Paid Like A Janitor, Worked Like A Genius: The Man Who Saved Thousands Of Babies In 1930, Vivien Thomas lost his medical school savings in the stock market crash and took a lab assistant job at Vanderbilt for $12 a week. Classified as a janitor despite his surgical genius, he became the secret architect behind one of medicine's greatest breakthroughs—the Blue Baby operation that saved thousands of dying infants. When Dr. Alfred Blalock moved to Johns Hopkins as Chief of Surgery in 1941, he insis