She couldn't read, couldn't hear, and wasn't allowed to speak in class—so she invented a surgery that saved thousands of dying babies.
Helen Taussig's childhood was defined by struggle. Letters swam on the page, refusing to form words. Her dyslexia was so severe that reading felt like decoding an impossible puzzle. While other children breezed through books, Helen fought for every sentence.
Then, in her twenties, another blow: her hearing began to fade. The world grew quieter, muffled, distant.
When she finally entered medical school in the 1920s—after years of fighting for admission—Harvard told her she could audit classes but would never receive a degree. Boston University allowed her to attend, but with conditions: sit in the back, don't speak to male students, remain invisible.
Helen Taussig refused to be invisible.
She taught herself to lip-read. She studied harder than anyone else in the room. She memorized what she couldn't hear and understood what she couldn't easily read. And when doors slammed in her face, she found windows.
By the 1940s, Dr. Taussig was working at Johns Hopkins Hospital, specializing in children born with heart defects. She witnessed something heartbreaking: infants turning blue, their bodies starved of oxygen, dying within days or weeks because their hearts couldn't pump blood properly. Parents left the hospital empty-handed. There was no treatment. No hope.
Helen couldn't accept that.
She developed a theory: what if they could reroute blood flow around the defective heart structures? It was a radical idea—heart surgery was still in its infancy, and operating on tiny babies seemed impossible.
She brought her vision to surgeon Alfred Blalock and surgical technician Vivien Thomas. Together, this team spent years perfecting the technique. In 1944, they performed the first successful Blalock-Taussig shunt on a dying baby named Eileen Saxon.
The child's blue skin turned pink. She survived.
Word spread. Parents traveled across the country, bringing their blue babies to Johns Hopkins. The hallways filled with children who had been given death sentences—until Helen Taussig gave them life. Thousands of children who would have died went home healthy.
Dr. Taussig went on to become the founder of pediatric cardiology, the first woman to become a full professor at Johns Hopkins, and a fierce advocate for children's health. When thalidomide threatened to be approved in the United States in the 1960s, it was Helen who investigated, discovered its dangers, and prevented a tragedy.
She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. But perhaps her greatest achievement was simply this: she proved that the world's assessments of our limitations are often wrong.
A girl who couldn't read became a doctor. A woman who couldn't hear listened more carefully than anyone. A student told to stay silent changed medicine forever.
Helen Taussig didn't just overcome barriers. She turned every obstacle into a reason to push harder, see clearer, and care deeper.
And because she did, thousands of children got to grow up.