Physician Helen Brooke Taussig discovered a surgical procedure for treating "blue babies." She proved that "blue babies" died of insufficient circulation rather than cardiac arrest, as had been previously thought.

Physician and cardiologist Helen Brooke Taussig spent her career as the head of the Children's Heart Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. In the course of her work with young children, she discovered that cyanotic infants--known as "blue-babies"--died of insufficient circulation to the lungs, not of cardiac arrest, as had been thought. She and colleague Dr. Alfred Blalock developed a surgical procedure, the Blalock-Taussig shunt, to correct the problem. First used in 1944, the Blalock-Taussig shunt has saved the lives of thousands of children. In 1961, after investigating reports of numerous birth defects in Germany, Taussig determined that the cause was use of the drug Thalidomide, and it was her intervention that prevented Thalidomide from being sold in the United...