Partners of the Heart

10th February 2003 55 mins Season 15 Episode 8

Chronicling the unlikely partnership between a white surgeon and a black "technician" that led to a procedure to correct blue-baby syndrome in 1944. The principals: Vivien Thomas, a black man with only a high-school diploma, and Alfred Blalock, the patrician chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins. Blalock pioneered the surgery to correct the congenital heart defect, but it was Thomas who devised to procedures that were used. And they did it at a time, narrator Morgan Freeman says, when the two "could not share the same lunch table in the Hopkins cafeteria."

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Season 15 · Episode 9

The Pill

Charting the development of an oral contraceptive during the 1950s and its effect on "the sexual revolution" of the '60s. It was enormous. Says Sylvia Clark, who grew up before the pill was available: "Women began to see themselves for the first time in all of history as economically self-sustaining." The hour examines reasons why, as it profiles the pill's key figures, including biologist Gregory Pincus and gynecologist John Rock; heiress Katharine Dexter McCormick, who financed the research; and Margaret Sanger, the activist who spearheaded it. Among Sanger's motivations: her own mother, who had 18 pregnancies (seven of them miscarriages) and died at 49.

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