OBITUARIES : ‘First Lady of Cardiology’ Dies in Crash : Dr. Helen Brooke Taussig Pioneered ‘Blue-Baby’ Operation

KENNETT SQUARE, Pa. — Helen Brooke Taussig, considered the first lady of cardiology for her development of the operation that has given life to tens of thousands of “blue babies” around the world, was fatally injured in a car accident near her home. She was 87.

Dr. Taussig, professor of medicine emeritus at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, was leaving the parking lot of the municipal center in nearby Pennsbury Township on Tuesday when she drove her car into the path of another vehicle, police said.

In 1944 she and the late Dr. Alfred Blalock pioneered the blue-baby operation at Hopkins, and afterward she devoted her life to research on congenital heart ailments and the effects of rheumatic fever.

In recent years, she had commuted from her Kennett Square retirement home to the University of Delaware, where she was studying heart malformations in birds.

Born in Cambridge, Mass., on May 24, 1898, she graduated in 1927 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

After years of research there, she became convinced that blue babies, children with congenital heart defects, were “blue” because they did not receive enough oxygen in their blood.

After reading of an operation in Boston in which the ductus arteriosus, a blood vessel not needed by babies after birth, had been closed, Dr. Taussig theorized that if an artery to the heart could be closed, one could also be opened.

When Blalock became chief surgeon at Hopkins in 1941, she suggested that an operation on constricted arteries of blue babies could save these sufferers of pulmonary stenosis from enforced inactivity and early death.

She and Blalock worked for more than a year on dogs to perfect the technique, and their first operation on a baby was performed, albeit unsuccessfully, Nov. 9, 1944. But the next two operations and 80% of those that followed were successful.

For her blue-baby work, subsequent accomplishments in heart research, her election in 1964 as the first woman president of the American Heart Assn. and her role in alerting the public to the dangers of the drug Thalidomide, Dr. Taussig received awards throughout the world, including the presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

She was alerted to the deformities that Thalidomide was creating in European babies when one of her students mentioned it to her after a trip to Germany. Dr. Taussig said she decided that “I’d better go to Germany to find out if it’s true or not.” The findings she later presented to federal authorities helped keep what was thought to be a harmless sleeping pill off the U.S. market.

Dr. Richard Ross, dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, said Wednesday that “Helen Taussig is recognized as the first lady of cardiology in the world, and she will be greatly missed.”