An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 8/10/2020
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"A people who don't make provision for their own sick and suffering are not worthy of civilization."
Continuing in the theme of medical milestones, today we look at the remarkable life and career of Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the first-ever surgeon to perform successful heart surgery.
Born in 1856 Pennsylvania, Williams inherited a barber shop from his father, but opted to instead follow the medical profession. Unusually for a black man of the time, he was apprenticed to a surgeon at Chicago Medical College and later set up his own private practice in the city. Due to the rigid discriminatory practices of the time (among other things, blacks could not be admitted to hospitals and black doctors were refused staff positions), in 1891 Williams opened Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses, the nation's first-ever hospital with a nursing and intern program that --significantly-- had a racially integrated staff. Such was the notoriety of this achievement that even Frederick Douglass (see Lesson #2 in this series) himself publicly advocated Provident Hospital.
In 1893 Williams further secured his place in history when he operated on a Provident patient with a severe stab wound. In an era well before modern transfusion or surgical technology, Williams successfully sutured the patient's pericardium, (the membranous sac enclosing the heart), thus becoming one of the first people to perform open-heart surgery.
In 1894 Williams became chief surgeon of the Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C. (a role which would later be filled by Charles R. Drew --see previous lesson in this series). He would later return to his beloved Provident, but later also worked at Chicago's Cook County Hospital and at St. Luke's, another milestone for a black doctor. He became a charter member of the American College of Surgeons in 1913.
Next page - Lesson 28: Dorothy Irene Height