaylock retired from Johns Hopkins five years later, and as he was mulling over how to spend his time after his retirement, Thomas said not to include him in those plans.

For most of their 34 years working together, Blaylock had just assumed that they were a package when entertaining other job and research offers, thinking that if he left Johns Hopkins, Thomas would obviously go to. But Thomas wanted to make his own way.

Blaylock died on September 15th, 1964, just a few months after he retired. Toward the end of his life, he expressed some regret over having not ever sent Thomas to medical school.

Blalock's obituary in The New York Times described the surgery performed on Eileen Saxen quote. Hospital officials recalled that Dr. Blaylock made a long incision and exposed the beating heart of a 15 month old girl. Then, for three hours, he worked at an operation no one had ever done before. The obituary also mentioned Tausig involvement, but not that Thomas was standing behind Blaylock and walking him through it. Vivien Thomas continued to have a career at Johns Hopkins after Blalock's retirement as lab supervisor.

He had been training surgeons and technicians for years, including training 20 black surgical technicians, two of whom later went on to medical school. The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine integrated in 1963, and Thomas had also become a mentor for the university's first black medical students and residents.

In the years that followed, attitudes about race were shifting in the United States in general and at Johns Hopkins specifically and in the late 1960s, surgeons and technicians who had trained with Vivian Thomas started to advocate for him to be recognized for his contributions. A group of former surgical fellows nicknamed the Old Hands Club, took the lead on commissioning and paying for a portrait of Vivian Thomas to be hung across from Blalock's portrait in the lobby of the Blaylock building at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The portrait was unveiled at a meeting of the Johns Hopkins Medical and Surgical Society in 1971. After a series of speeches, Thomas spoke as well. He said that when he had learned about the plans for this portrait, quote, My emotions were quite mixed and they still are. People in our category are not accustomed to being in the limelight. Most of you are. If our names get into print, it's usually in the very fine print down at the bottom somewhere.

But being placed and the position I find myself now makes me feel quite humbled. But at the same time, just a little proud. At no time during all the years that I have been here at Hopkins, have I had any idea that I would ever do anything that would make a mark upon this institution or make any contribution to the field of medicine that would merit such recognition as I am getting here today.

Press coverage about the unveiling of this portrait is how many of Thomas's friends and neighbors learned for the first time just what kind of work he had been doing at Johns Hopkins.

He wrote in his autobiography about getting this call from a friend like the morning the newspaper came out asking me all these questions. And he was like, I'm still in bed. I don't I don't know what you're talking about. Further recognition of Thomas's achievements and contributions followed from there in 1976, he was named instructor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, meaning that he was for the first time formally part of the faculty. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the university that same year.

This followed an effort from University of Maryland College Park to do the same, which fell through after the Board of Regents voted not to approve it, even though Thomas had already been informed that it was in the works.

That seemed very embarrassing for the University of Maryland College Park. Also, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, the honorary doctorate he got is a doctorate of laws and not a doctor of medicine, and I was not able to track down why that was, that there were vague references to there being some restrictions. And I was like, what restrictions do you mean?

Toward the end of his time at Johns Hopkins, Thomas worked with Dr. Levi Watkins Jr., who was the first black medical student to graduate from Vanderbilt University and the first black cardiac surgery resident at Johns Hopkins. Thomas helped Watkins develop and troubleshoot the process for implanting an automatic cardiac defibrillator. That is a surgery that Watkins performed for the first time ever. In 1980, Thomas had retired just a year before that happened, and at the request of many of his colleagues, he had started writing an autobiography.

The autobiography was printed as pioneering research in surgical shock and cardiovascular surgery. Vivian Thomas and his work with Alfred Blaylock copies printed more recently, are titled Partners of the Heart, which is also the title of a movie from PBS American Experience that debuted in 2004. The HBO movie called Something The Lord Made Stars Most Def as Vivien Thomas, Alan Rickman as Alfred Blaylock and Mary Stuart Masterson as Helen Tausig. And it also came out in 2004.

Vivien Thomas died of pancreatic cancer on November 26, 1985. The work that he did with Alfred Blalock really set the stage for the field of cardiac surgery. It was a field that really flourished from there. Blaylock and Thomas and the rest of the surgical team demonstrated that it was possible to operate on a heart and that patients who were sick enough to require cardiac surgery could survive the anesthesia and the physical trauma that were required to carry it out. When Alfred Blaylock, Helen Tausig and Robert Grosz were granted the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award in 1954.

They were described as launching, quote, a worldwide surge of effective investigation and corrective surgery into all phases of cardiovascular dynamics. This absolutely would not have been possible without Vivian Thomas surgical procedures that Thomas developed are still performed today, although the Blaylock Thomas Tausig shunt, as it is increasingly known, is often a temporary first step to help a patient survive until they can have other procedures to address a heart malformation more directly. Today, it typically involves a synthetic shunt rather than one of the patient's own blood vessels.

So one point of conjecture that often comes up is what Thomas might have achieved if he had been able to attend medical school. The idea being that if he was so brilliant with a high school education that he might have been truly astounding if he had been able to earn an M.D. But really, that's a little complicated. Thomas's connection to Blaylock gave him access to white medical institutions, which he would not have had if he had gone to medical school and started a career of his own, in the words of Dr.

Rowena Spencer, who worked with Thomas on the development of the atrial septet septum and was the only woman ever to serve as a surgical intern for Alfred Blalock. Quote, The truth of the matter is that as a black physician in that era, he would probably have had to spend all his time and energy making a living among an economically deprived black population. And we'll end with a brief and frequently repeated and illustrative story from the late Dr. J. Alex Haler.

Early in his career, Haler was working at the National Institutes of Health with Alfred Kasper as a technician. One day, while working in the lab, Haler ran into trouble with bleeding during a procedure but solved the problem. Kasper complimented Halleran how he had handled himself, and he said, Well, I trained with Dr. Blaylock. Later, during another procedure that went even further awry, Haler found himself totally at a loss for what to do, and Casper stepped in and fix the situation.

When Haler thanked and complimented Caspar, he said, I trained with Vivian.

Tracy, do you have a little listener mail to wrap this one up?

I do. It's also related to medicine and previous episodes that we have done on the theme of saving lots of babies. And it is from Shauna. Shayana says, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I've been listening to the podcast for years and I've always wanted to be a part of your listener emails, but had never had anything interesting to impart. And then when I felt like I did, I never actually got around to writing that email. I even put it on my to do list, maybe even last year where it's been lingering until now.

This year has been a year of fate, especially surrounding my wedding last weekend that we booked in August as a purposeful covid wedding, it was a pop up wedding, which was perfect for me as a bride who wanted nothing to do with the planning part of a wedding. And it was amazing anyway, not the purpose of this email. It was your podcast recently where Tracey mentioned procrastination, to which I reminded myself about emailing. And then at the end of the Bram Stoker episode, you talked about the episode Deja Vu, which was what I originally was going to email you about, see fate.

So now I feel compelled to actually push aside the procrastination and get down to business. This goes back to the episode about Dr. Cooney and the premature babies. I started listening to Sawbones as a recommendation from you guys and they did an episode about Dr. Cooney. And I was like, yes, stuff you missed in history did this topic already.

The inventor doctor that premature babies invented incubator, showed it at some kind of world fair, brought it to America. It was like a beachside attraction or something. I totally remember this. And then shortly thereafter, you guys released an episode on Dr. Cooney and mentioned that it was on Sabin's. And I sat there utterly confused because in my mind, you had already done that topic. That's how I knew about it. I tried searching the archives and found nothing.

So ever since I've had this itching thought of how did I know all about Dr. Cooney before both podcast did episodes on it. Maybe I'll never know. But it's the weirdest thing. And I 100 percent understand episode deja vu. So Shonna went on to write a little bit about the home economics episode that we did previously and of course, that was offered in Ontario called Managing Personal and Family Resources, which included all kinds of basic life stuff, including what the symbols on your clothes mean for washing.

I'm not going to read the whole rest of the email because it is relatively long, but I just want to say I hate those washing symbols. I know the point was to try to standardize laundering instruction on labels, but I don't know what any of them mean. And every time I'm looking at a new piece, like a new garment that I'm washing for the first time, if it only has those symbols in, it doesn't have words. I'm like having to Google laundry symbols to be able to do my laundry.

So anyway, Shana, thank you so much for this email. I became very curious to be like, how did Shawna learn about the baby sideshows? But that seems to already be on his mind before having gotten to our episode, there was a couple of years before we or Sawbones did the episode, there was an episode of StoryCorps, which would have been played during Morning Edition on NPR.

If you are a Morning Edition listener or just a StoryCorps listener, and that predated our episode and the sawbones episode in the 99 percent Invisible episode, all of which, you know, we're reasonably near one another, I think.

Yeah, or maybe the sawbones was was first, the submenus was first, and then it was like us and 99 percent of us knew each other anyway. That's a great mystery to solve. I asked all the time. I'm like, did I hear that before?

What's happening? We're out of Halloween season, so I can't go past life experience.

But hey, So Short tells us that lots of future episodes suggestions as well. So anyway, thank you Sharda for this email.

Thanks to everybody who's been writing to us lately. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast for a history podcast that I heart radio dot com, we're all over social media as missed in history. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the I Heart radio app and Apple podcast.

And anywhere else you get your podcast. Stuff you missed in history class is the production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts from My Heart radio visit by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, everybody, it's been Higgins' and it's Ashlei, and we're the hosts of the almost famous podcast. I was The Bachelorette and know first hand how dating twenty five people at one time is not easy. And I was on the show a time or two or four, but I met my husband, so I'm proof that the process works. We do interviews with the cast members creating the headlines and we know pretty much everyone. So we're a reliable source.

Listen to Almost Famous on the I Heart radio app, on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

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