Alan Rickman in the HBO Film Something the Lord Made

It's Not at All What You Think it is - it Will Open Your Heart!

I was flipping channels one Sunday afternoon and ran across Alan Rickman on the television screen. I checked the movie title; the guide said Something the Lord Made. I became curious about what role Alan Rickman, the famous Professor Severus Snape in Harry Potter, would be playing in a movie about the Lord. Alan Rickman also played the bad guy in Princes of Thieves with Kevin Costner, and he played Hans Gruber in Die Hard. I decided to stick with the movie to see what it was all about.

It was not AT ALL what I expected! Something the Lord Made is a story about overcoming racial prejudice, post-Depression social pressures, and the story about the incredible open-heart surgery using a pioneering shunt procedure that revolutionized the medical field. The screenplay was written by Peter Silverman and Robert Caswell.

Something the Lord Made is based on the true story of the world's first "blue baby" open-heart surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1944 that shocked the medical community. It was the first attempt to treat Tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart malformation that robs the blood of oxygen, turning the baby's skin blue as the infant slowly suffocates.

The real-life infant, Eileen Saxon, was small, frail and dying when she was wheeled into the operating room to receive the Blalock-Taussig Shunt. Rickman delivers a poignant portrayal of Dr. Alfred Blalock. Mary Stuart Masterson plays the distinguished pediatric cardiologist - Dr. Helen Taussig, who originally convinced Dr. Blalock to experiment with a procedure to cure the blue baby condition. Mos Def is the immortal Vivien Thomas, a young African-American lab assistant who brilliantly pioneered the shunt procedure using dogs.