Something the Lord Made


Something the Lord Made is a 2004 American made-for-television biographical drama film about the black cardiac pioneer Vivien Thomas and his complex and volatile partnership with white surgeon Alfred Blalock, the "Blue Baby doctor" who pioneered modern heart surgery. Based on the National Magazine Award-winning Washingtonian magazine article "Like Something the Lord Made" by Katie McCabe, the film was directed by Joseph Sargent and written by Peter Silverman and Robert Caswell.

Plot

The film tells the story of the 34-year partnership that begins in Depression era Nashville in 1930 when Dr. Alfred Blalock hires Vivien Thomas as an assistant at his Vanderbilt University lab, expecting him to perform janitorial work. Thomas' remarkable manual dexterity and intellectual acumen confound Blalock's expectations, and Thomas rapidly becomes indispensable as a research partner to Blalock in his forays into heart surgery.
In 1943, Blalock and Thomas move from Vanderbilt to Johns Hopkins, an institution where the only black employees are janitors and where Thomas must enter by the back door. They attack the congenital heart defect of Tetralogy of Fallot, also known as blue baby syndrome, and in so doing they launch the field of heart surgery. Dr. Helen Taussig, the pediatrician/cardiologist at Johns Hopkins, challenges Blalock to come up with a surgical solution for her Blue Babies. She needs a new ductus for them to oxygenate their blood.
The duo is seen experimenting on stray dogs they got from the local dog pound, deliberately giving the dogs the heart defect and then trying to solve it. The outcome looks good and they are excited to operate on Eileen Saxon, a baby with the defect, but in a dream, Thomas sees the baby grown up and crying because she is dying. Thomas asks why she is dying in the dream and she says it is because she has a baby heart. Blalock interprets his dream as implying that their sewing technique did not work because the sutures failed to grow with the heart, and developed a new version with that feature.
The film dramatizes Blalock's and Thomas's fight to save the dying Blue Babies. Blalock praises Thomas's surgical skill as being "like something the Lord made", and insists that Thomas coach him through the first Blue Baby surgery over the protests of Johns Hopkins administrators. Despite their close partnership in the lab, outside they are separated by the prevailing racism. Blalock makes a mistake by accidentally cutting an artery at the wrong place, but with Thomas's assistance, is able to complete the surgery. As news quickly spreads of their successes, parents from all over the country flock to the hospital with their sick children, hoping that the surgery can cure them too. Doctors from around the world also come to learn from Thomas how to do the surgery to treat their Blue Baby Syndrome patients.
Thomas attends Blalock's parties as a bartender, moonlighting for extra income, and when Blalock is honored for the Blue Baby work at the Racial segregation in [the United States|segregated] Belvedere Hotel, Thomas is not among the invited guests. Instead, he watches from behind a potted palm at the rear of the ballroom. From there, he listens to Blalock give credit to the other doctors who assisted in the work yet makes no mention of Thomas or his contributions. The next day, Thomas reveals that he saw the ceremony, and quits Blalock's lab. Thomas's heart is with the lifesaving work he left behind and he finds himself unhappy in other endeavors. He therefore decides to overlook Blalock's failure to properly acknowledge his contributions and returns to his lab.
In 1964, one day before Blalock's death, he sees Thomas, now a professional instructor of surgeons in the open heart surgery wing. After Blalock's death, Thomas continued his work at Johns Hopkins training surgeons. In a formal ceremony in 1976, Johns Hopkins belatedly recognized the importance of Thomas's work and awarded him an honorary doctorate. A portrait of Thomas was placed on a wall at Johns Hopkins next to Blalock's portrait, which had been placed there years earlier. Later, after looking at the portraits, Thomas walks away when the hospital intercom pages him. A shot of the portraits made for the film—based on the actors who played Blalock and Thomas—dissolves to a shot of the portraits at Johns Hopkins. The film concludes with a title card revealing that Blalock and Thomas's work launched the field of cardiac surgery, and that doctors in the United States now perform over 1.75 million heart operations per year.

Cast

A man who in life avoided the limelight, Vivien Thomas remained virtually unknown outside the circle of Johns Hopkins surgeons he trained. Thomas' story was first brought to public attention by Washingtonian writer Katie McCabe, who learned of his work with Blalock on the day of his death in a 1985 interview with a prominent Washington, D.C. surgeon who described Thomas as "an absolute legend." McCabe's 1989 magazine article on Thomas, "Like Something the Lord Made", generated widespread interest in the story and inspired the making of a 2003 public television documentary on Thomas and Alfred Blalock, Partners of the Heart. A Washington, D.C. dentist, Irving Sorkin, discovered McCabe's article and brought it to Hollywood, where it was developed into the film.
The film was shot in part in the historic Warfield Complex, Hubner, and T Buildings of the Springfield Hospital Center in Sykesville, Maryland. It was also partially shot on location on the East Homewood and Homewood campuses of Johns Hopkins University.

Awards and nominations