Daniel Hale Williams

Daniel Hale Williams was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, on the eighteenth of January 1856, the son of a free Black barber and a mother of mixed Scots-Irish and African ancestry. He apprenticed as a shoemaker, then as a barber, and ultimately as a medical assistant before entering Chicago Medical College (later Northwestern University Medical School) in 1880. He earned his MD in 1883.

He practiced medicine in Chicago through the 1880s and joined the surgical faculty of Chicago Medical College in 1885 — one of the few African Americans on any American medical-school faculty in the nineteenth century. In 1891 he founded Provident Hospital in Chicago — the first Black-owned and operated hospital in the United States, and the first racially integrated hospital and nursing school in the country.

On the ninth of July 1893, Williams performed at Provident Hospital what is widely regarded as the first documented successful open-heart surgery. The patient was James Cornish, a Black laborer who had been stabbed in the chest. Williams opened the pericardium, sutured a tear in the pericardial sac, and closed the wound. Cornish survived for more than fifty years after the operation. The procedure was performed without antibiotics, without blood transfusion, and with only basic anesthesia.

Williams was appointed Chief Surgeon of Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C., in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland, served until 1898, and was a founding member of the American College of Surgeons in 1913 — the only African American admitted to the College's founding membership.

He died in Idlewild, Michigan, on the fourth of August 1931, age seventy-five.

He is honored here as the surgeon who first opened the human heart.