Daniel Hale Williams was born on Jan. 18, 1858 in Hollidaysburg, Pa. He was the son of a barber/businessman and his mother was a cousin to Frederick Douglass. His family strongly advocated the values and significance of education — lessons that he internalized after his father’s death due from tuberculosis in 1867. At 16, along with his mother, he moved to Wisconsin where he eventually worked as a barber.Williams pursued an education with the encouragement of a man named Harry Anderson
The school Williams attended was called the Janesville Classical Academy where he studied German and Latin, and he eventually graduated in 1877. In the fall of 1880 Williams moved to Chicago to start his medical studies. In 1883, at the age of 27, he graduated from Chicago Medical College and worked as a surgeon for the South Side Dispensary (1884–92) and physician for the Protestant Orphan Asylum (1884–93). His job at the South Side Dispensary was to demonstrate surgery for medical students. One of his students was Charles Mayo who later establised the famous Mayo Clinic.
In response to the lack of opportunity for blacks in the medical professions, in 1891 Williams founded the nation’s first interracial hospital, Provident, to provide training for black interns and the first school for black nurses in the United States. He was a surgeon at Provident (1892–93, 1898–1912) and surgeon in chief of Freedmen’s Hospital, Washington, D.C.
However, Williams is best known for performing the first successful heart surgery in America. On the night of July 9, two men got into a fight. One man, James Cornish was stabbed in the chest. His friends took him to Provident Hospital. Because there were no x-rays, there had never been an operation before on the human heart. Although contemporary medical opinion disapproved of surgical treatment of heart wounds, Williams opened the patient’s thoracic cavity without aid of blood transfusions or modern anesthetics and antibiotics.
With six doctors observing the surgery, he found a tear in the lining of the heart, sewed up the hole and closed the chest. Cornish did not die and suffered no infection. After 51 days James Cornish walked out of the hospital. Williams had made history. People all over the world heard about his work.
In 1897 Williams returned to Chicago and married in April 1898. Hale died on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 1931. His legacy will always remain, not only with his ground breaking surgical techniques but also with the fact that there are two schools named for Daniel Hale Williams in New York City. One is an elementary school: the other is a middle school. -torrance stephens
