On November 29, 1944, a gravely ill nine-pound baby named Eileen Saxon was wheeled into an operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She was to become the first recipient of the Blalock-Taussig shunt, a new operation designed to save "blue babies." Eileen's blue complexion and severe weakness came from a congenital, fatal heart malformation called Tetralogy of Fallot.

A pediatrician at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Helen Taussig, had approached Dr. Alfred Blalock to suggest a surgical remedy for the condition. They came up with a radical idea -- to bypass the malformation altogether. Vivien Thomas set up experiments in the lab to develop the procedure before it was first performed.

Now you can enter the operating room and don surgeon's scrubs. You'll have the same set of tools used by the original Hopkins surgical team.

You Be the Surgeon (1.8mb)
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