Something the Lord Made

Something the Lord Made (2004) is an American biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Joseph Sargent reconstructs the unlikely partnership between Alfred Blalock — played by Alan Rickman — and Vivien Thomas, the self-taught Black lab technician portrayed by Yasiin Bey, whose joint work at Johns Hopkins University gave children with congenital heart defects a fighting chance for the first time.

Thomas designed the surgical techniques from scratch while Blalock took the public credit. Together they developed the Blalock–Taussig shunt, a procedure for so-called "blue babies" born with malformed hearts, performed at a time when racial segregation determined who could enter which wing of a Baltimore hospital. Thomas did not hold a medical degree, earned a fraction of his white colleagues' pay, and for years received no formal acknowledgment for work that saved thousands of lives.

The HBO film won four Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Writing. Stream Something the Lord Made (2004) online on iFILM — the true story of a medical breakthrough nearly buried by the prejudices of its era.