American Experience: Partners of the Heart
This 60-minute entry in the PBS American Experience anthology chronicles the unorthodox medical partnership between Alfred Blalock, chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins, and Vivien Thomas, a black man with little more than a high school education. When Thomas applied for a janitorial post at Johns Hopkins in the early '40s, Blalock was impressed by the man's medical knowledge and took him on as a technician. Ultimately, it was Thomas who, in 1944, designed the surgical procedure to correct what was...