Vivien Thomas dreamed of attending medical school as a young man, but saw those dreams dashed with the onset of the Great Depression. However, through hard work and perfect timing, he became a surgical assistant to a Vanderbilt University surgeon and the pair went on to revolutionize cardiac surgery. Born August 29, 1910 in […]

  Dr. Levi Watkins, Jr. a retired heart surgeon and educator, has made history a few times over the course of his four-decade career in medicine. On this day in 1980, Dr. Watkins performed the first human application of the Automatic Implantable Defibrillator (AID) at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md. Watkins, born June 13, […]