Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performing the first successful open heart surgery at Provident Hospital in Chicago.
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Things were tense in the operating
room of two year old Provident Hospital
in Chicago on July 10, 1893. James
Cornish had been carried to the hospital with what was surely a fatal wound—a knife was sticking out of his chest and lodged in the heart.
The only way to save him—open the
chest, remove the knife and suture
the pericardium—the tough double
layered membrane which covers the heart—would probably kill him. No one had
previously survived the handful of attempts at the procedure.
Dr.
Daniel Hale Williams, a 37 year old surgeon and founder of the only hospital in Chicago with an integrated staff, was used to breaking
new ground and confident in his skills.
He was also a pioneer of the sterile operating room, being one of
the first American surgeons to heed the ground breaking research of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister at a time when older doctors were still performing
multiple operations on the same bloody table without washing their hands in between.
That reform alone had greatly boosted survival rates among his patients.
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.
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Without the benefit of modern antibiotics and with unreliable anesthetics he went to work. And he had to work fast because he also had
no access to blood transfusions. He quickly and skillfully cracked the chest,
removed the knife, sutured the pericardium, closed and sutured the chest. Within ten days Cornish had fully recovered and went on to live a
normal life for many years.
Dr. Williams had just performed the
first successful open heart surgery.
James Cornish recovering from his heart surgery
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Did I mention that he was Black?
Williams was born on January 18,
1856 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. His parents were free Blacks and his father
made a good living as a barber. The elder Williams was also a community
leader and active in the Equal Rights
League, an early civil rights
organization active during the Reconstruction
Era.
At the age of ten the boy’s security
was shattered with the sudden death of his father. He was sent to live with relatives in Baltimore where he got a little more
basic education before being unhappily apprenticed
to a shoemaker.
Dissatisfied, he left Maryland to join his mother and other
members of his family who had relocated to Chicago. He took up his father’s trade and was soon
made enough money to better himself by apprenticing to Dr. Henry Palmer, a highly accomplished surgeon. He then completed
formal training at Chicago Medical
College, one of the few schools in the country to accept Black students.
Unable to gain a position or admitting status at any Chicago
hospital because of his race, Williams set up a private practice on the South Side.
Then he was hired as a doctor for the Chicago Street Railway, treating mostly white workers and injured
passengers. Despite the general racism
of the times, he was well thought of by the men and affectionately called Dr. Dan.
Private practice or the Railway
offices, however did not offer the kind of recovery
facilities necessary to perform the most difficult and challenging
operations. For that he needed a full
service hospital. He also wanted to
encourage more blacks to enter medicine, not only as doctors, but as nurses and other support personnel.
The original Providence Hospital building.
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So in 1891 Dr. Williams founded Provident Hospital and Training School for
Nurses, the nation’s first hospital with a nursing and intern program that
had a racially integrated staff.
Dr. Williams work soon attracted the
attention of the aging abolitionist
Fredrick Douglas who championed him among friends in Washington. As a result in
1894 Williams was appointed the chief surgeon of the Freedmen’s Hospital, serving former slaves. It was a daunting task. Poorly equipped and funded from its beginning
in the Reconstruction Era, it had
been allowed to deteriorate and offered substandard
care with an astonishing mortality
rate.
Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C.
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Williams worked feverishly on the
turn-around, instituting modern hygienic standards, re-training the staff,
improving surgical procedures including public
viewing of surgeries which he believed would be an incentive to the staff
to operate on the highest level. He also
added specialists in more fields,
launched an ambulance service, and
on the model of Provident, adding a multiracial staff, continuing to provide
opportunities for black physicians and nursing students.
The following year, in 1895 William
co-founded the National Medical Association, an alternative to the American Medical Association, which
didn’t allow African-American membership.
The school for nursing was an important part of Provident hospital and bringing Black women into medical careers one of the most treasured parts of Dr. Williams' legacy.
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In his years in Washington, Williams
met Alice Johnson who he married in
1898. The couple returned to Chicago
where he resumed his position at Provident.
Later he would practice at Cook
County Hospital and St. Luke’s,
major modern hospitals who could no longer deny privileges to one of the most
distinguished surgeons in the nation.
From 1901 he spent part of every
year in Nashville where he was a
voluntary visiting clinical professor
at Meharry Medical College for more
than two decades. He became a charter member of the American College of Surgeons in 1913.
Dr. Williams was active until he
suffered a stroke in 1926. On August 4,
1931 he died in Idlewild, Michigan.
Williams was widely honored in his lifetime and his story
has become a staple of Black History
Month commemorations. But he is
largely unknown to white Americans.
Williams’s beloved Providence
Hospital, one of the few full service hospitals on the under-served South Side, was forced to close in 1987
due to financial problems. In 1993 it
reopened in as Provident Hospital of
Cook County, part of the Cook County
Bureau of Health Services. Finances
continue to threaten the public hospital and its future is far from certain.
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