On August 29, 1944, Helen Taussig and Alfred Blalock were planning the first attempt at the surgical procedure Taussig had conceived: a shunt that would redirect blood flow in infants born with Tetralogy of Fallot, a combination of heart defects that turned them cyanotic — "blue babies" — from oxygen deprivation and killed most of them before adulthood.

Taussig was born on May 24, 1898, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Medical School, which admitted women for certain courses while refusing to allow them to take degrees. She completed her medical degree at Johns Hopkins in 1927 and specialized in cardiology.

The technical aspects of the surgical procedure were developed in Blalock's laboratory by Vivien Thomas, a Black surgical technician from Nashville who had come north with Blalock from Vanderbilt. Thomas was not a doctor — the Tennessee racial system had made medical school inaccessible — but he refined the surgical technique on dogs over two years until Blalock could execute it on humans. Thomas stood on a step stool next to Blalock during the first operation on November 29, 1944, to guide his hands.

The baby survived. The Blalock-Taussig shunt saved hundreds of thousands of children in the decades that followed.

The operation was named the Blalock-Taussig procedure. Vivien Thomas's name was added in later years; he received an honorary doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1976, thirty-two years after the operation. A portrait of him hangs in the Johns Hopkins medical school hallway alongside a portrait of Blalock. The two portraits were hung on the same day in 1969.

Taussig published Congenital Malformations of the Heart in 1947, the foundational text of pediatric cardiology. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. She died in 1986 in a car accident, at eighty-seven.