Daniel Hale Williams

Daniel Hale Williams was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, on the eighteenth of January 1856, into a family of free people of color whose lineage wove together African and Scots-Irish ancestry. His father, a barber, died of tuberculosis when Daniel was a boy, and the child was set to work early — apprenticed to a shoemaker in Baltimore, a trade he soon abandoned. He made his way to Wisconsin, kept a barbershop, and there fell under the wing of a physician, Henry Palmer, whose two-year apprenticeship opened the door to medicine.

He entered Chicago Medical College, forerunner of Northwestern University's medical school, and took his medical degree in 1883. In an era that barred Black physicians from most hospitals and denied Black nurses their training, Williams answered the injustice with an institution of his own. In 1891 he founded Provident Hospital in Chicago — the nation's first hospital with an interracial staff and a training school for Black nurses, open to the sick of every color.

It was at Provident, on the tenth of July 1893, that Williams performed the surgery that carried his name into history. A young man named James Cornish arrived with a knife wound to the chest. Without antibiotics, without blood transfusion, without the tools a later century would take for granted, Williams opened the chest, examined the beating heart, and repaired the wounded pericardium. Cornish recovered and lived for decades. That same year Williams was named surgeon-in-chief of Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, where he reformed and elevated its care until 1898.

In 1913 he became the only Black charter member of the American College of Surgeons. He died in Idlewild, Michigan, on the fourth of August 1931. We honor Daniel Hale Williams, who reached into the human heart when others dared not, and built the doors his people had been refused.