Something The Lord Made
These days when stressed out, beer-bellied men get a little chest pain they go in for a quad bypass and get another 20 years. In the 40's they died. Alfred Blalock is the doctor who performed the first heart surgery, turning Johns Hopkins into the preeminent hospital in the country. By figuring out how to turn a vein into an artery he saved babies that were turning blue and dying. Thing is, it wasn't really him that figured the thing out. The man who made the critical leaps that allowed this miracle was a high school educated black man named Vivien Thomas.
In the thousands and thousands of papers written about this procedure, Vivien Thomas has only been mentioned twice. He was finally awarded an honorary doctorate after working at Hopkins teaching the technique he pioneered for 50 years, but was relatively little known. His brother, who fought for equal pay for black teachers in the 50's, is even less known.
Blalock received one accolade and award after the next throughout his lifetime and I'm sure he worked diligently. But he took all the credit for something he did not achieve alone, and may never have achieved at all, had it not been for Thomas. I guess the classic story of the white guy taking all the credit is Sir Edmund Hillary, who could have never climbed Everest without his Nepali sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, a name you've probably never even heard before.
The interesting part, to me, was the psychology of people who are allowed to do this and the sense of entitlement and the rationalization and denial they may, or may not have lived with. Blalock never demonstrated any type of guilt or remorse, or even awareness, for taking the spotlight while the guy who made his fame possible had to enter Hopkins through the service entrance and use the ladies room when there was none for "coloreds only". Do people like that feel any understanding of how much their skin color and anatomy buy? Had it not been for the color of his skin, his life would have been filled with the type of struggle and degradation his partner felt every day.
Having to push that knowledge down every day has got to exact a cost somewhere, sometime. Here's how I look at it. Life is about learning. Blalock didn't learn. He enjoyed. But, that's not enough. Thomas learned... or did he? The guy never really quite learned to value himself or stand up for himself. Their portraits hang next to each other at Hopkins today. So, in the end, I guess they both got their due.
It sure makes you wonder about that sea of white male faces that is credited with Western Civilization. How many of the great leaps in thought and innovation came from similarly uncredited sources? My guess is LOTS, starting with Jesus, who was not white but was co-opted to the point where almost any white person, any person, thinks of Jesus the way he was portrayed by Renaissance painters. Vivien, precisely because of his lack of education, was able to see things the doctor had lost touch with. So much of our education is a deconstruction of what we already know. So much intuitive knowledge is squeezed out of us through the "education" process. Most great leaps forward occur when technological, higher thinking is matched with basic, intuitive knowledge.
Dr. Andrew Weil has done much to alert the public to the toxic nature of almost all our drugs. The drugs we use to cure often do exactly the opposite. A childhood friend of mine was recently diagnosed with MS, so they gave her drugs and now she has leukemia. Another friend was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and now has to have her body toxified for the next nine months. Perhaps modern medicine would do well to look toward simplicity and connection to nature. The problem is, you can not patent Something the Lord Made.
In the thousands and thousands of papers written about this procedure, Vivien Thomas has only been mentioned twice. He was finally awarded an honorary doctorate after working at Hopkins teaching the technique he pioneered for 50 years, but was relatively little known. His brother, who fought for equal pay for black teachers in the 50's, is even less known.
Blalock received one accolade and award after the next throughout his lifetime and I'm sure he worked diligently. But he took all the credit for something he did not achieve alone, and may never have achieved at all, had it not been for Thomas. I guess the classic story of the white guy taking all the credit is Sir Edmund Hillary, who could have never climbed Everest without his Nepali sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, a name you've probably never even heard before.
The interesting part, to me, was the psychology of people who are allowed to do this and the sense of entitlement and the rationalization and denial they may, or may not have lived with. Blalock never demonstrated any type of guilt or remorse, or even awareness, for taking the spotlight while the guy who made his fame possible had to enter Hopkins through the service entrance and use the ladies room when there was none for "coloreds only". Do people like that feel any understanding of how much their skin color and anatomy buy? Had it not been for the color of his skin, his life would have been filled with the type of struggle and degradation his partner felt every day.
Having to push that knowledge down every day has got to exact a cost somewhere, sometime. Here's how I look at it. Life is about learning. Blalock didn't learn. He enjoyed. But, that's not enough. Thomas learned... or did he? The guy never really quite learned to value himself or stand up for himself. Their portraits hang next to each other at Hopkins today. So, in the end, I guess they both got their due.
It sure makes you wonder about that sea of white male faces that is credited with Western Civilization. How many of the great leaps in thought and innovation came from similarly uncredited sources? My guess is LOTS, starting with Jesus, who was not white but was co-opted to the point where almost any white person, any person, thinks of Jesus the way he was portrayed by Renaissance painters. Vivien, precisely because of his lack of education, was able to see things the doctor had lost touch with. So much of our education is a deconstruction of what we already know. So much intuitive knowledge is squeezed out of us through the "education" process. Most great leaps forward occur when technological, higher thinking is matched with basic, intuitive knowledge.
Dr. Andrew Weil has done much to alert the public to the toxic nature of almost all our drugs. The drugs we use to cure often do exactly the opposite. A childhood friend of mine was recently diagnosed with MS, so they gave her drugs and now she has leukemia. Another friend was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and now has to have her body toxified for the next nine months. Perhaps modern medicine would do well to look toward simplicity and connection to nature. The problem is, you can not patent Something the Lord Made.
posted by Intervision at 6:36 PM
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