Partners of the Heart

Vivien Thomas

University of Pennsylvania Press, £13.95, pp 245

ISBN 0 8122 1634 2

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Multidisciplinary team working is the employment benchmark in the health service this decade. This applies not only in the provision of clinical services, but also in the prosecution of surgical research. However, the concept is not new. Many of the great surgical research laboratories of the past had fruitful collaboration between expert technicians and clinician scientists. In no department was this relationship better illustrated than at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. This autobiography by Vivien Thomas, who ultimately became supervisor at the Surgical Research Laboratory of the renowned Professor Alfred Blalock, essentially concerns this relationship. However, at a different level, the place of …