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Williams was born to a mixed-race family in Pennsylvania. His father, a white man, was married to a free Black woman, and was an active abolitionist who died when he was 11.
Although some members of the family lived as whites, and he could also have done so, Daniel refused to “pass” and actively identified himself as Black. Soon after his father died his mother sent her children to live with different relatives, except Daniel, who was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Baltimore, while she went to live in Illinois. After a while Daniel left his apprenticeship and followed her, but although the reunion was happy, his mother soon moved to Maryland with his sisters to rejoin the other children, and Daniel elected to stay in Illinois.

For the next several years he worked and lived with various cousins, but when he was 16 he struck out on his own and moved to Wisconsin, where he became a barber, living very happily with his employers family, and also attended high school. His employer-cum foster father later financed his medical training in Chicago, and he graduated in 1883.
Unable to practice in Chicagos segregated hospitals, he opened his own, the first integrated hospital in the USA, in 1891. He also established two nursing schools for Black nurses. At Provident Hospital Williams made history in 1893 by performing the worlds first open-heart surgery, on a stabbing victim (who lived another 50 years). He was also the first Black man on the Illinois State Board of Health and later chief surgeon at Washingtons Freedmens Hospital. He was the only Black doctor invited to be a founder member of the American College of Surgeons (1913) and one of the founders of the National Medical Association (the medical society founded in 1895 for Black doctors).
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams was an African American physician who made history by performing the first successful open heart surgery operation.
Daniel Hale Williams was born in 1856 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, the fifth of eight children. His father was a barber who died when Daniel was only nine. His mother was unable to provide for all the children on her own, so she moved the family to Baltimore, Maryland to stay with relatives. An apprenticeship with a shoemaker was found for Daniel; he remained there as a shoemakers apprentice for three years while he was still a young child. As a teenager, he learned to cut hair and became a barber, living and working with a family who owned a barber shop in Janesville, Wisconsin.
In Janesville Daniel began to attend high school. He graduated from Hares Classical Academy in 1877. While working as a barber, he met Dr. Henry Palmer, a leading surgeon, who became the Surgeon General of Wisconsin. Dr. Palmer took Daniel on as a medical apprentice; he had two other apprentices at the time. Dr. Palmer helped the three apprentices apply for admission to a top medical school, the Chicago Medical School, which was affiliated with Northwestern University. All three were accepted and began their studies in 1880. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams graduated with his medical degree in 1883.
Dr. Williams began to practice surgery and medicine at the South Side Dispensary. At the same time, he held a position at Northwest University, as an instructor of anatomy. He worked for a time as a medical doctor for the City Railway Company and for the Protestant Orphan Asylum. Dr. Williamss practice began to grow, as did his reputation as a skilled surgeon. In 1883, he was one of only four African American doctors in the Chicago area, yet he gained so much respect within the medical community that six years later, in 1889, he was appointed to the Illinois Board of Health.
Dr. Williams observed that African American patients were routinely subject to second-class medical care. Also, opportunities for most Black physicians were extremely limited, and it was difficult for African Americans to gain admission to medical and nursing schools because of institutionalized racism. Dr. Williams met a young woman, Emma Reynolds, who had been refused admission by every nursing school in the area. This prompted him to launch a new venture, the first African American owned hospital in the United States. It started as a twelve-bed facility, named Provident Hospital. At Provident Hospital, Dr. Williams also opened the first nursing school for African Americans, where Emma Reynolds and six others made up the first graduating class. Dr. Williams employed African American and White doctors at Provident Hospital, emphasizing the need to provide the best available care to everyone. He required that the doctors at Provident keep abreast of the latest advances in medicine.
Two years later, in 1893, a young man named James Cornish was rushed to Provident Hospital with a stab wound to the chest. Doctors at this time did not have X-ray machines, and the doctors at Provident were unsure what to do for Mr. Cornish. His condition began to deteriorate; his pulse was getting weaker and he started to go into shock, which are signs of internal bleeding. In the operating room, Dr. Williams made the decision to open up Cornishs chest and see what could be done before he bled to death internally. The surgical team found a pierced blood vessel and a tear to the pericardium tissue around the heart. Dr. Williams sutured both of these injuries to stop the bleeding. James Cornish survived the operation. Newspaper headlines reported: “Sewed Up His Heart! Remarkable Surgical Operation on a Colored Man!” Cornish recovered and lived another twenty years. It was the first successful open heart surgery ever performed.
Dr. Williamss medical career prospered and he became surgeon-in-chief at Freedmens Hospital in Washington, D.C.. He organized the hospital into specialized departments such as Medical, Surgical, Gynecological, Obstetrical, Dermatological, etc. He helped organize the National Medical Association, which at the time was the only medical organization open to African Americans. In 1898 he married Alice Johnson, a school teacher, and moved back to Chicago where he acted as chief of surgery at Provident, which had grown to be a much larger institution. He continued on to hold top positions in teaching and as head surgeon at another Chicago hospital. Dr. Williams was often invited to speak to doctors associations around the country on the subject of health care for African Americans. He encouraged African American leaders to open hospitals in other cities where African American people would receive first rate care. He received numerous honors and was the first Black physician named as a Fellow in the American College of Surgeons. In 1926 he retired after suffering a stroke. Dr. Williams passed away in Idlewild,