Daniel Hale Williams


Daniel Hale Williams was an American surgeon and hospital founder. He founded Provident Hospital in 1891, which was the first non-segregated hospital in the United States. He is known for being the first to successfully perform an open-heart surgery—specifically, a procedure on the pericardium, the double-layered, fluid-filled sac that encloses the heart and the roots of the great vessels. The pericardium anchors the heart, protects it from infection and trauma, and reduces friction during its constant beating by providing lubrication.
In 1913, Williams was elected as the only African-American charter member of the American College of Surgeons.

Biography

Early life and education

Williams was born on January 18, 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,' a designation that included black Americans.
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. He earned a Doctor of Medicine from Northwestern University Medical School in 1883.

Career

After graduation, he opened a private medical practice in Chicago, Illinois.
From 1885 to 1888, Williams worked as a demonstrator in anatomy at Northwestern. He later appointed an instructor at Northwestern's free clinic, the South Side Dispensary.
In 1887, he was appointed to the Illinois State Board of Health. That same year, he became an attending physician at the Protestant Orphan Asylum, an institution that was established to respond to the cholera epidemic.

Provident Hospital

In 1891, Williams founded the Provident Hospital, which also provided a training residency for doctors and training school for nurses in Chicago. This was established mostly for the benefit of African-American residents, to increase their accessibility to health care, but its staff and patients were integrated from the start.
In 1892, he endorsed the application of Emma Ann Reynolds, who was a graduate of the nurses training school at Provident, to Northwestern University Woman’s Medical School. In 1895, Reynolds became the first black woman to receive a Doctor of Medicine from Northwestern.

Heart surgery

In 1893, Williams became the first African American on record to have successfully performed pericardium surgery to repair a wound. On September 6, 1891, Henry Dalton had been the first American to successfully perform pericardium surgery to repair a wound. Earlier successful surgeries to drain the pericardium, by performing a pericardiostomy were done by Francisco Romero in 1801 and Dominique Jean Larrey in 1810.
On July 10, 1893, Williams repaired the torn pericardium of a knife wound patient, James Cornish. Cornish, who was stabbed directly through the left fifth costal cartilage, had been admitted the previous night. Williams decided to operate the next morning in response to continued bleeding, cough and "pronounced" symptoms of shock. He performed this surgery, without the benefit of penicillin or blood transfusion, at Provident Hospital, Chicago. It was not reported until 1897. He undertook a second procedure to drain fluid. About fifty days after the initial procedure, Cornish left the hospital.

Public and teaching posts

In 1893, during the administration of President Grover Cleveland, Williams was appointed surgeon-in-chief of Freedman's Hospital in Washington, D.C., a post he held until 1898. That year he married Alice Johnson, who was born in the city and graduated from Howard University, and moved back to Chicago. In addition to organizing Provident Hospital, Williams also established a training school for African-American nurses at the facility. In 1897, he was appointed to the Illinois Department of Public Health, where he worked to raise medical and hospital standards.
Williams was a Professor of Clinical Surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, and was an attending surgeon at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. He worked to create more hospitals that admitted African Americans. In 1895 he co-founded the National Medical Association for African-American doctors, and in 1913 he became a charter member and the only African-American doctor in the American College of Surgeons.

Death

His wife, Alice Johnson, died in 1924. Williams died in relative obscurity, of a stroke in Idlewild, Michigan on August 4, 1931. He was funeralized at St Anselm Catholic Church in Chicago, and there is debate about how well attended the service was. Dr Daniel Hale Williams was 75 years old.

Personal life

Williams was married in 1898 to Alice Johnson, natural daughter of the Jewish-American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel and a biracial maid. His retirement home was in Idlewild, Michigan, a black community.
Williams was baptized a Catholic by Fr Joseph Eckert, SVD on his deathbed. He left $2,500 in his will to St. Elizabeth's Church in Chicago. Williams was buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood.

Legacy and impact

In the 1890s several attempts were made to improve cardiac surgery. On September 6, 1891, the first successful pericardial sac repair operation in the United States of America was performed by Henry C. Dalton of Saint Louis, Missouri. The first successful surgery on the heart itself was performed by Norwegian surgeon Axel Cappelen on September 4, 1895, at Rikshospitalet in Kristiania, now Oslo. The first successful surgery of the heart, performed without any complications, was by Ludwig Rehn of Frankfurt, Germany, who repaired a stab wound to the right ventricle on September 7, 1896. Despite these improvements, heart-related surgery was not widely accepted in the field of medical science until during World War II. Surgeons were forced to improve their methods of surgery in order to repair severe war wounds. Although they did not receive early recognition for their pioneering work, Dalton and Williams were later recognised for their roles in cardiac surgery.

Honors

Williams received honorary degrees from Howard and Wilberforce Universities, was named a charter member of the American College of Surgeons, and was a member of the Chicago Surgical Society.

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