that the clinic struggled to cope, and medical visitors from around the world came to assist and to share knowledge. By 1951, the team had operated on over 1,000 children and the surgery had a mortality rate of only 5%. One of the major benefits of this surgery was that children gained the ability to play actively without the rapid exhaustion and frequent loss of consciousness that usually results from cyanotic heart defects. Helen Taussig reportedly kept a letter on her mantelpiece from twelve year old Jean-Pierre Cablan, written after undergoing the procedure: "Je suis maintenant un tout autre petit garcon ... je vais pouvoir aller jouer avec mes petits camarades." ("I am now a completely new boy... I will be able to play with the other children.") Often, an immediate improvement in the level of cyanosis could be seen as well. Taussig later recalled, "I suppose nothing would ever give me as much delight as seeing the first patient change from blue to pink in the operating room... bright pink cheeks and bright lips." Nowadays, the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt is useful for prolonging life and improving health in infants before heart defects can be definitively repaired, commonly as the first stage of the three-step Norwood Procedure. It allows infants to survive and gain weight before more complex surgeries are later attempted, and is used in the care of patients with Tetralogy of Fallot, pulmonary atresia, and more rare and complex abnormalities. At the time of Taussig's death, tens of thousands of children's lives had been saved by the shunt procedure. Further career As a physician, Taussig pioneered the use of x-rays and fluoroscopy simultaneously to examine changes in a baby's heart and lungs in a less invasive manner, and was very skilled in diagnosing heart conditions by feeling the heartbeat with her fingertips, rather than listening with a stethoscope. As well as her day to day clinical work as a paediatrician, Taussig was also an accomplished academic clinician. She published 100 academic articles over her career, considering various aspects of cardiology including biomedical ethics and the evolutionary origins of heart disease. In her research into the long-term outcomes of recipients of the shunt, Taussig remained in touch with many of her patients as they grew to adulthood and middle age. In 1947, after a decade of gathering material, Taussig published her magnum opus, Congenital Malformations of the Heart, considered to