PARA ⁿPAR@ ` ñTEXT ` ûTaussig, Helen Brooke1898╨1986physicianBorn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 24, 1898, Helen Taussig was the daughter of a Harvard economics professor. She attended the Cambridge School for Girls and in 1917 entered Radcliffe College; two years later she transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, from which she graduated in 1921. She began medical studies that year at the Harvard Medical School, where women were not yet admitted to full student status, and then transferred to the Boston University Medical School. By 1924, when she transferred again to the Johns Hopkins Medical School, she had already begun to concentrate on the study of the heart. She received her M.D. degree in 1927. After a year╒s fellowship in the Johns Hopkins Hospital she did her two-year internship in pediatrics there and in 1930 was named head of the Children╒s Heart Clinic of the Harriet Lane Home, the pediatrics division of the hospital. In addition to patient care and teaching she carried on a full schedule of research. Taussig╒s principal concern was the problem of cyanosis in the newborn╤╥blue babies╙╤and she gradually determined that the cyanosis was a symptom of anoxemia and that a likely cause was a stenosis, or constriction, in the pulmonary artery leading from the heart to the lungs. When Dr. Alfred Blalock, a noted vascular surgeon, joined the Johns Hopkins staff in 1941, Dr. Taussig interested him in her theory. He began surgical experiments on dogs and finally, in November 1944, successfully relieved a pulmonary stenosis and thereby anoxemia and cyanosis in a human infant. The Blalock╨Taussig operation, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May 1945, was to save the lives of countless thousands of infants in years to come. In 1946 Taussig was appointed associate professor of pediatrics in the Johns Hopkins Medical School. Her later research was concerned with rheumatic fever and with congenital malformations of the heart; her Congenital Malformations of the Heart was published in 1947. In 1961 Taussig researched the increase in birth defects in West Germany and linked the rise to the effects of the sedative thalidomide on pregnant women. Her findings prevented further use of the drug in the United States. In 1959 she was promoted to full professor, the first woman to attain that rank at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and in 1963 she became professor emeritus. She served as president of the American Heart Association in 1965╨1966. Among her many awards were the French Legion of Honor in 1947, the Albert Lasker Award (with Blalock) in 1954, the Eleanor Roosevelt Achievement Award in 1957, and the Medal of Freedom, presented by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. She was named to the Women╒s Hall of Fame in 1973 and received the National Medal of Science in 1977. She died in an automobile accident near her home in Kennet Square, Pennsylvania, on May 20, 1986. &styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ + !I 5¬ !I é !I ¡ !I m 5¬ n !I ╪ !I ² !I
