Helen B. Taussig

Helen Brooke Taussig was an American physician who founded the field of pediatric cardiology, working at Johns Hopkins despite becoming profoundly deaf as an adult and developing methods of examining infant hearts by touch rather than by listening. She observed that infants with tetralogy of Fallot, the most common cause of blue baby syndrome, tended to survive longer when a natural blood vessel connecting the heart's major arteries stayed open, and she proposed creating that connection surgically, an idea realized in 1944 by surgeon Alfred Blalock and his laboratory assistant Vivien Thomas as the operation now generally called the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt. She later campaigned successfully against the approval of thalidomide in the United States after seeing the birth defects it caused in Europe, and became the first woman to serve as president of the American Heart Association.