Daniel Hale Williams

• Born: January 18, 1856
• Birthplace: Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania
• Died: August 4, 1931
• Place of death: Idlewild, Michigan

Physician, surgeon, and educator

In 1893, only fifty-six years after James McCune Smith became the first African American physician and only forty-six after David Jones Peck became the first African American to graduate from a regular American medical school, Williams performed the world’s first successful open-heart surgical operation. It would be seventy years before open-heart surgery became routine.

Areas of achievement: Education; Medicine

Early Life

Daniel Hale Williams was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, on January 18, 1856, the fifth of seven children of Daniel Williams, a prosperous free mulatto, and his wife Sarah, a free woman of African, white, and Native American ancestry. Williams began his education in Annapolis, Maryland. Family fortunes declined after his father died of tuberculosis in 1867. His desperate mother broke up the family, leaving some of her children with relatives in Baltimore and taking others to her new home in Rockford, Illinois.

Williams quit his shoemaker’s apprenticeship in Baltimore and traveled west to rejoin his mother and younger siblings in Janesville, Wisconsin, where he found work in a barbershop. With financial and tutorial support from his landlord and employer, Harry Anderson, and his mentor, Orrin Guernsey, he received a secondary school diploma from Janesville Classical Academy in 1878. Eager for more education and a professional career, he apprenticed to Henry Palmer, a physician in Janesville. He entered the Chicago Medical College of Northwestern University in 1880 and earned his M.D. in 1883.

Life’s Work

“Doctor Dan,” as Williams was known, interned at Mercy Hospital in Chicago before starting a private surgical practice in 1884, when he was also named surgeon to the South Side Dispensary. Until 1887, he taught anatomy at Northwestern. In 1889, he became a member of the Illinois State Board of Health. Disturbed that he was one of only three black physicians in Chicago and eager to try to overcome the effects of discrimination and prejudice, he proposed founding a new hospital and nursing school with race-blind policies. The board accepted his proposal, which led directly to the opening in 1891 of the Provident Hospital and Nursing Training School, one of the nation’s earliest interracial health care facilities. By 1896, it had sixty-five beds.

On the night of July 9, 1893, James Cornish, a victim of a bar fight, was brought to Provident Hospital with a stab wound between the fourth and fifth ribs on his left side. As is typical of puncture wounds, there was little bleeding. Without any of the sophisticated diagnostic equipment that would become common in the twentieth century, Williams was at first unable to determine the extent, severity, or prognosis of the wound, but he saw that Cornish was in shock and fading rapidly. He decided to use an unprecedented procedure to try to save the young man’s life.

Williams insisted that he and his staff be familiar with the latest and best medical technology, medical science, and surgical techniques. At the time, only two of the three conditions necessary for complicated modern surgery had been met. John Collins Warren had introduced anesthesia in 1846, but anesthesiology was still an undeveloped science. Ignaz Semmelweis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Marion Sims, and Joseph Lister had pioneered antisepsis in the 1840’s, 1850’s, and 1860’s, but it too was still unreliable and not even fully accepted. George Washington Crile would not publish his results on the control of surgical shock and hemorrhage until 1899. Thus, in Williams’s operating room, however careful and knowledgable he and his colleagues were, not much existed to prevent patients from suffering pain, developing infections, or bleeding to death.

Williams was aware of these risks and deficiencies when he decided to open Cornish’s chest. He had no device to prevent Cornish’s lung from collapsing or to safeguard his heart. Williams went ahead anyway, dealing with the dangers as best he could. Upon cutting a hinged opening in the chest above the heart, Williams noticed damage to the left internal mammary artery and the pericardium. He repaired both, irrigated the chest with saline solution, and closed the chest. Cornish survived for fifty years.

Williams became instantly famous, not only in local medical and surgical circles but also in the popular press. He was in demand nationwide for prestigious positions. From 1894 to 1898, he was chief of surgery at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., and a member of the medical faculty of Howard University. In 1898, he married Alice Johnson and returned to Chicago, where he served at the Provident until 1912. Beginning in 1900, he was occasionally a visiting professor of surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. From 1912 to 1926, he was senior staff surgeon at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago.

Williams retired after suffering a stroke in 1926. He died of another stroke on August 4, 1931, at his home in Idlewild, Michigan.

Significance

In 1895, because the American Medical Association (AMA) would not yet admit people of color as members, Williams and five other African American physicians—Robert F. Boyd, Daniel L. Martin, David H. C. Scott, H. R. Butler, and Miles V. Lynk—founded a parallel organization, the National Medical Association (NMA), to represent their professional interests. Boyd was its first president and Williams its first vice president. By 2009, NMA membership comprised more than thirty thousand African American physicians.

Williams’s lasting importance to the history of medicine was not primarily based on his skill and innovation as a first-rate operative surgeon, but rather on his demonstration to a skeptical world that African Americans could achieve and maintain the highest standards of medicine and surgery. He was the only African American among the founders of the American College of Surgeons in 1913.

Bibliography

Buckler, Helen. Daniel Hale Williams: Negro Surgeon. Rev. ed. New York: Pitman, 1968. The standard biography of Williams, revised from its first publication in 1954 as Doctor Dan: Pioneer in American Surgery.

Byrd, W. Michael, and Linda A. Clayton. An American Health Dilemma: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race: Beginnings to 1900. New York: Routledge, 2000. Discusses the unique dilemmas of nineteenth century African Americans as both patients and caregivers.

Leavitt, Judith Walzer, and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health. 3d ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Describes the sociological, political, and historical context of Williams’s achievements.

Moxsey, Mary E. “Daniel Hale Williams.” In Rising Above Color, edited by Philip Henry Lotz. New York: Girvin, 2007. A hagiographic and didactic sketch aimed at younger readers.

Shumacker, Harris B. The Evolution of Cardiac Surgery. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Presents the scientific and medical context of Williams’s work.

Williams, Daniel Hale. “Stab Wound of the Heart and Pericardium, Suture of the Pericardium, Recovery, Patient Alive Three Years Afterward.” Medical Record 51 (1897): 437-439. Williams’s own professional account of his groundbreaking feat.