On July 10, 1893, trailblazing physician Daniel Hale Williams successfully performs one of the world’s first open-heart surgeries at Provident Hospital in Chicago. Not only is he a pioneer of the procedure; he is one of just three African American physicians practicing in Chicago at a time when many white-run hospitals refused to treat Black patients—much less hire Black doctors.
Born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania on January 18, 1856, Williams worked as a shoemaker’s apprentice and a barber before graduating from Chicago Medical College in 1883. Eight years later, seeing the need for more training and employment opportunities for Black people in the medical field, he founded the first interracial hospital and nursing school: Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses.
On the evening of July 9, 1893, a 24-year-old man named James Cornish entered the hospital with a stab wound to the chest. The next morning, Williams examined the wound and found that Cornish’s pericardium—the sac surrounding his heart—was torn. As his colleagues looked on, Williams sutured the tear with catgut. The procedure was successful, and Cornish left the hospital on August 30 as one of the first people to survive open-heart surgery. He went on to live 20 more years.
Williams’ procedure is the second-known case of a successful pericardium suture in the United States. Two years before Cornish’s surgery, a doctor named Henry Dalton performed a similar procedure in St. Louis, Missouri. But Williams didn’t know about Dalton’s surgery because Dalton hadn’t published an article about it yet. Williams used his own medical knowledge and skill to improvise the life-saving procedure.
In 1894, Williams became the chief surgeon at Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his time there, he worked to reduce the hospital’s mortality rate and helped found the National Medical Association to represent Black medical professionals, whom the American Medical Association refused to admit. He returned to Provident Hospital in 1898. In 1902, he performed another pioneering surgery there when he successfully sutured a patient's spleen.
