Daniel Hale Williams

He cut hair before he cut anything else. Daniel Hale Williams was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, the son of a Black barber who died of tuberculosis while Daniel was still a boy — nine by the census record his parents gave, eleven by other accounts. His mother could not hold the family together and scattered the children. Williams was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Baltimore, ran away to find her, and ended up in Wisconsin running a barber shop of his own. In Janesville he talked himself into a two-year apprenticeship with the surgeon Henry Palmer, entered Chicago Medical College in 1880, and took his medical degree in 1883, his tuition partly paid by the Chicago activist Mary Jane Richardson Jones.

Provident Hospital, opened in 1891, was the larger achievement. Black doctors could not get hospital privileges and Black women were barred from nursing schools. Provident took patients and staff of any race and ran the country's first nurses' training school for Black women. Two years later Williams opened the chest of a stabbing victim, James Cornish, repaired the pericardium — the sac around the heart — and Cornish lived. It is often called the first successful heart surgery. The truer claim: an early successful pericardial repair, done without antibiotics, transfusion or modern anesthesia, and not the first chest opened.

The fame did not protect him. In 1893 Williams was appointed surgeon-in-chief of Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, a neglected federal institution, and rebuilt it — a multiracial staff, an ambulance service, another nurses' training school, surgical clinics that outside doctors traveled to watch. He returned to Chicago in 1898 and into a fight he never got out of. George Cleveland Hall, Provident's medical director and a man in Booker T. Washington's circle, wanted the hospital to be a Black institution rather than an integrated one. Williams lost, and in 1913 resigned from the board of the hospital he had founded. He had co-founded the National Medical Association in 1895 because the American Medical Association would not admit Black physicians. That same year, 1913, he became the American College of Surgeons' only Black charter member.

Alice Johnson Williams died in 1924. Her husband, recovering from a stroke, retired from St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago in 1926 and spent his last years at Idlewild, the Black resort town in Michigan, where another stroke killed him on August 4, 1931. He was 75, and he died out of the public eye. Schools in Chicago, Gary, Brooklyn and the Bronx carry his name, and a Pennsylvania marker stands near his boyhood home. Most of it commemorates the operation. Provident — the hospital that trained Black nurses and physicians when almost nowhere else would — is the part that gets left out, and it is the part that changed more lives.

Daniel Hale Williams's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Provident Hospital other
  The first interracial hospital in the United States, with a nurses' training school for Black women 1891
• Pericardial repair on James Cornish discovery
  One of the first successful operations on the sac around the heart 1893
• The reorganization of Freedmen's Hospital other
  Multiracial staff, ambulance service and a nurses' school in Washington 1894
• National Medical Association other
  Co-founded for the Black physicians the AMA would not admit 1895
• Stab Wound of the Heart and Pericardium other
  His own account of the Cornish operation, published four years after it 1897

• January 18, 1856 aged 0 Born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania Several reference works give 1858, but the census records his parents supplied say 1856.
• 1880 aged ~24 Enters Chicago Medical College after two years apprenticed to a Wisconsin surgeon He had been a shoemaker's apprentice and a barber first.
• 1883 aged ~27 Takes his medical degree and opens a practice in Chicago
• 1891 aged ~35 Founds Provident Hospital on Chicago's South Side Twelve beds, an interracial staff, and the first nurses' training school in the country for Black women.
• July 10, 1893 aged 37 Repairs the torn pericardium of James Cornish Cornish left the hospital about 50 days later. Williams did not publish the case until 1897.
• 1893 aged ~37 Appointed surgeon-in-chief of Freedmen's Hospital in Washington He held the post until 1898 and rebuilt a neglected institution.
• 1895 aged ~39 Co-founds the National Medical Association The American Medical Association would not admit Black physicians.
• 1913 aged ~57 Becomes the only Black charter member of the American College of Surgeons The same year he resigned from the board of Provident.
• August 4, 1931 aged 75 Dies of a stroke at Idlewild, Michigan He was buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.

• Booker T. Washington 1856–1915
  Educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational training for African Americans. opposed
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. aligned with
• Charles Drew 1904–1950
  Physician-scientist whose work on blood plasma and blood banking saved countless lives. successor at Freedmen's Hospital
• Vivien Thomas 1910–1985
  Devised the blue-baby heart operation without a medical degree, and went unnamed on the paper. heir in cardiac surgery
• Michael DeBakey 1908–2008
  Cardiovascular surgeon who invented the roller pump and the Dacron arterial graft built on the field he opened