Article highlights achievements of pediatric cardiology pioneer Helen Taussig
Investor’s Business Daily published a profile of Johns Hopkins physician Helen Brooke Taussig, MD, who overcame an initial rejection to medical school due to gender discrimination and went on to create the field of pediatric cardiology.
Taussig, who lived from 1898 to 1986, is also credited with developing the concept for a procedure to treat Tetralogy of Fallot, a common cause of “blue baby syndrome.”
"Taussig is recognized as the founder of pediatric cardiology because of her ability to characterize and understand the heart defects in patients who were living, while in the past they had been described using an autopsy," Anne Murphy, MD, a pediatric cardiologist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, told IBD. "She began to understand it in terms of patients she was caring for in her clinic. That was her legacy."
According to the article, Taussig trained the first generation of cardiologists specifically focused on the pediatric population. Among other obstacles, she overcame childhood dyslexia and hearing loss late in her career, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.
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Daniel joined TriMed’s Chicago editorial team in 2017 as a Cardiovascular Business writer. He previously worked as a writer for daily newspapers in North Dakota and Indiana.