Mos Def and Alan Rickman star in this true life story of Dr. Thomas and Dr. Blalock who started cardiac surgery in 1944 on a baby suffering from blue baby syndrome. Through their research, they introduced cardiac surgery to the world (over a million heart surgeries are now performed each year in the US alone) and they also saved countless lives through their research and work on traumatic shock. Although Vivian Thomas performed almost all the lab work on the shunt
process in hundreds of operations on dogs, he was only able to coach Dr.
Blalock during the actual human surgeries since he was a lab technician
and was not awarded an honorary doctorate from Johns Hopkins until
1976.
The film was made in 2004 and is not rated but would probably get a PG rating for surgical work on both dogs and humans and some language.
This was a wonderful film that not only tells Blalock and Thomas's story; it touches briefly on the story of Vivian Thomas's brother, Harold Thomas, and his fight for equal pay for school teachers. His attorney? Thurgood Marshall. They won. For more information there's another blog post at:
http://gdhslawblogwill.wordpress.com/tag/thurgood-marshall/
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