Dr. Daniel Hale Williams: A man of firsts

By Logan Langlois

NASHVILLE, TN — On January 18 we celebrated the birthday of a man of firsts. The first person to ever successfully perform open heart surgery, the first African American cardiologist, and the founder of the first interracial hospital, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams III’s January 18, 1856 birthday is one to be marked with broad strokes within history books. Williams was the first African American physician to be admitted into the American College of Surgeons, after which he co-founded the National Medical Association. Throughout his career, Williams advocated for African Americans to have their place in the medical world. Today he is honored by international scholarly and medical communities.

Born the fifth of eight children and the eldest son to Sarah Price Williams and Daniel Hale Williams II in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, Williams’s father passed away from tuberculosis when he was just ten years old. Following her husband’s passing, Daniel’s mother moved the family to live with relatives in Baltimore, Maryland. After giving up the pursuits of a shoemaker apprenticeship and working in the family barbering business, Williams decided to pursue an education and worked as an apprentice at the age of 20 with distinguished surgeon Dr. Henry Palmer.

Williams would receive his M.D. in 1883 from Chicago Medical College, where he would go into private practice as one of the only Black physicians in Chicago. Williams would practice in an integrated neighborhood where he would treat both Black and white patients. Around this time, he would also work for the Black civil rights organization Equal Rights League throughout the Reconstruction era.

Dr. Williams was appointed to the Illinois State Board of Health, currently the Illinois Department of Public Health, in 1889. Williams throughout his career would combat the overt racism of the day which both prevented African Americans from being admitted to and Black doctors being employed by hospitals. An example of this is when Williams founded the Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses, currently the Provident Hospital of Cook County, on May 4, 1891, while practicing in Chicago. It would become the first American hospital to provide an internship and nursing program that hired African Americans, as well as being the first with an interracial staff.

Williams would perform the first open-heart surgery on a stabbing victim named James Cornish on a hot summer in 1893 after Cornish had been rushed to Provident Hospital. Williams worked with a team of four white and two Black doctors watching as he operated using crude anesthesia within a cramped operating room. After the operation, Cornish would walk out of the hospital only 51 days after suffering the near-lethal wound and live for another 20 years.

Williams operated without X-rays, antibiotics, surgical prep work, or tools of modern surgery and his skill earned him and Provident Hospital a pioneering reputation. In 1894 Dr. Williams moved to Washington, D.C., where he assumed the position of Chief Surgeon of the Freedmen’s Hospital. While there, he continued to encourage the employment of multiracial staff.

In 1895, Williams co-founded the National Medical Association as an alternative for Black medical practitioners to the all-white American Medical Association. He then returned to Provident in 1898 and married Alice Johnson that same year. After working at several hospitals, he was employed at Meharry Medical College in 1899 for around 20 years and became an American College of Surgeons charter member in 1913. Williams would experience a debilitating stroke in 1926 and would die five years later August 4, 1931. Today, Williams is remembered as a pioneering physician and equal employment advocate in the medical field, as his work is continuously honored worldwide.