Alfred Blalock Chair in Surgery

School of Medicine

Established in 1992 by numerous donors including many of Dr. Blalock's former residents and faculty in the Department of Surgery in his honor

As a teenager, ALFRED BLALOCK, Med 1922, decided that he wanted to attend the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, where his father had been a patient. After earning a Hopkins medical degree, he trained at Vanderbilt University and then served on its full-time faculty. Dr. Blalock joined the Hopkins faculty in 1941 and went on to become one of the most highly renowned and honored surgeons of his day.

He is best known for his work on shock and for developing, with Helen Taussig and Vivien Thomas, the operation for the Tetralogy of Fallot–known as the “blue-baby operation”–a procedure that palliates a congenital malformation of the heart. In 1953, Dr. Blalock was honored with the American Medical Association’s Distinguished Service Award for his outstanding work in surgery. He died in 1964.

Held by John L. Cameron

JOHN L. CAMERON, Med 1962, the Alfred Blalock Professor of Surgery, is best known for his work on the surgical management of pancreatic cancer. He pioneered efforts to lower the mortality and morbidity of pancreaticoduodenectomy, the Whipple operation, which is used to treat pancreatic cancer. He has also made numerous laboratory and clinical contributions to the understanding and treatment of a variety of other alimentary tract diseases. Except for two years at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Dr. Cameron has spent his entire medical career at Johns Hopkins, beginning with medical school.