The Unsung Hero of Heart Surgery
The History Hour
BBC
4.4 • 913 Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2017
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The African-American lab technician, Vivien Thomas, who pioneered surgery that saved millions of babies, Otis Redding remembered 50 years on from his tragic death, the killer smog of the 1950's London, the man brave enough to hypnotise Uday Hussein and the Australian Prime Minister - lost at sea.
(Photo: Vivien Thomas, US Surgical Technician, 1940) (Audio: Courtesy of US National Library of Medicine)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, |
| 0:04.8 | the past brought to life by those who were there. |
| 0:07.8 | This week the American hypnotist who had the daunting task of trying to treat Saddam Hussein's much-feared son Uday. |
| 0:15.0 | Instead of me viewing him as some terrorist and murder and rapist, I viewed him as nothing |
| 0:19.8 | more than a scared child, and he viewed me as nothing more than a person who was going to help him. |
| 0:25.0 | Plus the dreadful effects of the great London smogs of the 1950s. |
| 0:30.0 | To see somebody fighting for air is a harrowing experience. |
| 0:34.8 | So they go, |
| 0:35.8 | trying to get air into their lungs. |
| 0:39.8 | And of course it was dirty air. |
| 0:41.4 | And the tragic death of Otis Redding. |
| 0:44.0 | These arms are the mind. |
| 0:50.0 | He was one of a kind guy. We all felt privileged to be playing music with |
| 0:58.4 | making records with him and my proudest possessions of those records. That's all coming up later in the podcast. |
| 1:10.0 | But we begin this week with the astonishing treatment of a black man in America |
| 1:15.0 | who was responsible for a surgical breakthrough that has helped to save millions of lives. |
| 1:20.0 | The key moment in this story came in the winter of 1944 and an operation that changed medical history and revolutionized heart surgery. |
| 1:29.0 | The aim was to keep alive so-called blue babies, born with a defect that starved their bodies of oxygen. |
| 1:35.9 | Claire Bose has been listening to archive recordings of the unsung hero of the operation, |
| 1:40.8 | the African American surgical assistant who taught the lead surgeon the procedure. |
| 1:45.9 | This is a tale of two men, completely opposite in almost every way, except for their love of science. |
| 1:53.0 | Alfred Blaylock. |
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