A Doctor at Heart

A tribute to a pioneering African American cardiac surgeon. Growing up in the South as the sort of person who “loved solving problems and figuring things out,” Vivien Thomas never enrolled in college but worked his way up as a white medical researcher’s lab assistant to become an expert on the malady known as “blue baby syndrome.” Breaking the color bar, he joined a team of white surgeons at Johns Hopkins that in 1944 used techniques that Thomas developed on dogs to perform the first successful open-heart surgery on a child. Thomas then went on to perform and teach the procedure there for many years while, Schoettler points out, being so underpaid that he had to tend bar and work other jobs to make ends meet. He was not, she goes on pointedly, even awarded a doctoral degree until 1976, when he was 65 years old, or given proper credit in the procedure’s formal name until 2023. Still, the author tells his story in positive tones overall, reserving further specifics about the discrimination he faced to her afterword. Walthall’s illustrations add helpful details of the surgery to views of the sober Thomas hard at work, later surrounded by increasingly diverse groups of his patients and students. A sympathetic profile of an achiever well worth knowing better. -- Kirkus * March 1, 2026 *