Helen Brooke Taussig, who founded the field of pediatric cardiology, which is the diagnosis and treatment of heart conditions in children, was born on May 24, 1898, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was appointed chief of the pediatric unit at Johns Hopkins in 1930 and worked there until 1963. Helen was the first female president of the American Heart Association. In the 1960s, Helen started a campaign and testified before Congress to ban the use of thalidomide. A profound and inspiring layer to her medical genius is that Taussig accomplished much of her groundbreaking work while being profoundly deaf. Dyslexic as a child and losing her hearing in her late 30s, she innovated a technique of using her fingertips to feel the rhythmic vibrations and subtle murmurs of her young patients’ hearts. This extraordinary sense of touch allowed her to diagnose congenital defects that other doctors missed with stethoscopes, ultimately leading to her co-development of the Blalock-Taussig-Thomas shunt, which saved the lives of countless blue babies.