'Something the Lord Made'

On Friday, a local peace organization hosted a screening of Something the Lord Made, the story of Vivien Thomas (Mos Def), his experience working in the field of experimental surgery, and his pioneering work in cardiac surgery.

The movie shows Thomas's experiences as the target of White-supremacist capitalist patriarchy while he is working under Alfred Blalock (Alan Rickman), first at Vanderbilt University and later at Johns Hopkins University. While not an explicit part of the film, the oppression Thomas experiences is linked with that of the dogs who Thomas and Blalock use in their research.

Thomas's exploitation as a working-class Black man is obvious throughout the film. When Thomas starts working in Blalock's lab as a janitor he is an unemployed carpenter, but Thomas aspires to attend medical school and become a doctor and sees working in the lab as a step in that direction. Blalock finds that Thomas has skills and knowledge that can be exploited, so he makes Thomas his lab technician.

I think the film does a good job showing how Thomas's race and class intersect to create a distinct experience of exploitation. I do not see the film as the "story of two men ... who defied the racial strictures of the Jim Crow South and together pioneered the field of heart surgery." That description, from the HBO website, fails to acknowledge how Blalock does little to defy the institutional racism and classism that would require him to question his own privilege, a privilege that comes directly from the exploitation of Thomas. I include patriarchy because while watching the movie the structure of Blalock's lab and Johns Hopkins University seemed very patriarchal.

Blalock makes a career for himself by exploiting Thomas and keeping him from attending medical school. While Thomas is the one to pioneer the field of cardiac surgery, doing the research and developing the technique that open up the field, it is Blalock who takes all the credit. Without the credential that would come with a medical degree, Thomas is all the more vulnerable to exploitation from Blalock and Johns Hopkins.

The film shows Blalock and Thomas conducting their research on dogs collected from pounds, but this exploitation of other animals is never addressed. Like Thomas throughout much of the film, the dogs are simply there to be used and the privilege gained from their exploitation goes unrecognized. Unlike Thomas, the story of the dogs institutional exploitation is yet to be told.