Daniel Hale Williams

1856–1931

Innovator and pioneer of Medical Science, Educator

First Black American Doctor to perform a Successful Open Heart Surgery

Founded Provident Hospital in 1891. It was the first non-segregated hospital in the United States. Provident also had an associated nursing school.

1913, Williams was elected as the only African-American charter member of the American College of Surgeons.

Williams was born in 1856 and raised in the city of Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. His father, Daniel Williams Jr., was the son of a Scots-Irish woman and a black barber. His mother, Sarah Price, was black American. His Williams family great-grandfather was listed in the 1790 U. S. census for Philadelphia City, as ‘other free,’ .

The fifth-born child, Williams lived with his parents, a brother, and five sisters. His family eventually moved to Annapolis, Maryland. Shortly after when Williams was nine, his father died of tuberculosis. Williams’ mother realized she could not manage the entire family and sent some of the children to live with relatives. Williams was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Baltimore, Maryland but ran away to join his mother, who had moved to Rockford, Illinois. He later moved to Edgerton, Wisconsin, where he joined his sister and opened his own barber shop. After moving to nearby Janesville, Wisconsin, Williams became fascinated by the work of a local physician and decided to follow his path.

He began working as an apprentice to Henry W. Palmer, studying with him for two years. In 1880, Williams entered Chicago Medical College, now known as Northwestern University Medical School. His education was funded by Mary Jane Richardson Jones, a prominent activist, and leader of Chicago’s black community. After graduating from Northwestern in 1883, he opened his own medical office in Chicago, Illinois.[lliams graduated from what is today Northwestern University Medical School, he opened a private practice where his patients were white and black. Black doctors, however, were not allowed to work in America’s private hospital

The first successful open-heart surgery, in 1893, was performed by a Black physician, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, in the first interracial U.S. hospital, which he created to serve the African American population of Chicago.

The operation, on a young black man named JAMES CORNISH who was employed in the Chicago stockyards, was done in the hospital that Williams established just two years earlier in 1891 with no anesthesia. In 1893 due to the depression of the capitalist era they almost closed down his hospital. Inspired by Frederick Douglass’s personal appeal, through appeals many people came forth with donations to keep the center open. Later that year, Dr. Williams made medical history. below is an article indicating the patient afterward..