Background
Alfred Blalock was born on April 5, 1899, in Culloden, Georgia, United States, the son of George Z. Blalock, a merchant, and Martha Davis.
Alfred Blalock was born on April 5, 1899, in Culloden, Georgia, United States, the son of George Z. Blalock, a merchant, and Martha Davis.
Alfred completed the ninth grade at Jonesboro, Georgia, and then studied at Georgia Military College at Milledgeville. He received his B. A. from the University of Georgia in 1918 and his M. D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1922. Blalock credited his interest in medical research to a classmate at Johns Hopkins, Tinsley R. Harrison.
After graduation from medical school, Blalock was appointed house medical officer in urology under Hugh H. Young. Despite illness during his intern year, Blalock gained an assistant residency on the general surgical service the following year. In July 1924 he began a year as extern in otolaryngology under Samuel J. Crowe. With Harrison, Blalock published "The Effects of Changes in Hydrogen Ion Concentration on the Blood Flow of Morphinized Dogs" and "Partial Tracheal Obstruction: An Experimental Study on the Effects on the Circulation and Respiration of Morphinized Dogs. "
In 1925 Blalock became the chief resident in surgery at the newly reorganized school of medicine at Vanderbilt University. His friend Harrison was the chief resident in medicine; they continued their investigative work, studying the influence of various factors on the output of the heart. Over the next few years, Blalock's interest shifted more toward problems of cardiac output that had some direct application to the clinical problems of surgery. He began his work on shock. In 1928 he initiated studies in which the oxygen content of blood withdrawn from veins in various parts of the body was determined in shock produced by different methods, including trauma and the injection of histamine. He concluded that the local accumulation of blood at the site of trauma to a large area, such as the intestinal tract or an extremity, was evidence against the systemic action of a histaminelike substance.
Blalock and his group explored every facet of the problem; they gathered overwhelming evidence that shock was caused by the loss of fluid outside the vascular bed with resulting decrease in blood volume. Blalock's recognition of the need for volume replacement was corroborated during World War II. Large quantities of blood, blood substitutes, and plasma expanders were used in treating the wounded, which resulted in the saving of many lives.
In 1941 Blalock became professor of surgery and chairman of the Department of Surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and surgeon-in-chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Soon thereafter he collaborated with A. McGehee Harvey and Joseph L. Lilienthal, Jr. , in performing, for the first time, total removal of the thymus gland in patients with myasthenia gravis. This operation is still utilized in the treatment of this disease.
No other surgeon of Blalock's era trained so many residents for important academic appointments. He gave his best energies to the development of a children's surgical unit at Johns Hopkins. The effort culminated in the great Children's Medical and Surgical Center in Baltimore, dedicated in the year of Blalock's retirement. Because of Blalock's accomplishments and contributions to Johns Hopkins, the trustees changed the name of the clinical science building to the Alfred Blalock Building. He died in Baltimore.
On October 25, 1930, Blalock married Mary O'Bryan. They had three children. On November 12, 1959, after his first wife died, Blalock married Alice S. Waters.