05/25/2026
"I suppose nothing would ever give me as much delight as seeing the first patient change from blue to pink in the operating room... bright pink cheeks and bright lips."
Helen Taussig had spent years watching babies die. They arrived at her clinic at Johns Hopkins with a condition doctors called "blue baby syndrome" -- a constellation of heart defects that starved their blood of oxygen and left their skin the color of twilight, their lips a deepening purple. Most would not live to see their third birthday. Every surgeon Taussig consulted told her the condition was untreatable -- the hearts too small, the anatomy too complex, the risk too great. Even her friends worried she was wasting her time on children who were already lost.
She refused to accept it.
Helen Brooke Taussig was born on this day in 1898 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a family of scholars -- her father was a prominent Harvard economist, her mother among the first women to study at Radcliffe College. But her childhood was shaped less by privilege than by loss. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Helen was eleven; she contracted the disease herself and spent years recovering. Severe dyslexia made reading an ordeal well into adulthood, and a childhood ear infection gradually stole her hearing -- a condition that would deepen over the decades that followed, eventually becoming near-total.
Taussig wanted to be a doctor. Harvard Medical School would allow women to sit in on classes but refused to grant them degrees. When she asked the dean why any woman would attend under those conditions, he replied: "That is what we are hoping."
"Well," Taussig told him, "I shall not be the first to disappoint you." She left.
At Boston University, she was permitted to take courses in histology and anatomy but required to sit at the back of the lecture hall, apart from the male students, forbidden to speak to them. It was there that a professor named Alexander Begg recognized her talent and encouraged her to apply to Johns Hopkins -- one of the few medical schools in the country that would grant women degrees. "It was one of those times in life," Taussig later reflected, "when what seemed to be disappointment... later proved to be a great opportunity."
She earned her MD in 1927 and was appointed to head the children's cardiac clinic at Johns Hopkins -- a position no one else particularly wanted, in a field that barely existed. "Congenital abnormalities were the last thing in the world I expected to be interested in," she said. "I started with a busy rheumatic clinic... It fell on me -- or I fell on it."
Her deafness, which should have ended a career in cardiology, became the source of her greatest insight. As her hearing faded, Taussig used an amplified stethoscope -- a specially designed electronic version that boosted sound -- but increasingly she came to rely on something no instrument could replicate. She pressed her long, sensitive fingers against the chests of her small patients and felt the rhythms of their malformed hearts. The flutter, the murmur, the labored struggle beneath the skin.
She studied thousands of children this way, and over the years she noticed a pattern no one else had seen: babies who happened to have a second defect -- one that left an extra vessel running between the aorta and the pulmonary artery -- survived longer than those who didn't. That vessel was routing additional blood to the lungs, giving them oxygen their damaged hearts could not provide.
The insight was elegant in its simplicity. What if a surgeon could build such a vessel where none existed -- "as a plumber changes pipes around," as she put it?
Taussig brought her idea to surgeon after surgeon, and each one turned her away. Then, in 1943, she presented it to Alfred Blalock, the chief of surgery at Hopkins, who agreed to attempt what no one else would. His surgical technician, Vivien Thomas -- a Black man with no college degree who had taught himself to operate with extraordinary precision -- spent the next two years perfecting the procedure, fabricating his own instruments when the ones he needed did not exist.
On November 29, 1944, they tried it on a living child. Eileen Saxon was fifteen months old and weighed nine pounds. Her skin was blue, her heart failing. Scores of surgeons and medical students packed the observation gallery above the operating theater to witness what most of them considered impossible. Blalock cut while Thomas stood on a step stool directly behind him, guiding him step by step through the surgery that would prove Taussig's vision right.
Eileen's color began to return.
News of the operation traveled across the world. Parents began arriving at Johns Hopkins from every continent, carrying their blue babies in their arms. By 1951, the team had performed over a thousand operations with a mortality rate of just five percent. The change was often visible within minutes -- a child who had arrived ashen and gasping would emerge from surgery with flushed cheeks and pink lips, breathing easily for the first time in her life.
Taussig became one of the first women promoted to full professor at Johns Hopkins and the first woman to lead the American Heart Association. In 1962, when reports reached her that a drug called thalidomide was causing devastating birth defects across Europe, she flew to Germany to investigate, then returned to testify before Congress and helped prevent the drug's approval in the United States -- averting what could have been a second catastrophe on an enormous scale.
In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The citation read: "Her fundamental concepts have made possible the modern surgery of the heart which enables countless children to lead productive lives."
Helen Taussig died in 1986 at the age of eighty-seven. By then, the procedure she had envisioned -- now called the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt -- had saved tens of thousands of children's lives and opened the door to the era of open-heart surgery.
She had been told, at every turn, what she could not do. The dean at Harvard hoped she would simply go away. The professors at Boston University sat her in the back of the room. The surgeons told her a failing heart was beyond repair. She could not earn a degree. She could not sit with the men. She could not even hear the hearts she had devoted her life to saving.
"Learn to listen with your fingers," she told her students.
She had. She heard what no one else could -- and saved the children no one else believed could be saved.
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To learn more about her extraordinary story, there is a recent definitive biography of Dr. Taussig -- tracing her childhood struggles with dyslexia and deafness, her battles against medical sexism, and her groundbreaking work saving blue babies: "A Heart Afire: Helen Brooke Taussig's Battle Against Heart Defects, Unsafe Drugs, and Injustice in Medicine" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780262048521 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3PVjglj (Amazon)
Dr. Taussig's story is also told, along with her collaborators Dr. Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas, in "Breakthrough!: How Three People Saved 'Blue Babies' and Changed Medicine Forever" for ages 10 to 14 at https://www.amightygirl.com/breakthrough-blue-babies
For teens and adults, Dr. Taussig is featured in the books "Bold Women of Medicine" (https://www.amightygirl.com/bold-women-of-medicine) and "Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science – And The World" (https://www.amightygirl.com/headstrong-52-women), for ages 13 and up
For the equally remarkable story of Vivien Thomas -- the Black surgical technician who perfected the blue baby procedure and waited decades for recognition -- "Tiny Stitches: The Life of Medical Pioneer Vivien Thomas" for ages 5 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781620141564 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3PI6QNA (Amazon).
To introduce young kids to more pioneering women in medicine, we recommend the picture books: “Who Says Women Can’t Be Doctors? The Story of Elizabeth Blackwell” for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/who-says-women-can-t-be-doctors), "Dr. Jo: How Sara Josephine Baker Saved the Lives of America's Children" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/dr-jo), and “The Doctor with an Eye for Eyes: The Story of Dr. Patricia Bath” for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/the-doctor-with-an-eye-for-eyes)
For more books about girls and women who love scientific exploration, check out our blog post, "60 Books to Inspire Science-Loving Mighty Girls," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=13914
If you'd like to encourage your own aspiring doctor or scientist, you can also find science kits and toys in our blog post, "Top 60 Science Toys for Mighty Girls," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10528
