1898-1986

American Physician

Helen Brooke Taussig is recognized as the founder of pediatric cardiology. Along with Alfred Blalock (1899-1964), she devised a procedure for the treatment of newborns afflicted with "blue baby" syndrome.

Born May 24, 1898, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Taussig was the youngest of four children of famed Harvard economist Frank Taussig. Her mother had attended Radcliffe College but died of tuberculosis when Taussig was 11. Taussig began her studies at Radcliffe in 1917, where she was a member of the tennis team, but finished her B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1919.

Though medicine was her primary interest, she enrolled at the Harvard School of Public Health. At the time, Harvard permitted women to take classes, but did not allow female students to earn a degree in medicine until 1945. Thus, she studied medicine at Boston College, where her professor, Alexander Begg, suggested she study...