Vivien Thomas - Legacy

Legacy

Following his retirement in 1979, Thomas began work on an autobiography, Partners of the Heart: Vivien Thomas and his Work with Alfred Blalock, ISBN 0-8122-1634-2. He died on November 26, 1985, of pancreatic cancer, at age 75, and the book was published just days later. Having learned about Thomas on the day of his death, Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe brought his story to public attention for the first time in a 1989 article entitled "Like Something the Lord Made", which won the 1990 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and inspired filmmaker Andrea Kalin to make the PBS documentary "Partners of the Heart," which was broadcast in 2003 on PBS's American Experience and won the Organization of American Historians's Erik Barnouw Award for Best History Documentary in 2004. McCabe's article, brought to Hollywood by Washington, D.C. dentist Irving Sorkin, formed the basis for the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning 2004 HBO film Something the Lord Made.

Thomas's legacy as an educator and scientist continued with the institution of the Vivien Thomas Young Investigator Awards, given by the Council on Cardiovascular Surgery and Anesthesiology beginning in 1996. In 1993, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation instituted the Vivien Thomas Scholarship for Medical Science and Research sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline. In Fall 2004, the Baltimore City Public School System opened the Vivien T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy, and on January 29, 2008, MedStar Health unveiled the first "Rx for Success" program at the Academy, joining the conventional curriculum with specialized coursework geared to the health care professions. In the halls of the school hangs a replica of Thomas's portrait commissioned by his surgeon-trainees in 1968. The Journal Of Surgical Case Reports (JSCR) announced in January 2010 that their annual prizes for the best case report written by a doctor and best case report written by a medical student would be named after Thomas.