She Touched My Heart

Dr. Helen Taussig, my cardiologist when I was a baby in Baltimore with a congenital heart condition, did not use a stethoscope to listen to my heart. After a childhood ear infection led to permanent hearing loss, Dr. Taussig used her fingers to feel the irregular rhythm of my defective heart that enabled her to diagnose my pulmonary stenosis.

By 1952, when I was three years old and could no longer walk and function normally, with a prognosis that I would not live much longer, Dr. Taussig convinced her Johns Hopkins colleague Alfred Blalock, the world-famous cardiac surgeon, to perform open heart surgery to repair my pulmonary valve. Dr. Taussig was in the operating room on April 5, 1952, with Dr. Blalock and his long-time assistant Vivien Thomas, who were the three people who saved my life that day.

Helen Brooke Taussig was born on May 24, 1898, in Cambridge, MA. The youngest of four children raised in an academic family – her father was a professor at Harvard University and her mother was one of the first students at Radcliffe College – Helen struggled with numerous childhood ailments, including severe dyslexia. Yet she worked hard at her studies and eventually graduated in 1921 from the University of California, Berkeley as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Helen returned to Massachusetts and wanted to study at Harvard Medical School, only to learn that women were not accepted as degree candidates into the medical program (this did not change until 1945, seven years before my surgery). Instead, she studied anatomy at Boston University and then transferred to The Johns Hopkins University, where she received a medical degree in 1927.

Fortunately for me, Dr. Taussig decided to stay in Baltimore, and became one of the first physicians to specialize in pediatric cardiology. Several years later, Dr. Taussig became chief of the pediatric department at Johns Hopkins and became famous for studying the “blue baby” condition – named for the bluish tinge in a baby’s lips, fingertips and toes because of insufficient blood flow between the heart and the lungs. Working with Dr. Blalock and Vivien Thomas, she helped developed the surgical procedure that became known as the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt.

This procedure was first performed in 1945 on children with pulmonary stenosis, the same condition I presented to her in 1952. Since then, tens of thousands of children around the world have been saved by this operation. In addition to her clinical work, Dr. Taussig went on to become a professor at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, only the second woman to achieve full professor status at the University.

Dr. Taussig retired from John Hopkins in 1963 but continued her work, writing more than 140 papers in her career, some co-authored with Dr. Blalock. She received dozens of honorary degrees and awards, including becoming a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, and induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. One year later, she became the first woman to be elected president of the American Heart Association.

Sadly, Dr. Taussig died in a freak car accident in a shopping mall parking lot on May 20, 1986, four days short of her 88th birthday. She donated her body to Johns Hopkins. In 2005, The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine dedicated the Helen B. Taussig Congenital Heart Disease Center in her honor.

In 1973, some 21 years after my surgery and purely by chance, I saw Dr. Taussig interviewed on a local Baltimore television program. I immediately wrote her a letter, and a few days later I received a handwritten response that began, “My dear William.” She went on to say that receiving my letter “means more to me than anything else. You truly warmed my heart.”