Our Days are Designed by Diversity
From the Operating Room to the Classroom, Mentors Change our Lives

Vivien Thomas ... Vivian Grice – whenever there was a break during the recent St. Luke’s Episcopal Health System management conference on diversity/commonality, I found myself thinking of Vivien and Vivian, of how we never know who will forever change our lives for the better.

It is the late Vivien Thomas – a black high school graduate who devised surgical techniques while working as a technician at Johns Hopkins University Medical School – to whom Dr. Denton A. Cooley, who performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States in 1968, gives much credit for his becoming known as the world’s best technical surgeon.

"Simplicity – that’s what I took from Vivien," says Dr. Cooley, the founder, president, and surgeon in chief at the Texas Heart Institute and chief of cardiovascular surgery at St. Luke’s. "There wasn’t a false move, not a wasted motion, when he operated."

If it wasn’t for Vivian Grice – a black schoolteacher who left the South so she could teach in an integrated school setting, chances are I wouldn’t be doing what I love to do – writing for a living.

Yes, the St. Luke’s management conference on diversity/commonality made me think – about religion, language, cultures ... about how we must, as Martin Luther King Jr. urged, judge others by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.

As the St. Luke’s management team discussed the challenges of implementing exceptional care for multicultural populations, I once again heard the voice of Mrs. Grice from my eighth-grade class in Flint, Mich.

By limiting our acquaintances and friends, she told us, we had less chance of ever finding the individuals who can change the course of our lives for the better.

No one knows that better than Dr. Denton A. Cooley, who in 1969 first implanted the idea in the public consciousness that a heart born in a technology lab could sustain life over the long term – when he successfully implanted a man-made heart in a human as a bridge to a transplant.

When Dr. Cooley – in whose name a new Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital building was dedicated Jan. 17 – arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1941 to finish his medical degree, the Houston native had no idea of the impact Vivien Thomas would have on his life. Mr. Thomas had arrived the same year to run the surgical lab under Dr. Alfred Blalock. At that time, the only other black employees at Johns Hopkins were janitors.

Eleven years earlier, Mr. Thomas was a 19-year-old carpenter’s apprentice with a dream of medical school himself. But the Depression wiped out his savings. Through a friend, he learned that a doctor who was then at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Alfred Blalock, needed a lab assistant. Dr. Blalock, wrote Katie McCabe, a journalist for Washingtonian magazine, told Mr. Thomas in the job interview that he needed "someone in the lab whom I can teach to do anything I can do, and maybe do things I can’t do."

"Within three days," McCabe wrote, "Vivien Thomas was performing almost as if he’d been born in the lab, doing arterial punctures on the laboratory dogs and measuring and administering anesthesia. Within a month, the former carpenter was setting up experiments and performing delicate and complex operations (on canines)."

By the time they took new positions at Johns Hopkins in 1941, Dr. Blalock and Mr. Thomas brought with them solutions to problems of shock that would save many wounded soldiers in World War II. And by 1944 they devised an operation to save "Blue Babies" – infants born with a heart defect that sends blood past their lungs. An intern by the name of Denton A. Cooley was there for the first one.

Dr. Cooley remembers that Mr. Thomas stood on a stool looking over Dr. Blalock’s right shoulder, coaching every move as Dr. Blalock rebuilt a little girl’s heart.

"You see," Dr. Cooley says, " it was Vivien who had worked it all out in the lab, in the canine heart, long before Dr. Blalock did Eileen, the first Blue Baby. There were no ‘cardiac experts’ then. That was the beginning."

It was Mr. Thomas, Dr. Cooley says, who taught him much of the surgical skill that has won him the admiration of patients and physicians around the world, including Dr. Christian Barnard, the South African surgeon who performed the world’s first heart transplant.

In his book "One Life," Dr. Barnard wrote of Dr. Cooley’s surgical skill: "It was the most beautiful surgery I had ever seen ... Every movement had a purpose and achieved its aim. Whereas most surgeons would have taken three hours, he could do the same operation in one hour."

"Vivien could use his hands so gracefully," recalls Dr. Cooley of the man who was honored with an honorary doctorate from Johns Hopkins as well as an appointment to the medical school faculty.

It is impossible, of course, to determine just how much influence Vivien Thomas had on Dr. Cooley. It is also impossible to say whether or not I would be sharing this story had I not been a student of Vivian Grice, the first black teacher I had ever known.

Not long after I entered her classroom in the ’60s, she delivered a greeting I’ll never forget.

"Hello," she said, "I’m Mrs. Grice. You’re going to write and then write some more in this class. You’ll write compositions until you think your hand is going to fall off. If it does, I’ll cry with you, but you’ll have to learn how to write with your other hand."

I kept a daily journal and wrote three lengthy themes a week, often getting up at 4 a.m. to rewrite what I had done the night before. When my papers were returned, Mrs. Grice’s markings seemed everywhere. A comma should have been here, a semicolon there. But as sad as some of my performances were, Mrs. Grice always managed to find a silver lining. Her comments at the end of my papers might talk of my "wonderful ideas that we don’t want to get lost because of bad grammar." Once she wrote that people "would lose track of what a great mind has to offer if you continue to write run-on sentences."

How could you not produce for a teacher like that?

With each passing day in her class, it seemed she made me believe I could – indeed should – become a writer.

It is still difficult for me to believe that I wouldn’t have been able to have her as a teacher only a few years earlier. Not until 1954 did a Supreme Court decision lead to the desegregation of public schools. No, we still haven’t been able "to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood" as Dr. King urged so eloquently during his 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech. But we have come a long, long way because of those who have worked to make the dream a reality.

Not surprisingly, Mrs. Grice, who’s been retired as a schoolteacher for 10 years, will never stop working on the dream that Dr. King called "deeply rooted in the American dream." Nor will this student of hers. Her reasoning is as sound today as it was when I first heard it in junior high.

"You just never know who the special people are," she says, "who will help make you what you should be, or where they’ll come from."

---

©2006 Texas Medical Center

---

E-Mail: tmcinfo@texmedctr.tmc.edu
URL: http://www.tmc.edu/tmcnews/02_01_02/page_15.html