TAUSSIG, HELEN BROOKE. 1898-1986.


Congenital Malformations of the Heart. New York: The Commonwealth Fund, 1947. 4to. 46 colored plates. Publisher's beige cloth, yellow printed dust jacket. Edges worn, small chips to dust jacket. FIRST EDITION, INSCRIBED AND SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR on the free front endpaper: "Inscribed to Dr. Bruce Fye, with warm regards and wishing him a great career. Helen B. Taussig." Taussig "was a brilliant physician whose contributions advanced the status of women in medicine ... she developed a new subspecialty in pediatrics and wrote its definitive textbook" (DMB 5, p 1221). Taussig discovered the concepts that made it possible to correct the tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital disease affecting infants. This was further advanced into a surgical procedure by Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and became known as the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt. Bedford 821; Garrison-Morton 2878.