Taussig, << TOW sihg, >> Helen Brooke (1898-1986), was an American physician who specialized in children’s heart diseases. She discovered the major defects that cause the bluish tinge in the skin of blue babies (see Blue baby ).
From 1930 to 1963, Taussig served as chief of the Cardiac Clinic of the Harriet Lane Home, the children’s section of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She found that at birth most blue babies have an abnormal opening in the septum (wall between the chambers of the heart) and a partial blockage of the pulmonary artery. The heart pumps blood through this artery to the lungs, where oxygen enters the blood. A lack of oxygen in the blood gives the skin a bluish color. In 1944, Taussig and a surgeon, Alfred Blalock, first performed an operation that enables the blood to bypass the faulty artery.
Taussig was born on May 24, 1898, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1921 and received her M.D. degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1927. She died on May 21, 1986.
