Blalock, Alfred

(born April 5, 1899, Culloden, Ga., U.S.—died Sept. 15, 1964, Baltimore, Md.) U.S. surgeon. He received an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University. His research, showing that traumatic and hemorrhagic shock resulted from loss of blood volume, led to volume-replacement treatment, which saved countless lives during World War II. He is remembered for his development, with Helen Brooke Taussig, of a surgical treatment for heart malformations in newborns. In 1944 he performed the first subclavian-pulmonary artery anastomosis operation, which corrected the birth defect.

Blalock, Alfred (1899–1964) surgeon, educator; born in Culloden, Ga. From 1925 to 1941 he was head of the surgery department at Vanderbilt University's school of medicine. He conducted experiments to establish that "shock" was the result of drastic loss of blood from the vascular system (1928–30). This led to the practice of treating wounded soldiers with blood substitutes and plasma. He became chairman of the Department of Surgery at Johns Hopkins (1941); there he and his colleagues performed the first total removal of the thymus gland; and in 1944, following through on the idea of Helen Taussig, he performed the first successful heart surgery on a "blue baby."