A Pioneering Surgeon
By Peter Galvin, MD
Daniel Hale Williams (1856–1931) was the fifth of six children born to Daniel and Sarah Williams of Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. His parents were free black people and were abolitionists and devout Christians. Shortly after the Civil War, his father died of tuberculosis. The financial strain forced the family to move to Baltimore, where young Williams was apprenticed with a shoemaker. He found the work tedious and lonely, and after a year the family moved again, this time to Rockford, Illinois. There, Williams worked a variety of jobs, including cutting hair. By age 17, he and his sister moved 50 miles north to Edgerton, Wisconsin, where he opened his own barbershop. Although the business didn’t last long, he became proficient at cutting hair. After his barbershop closed, he joined another barbershop in a nearby town. While barbering, he tried unsuccessfully to finish high school. Harry Anderson, who owned both the barbershop where he worked and the house he and his sister lived in, suggested that Williams attend Haire’s Classical Academy, where he completed his secondary education.
While cutting hair, Williams met Dr. Henry Palmer, who had been a brigadier surgeon in the Union army. Palmer was one of Wisconsin’s most prominent citizens, later becoming the state’s surgeon general. Williams apprenticed with Palmer for two years, then attended Chicago Medical School. Williams could not break into an established medical practice because of his race, so after a year of internship at Mercy Hospital, he opened his own practice, becoming Chicago’s third black surgeon. He taught anatomy for three years at Chicago Medical School while running his own practice. His medical knowledge and surgical skills became apparent during this period. In 1889 he was appointed to the Illinois State Board of Health. Williams’ name became established among all levels of Chicago society, and his influence crossed racial boundaries. In 1890, he was approached by Pastor Louis Reynolds of St. Steven’s AME Church, whose sister Emma wanted to become a nurse. Emma was rejected by nursing schools because she was black, and after Williams was unable to convince any of the schools to take Emma, he and Reynolds decided to raise the funds to start their own nursing school.
Armour & Co., Chicago’s largest employer, made a down payment on a three-story house that became the Provident Hospital and Training School Association. Emma Reynolds was among the first seven women to graduate as nurses. The hospital started with just 12 beds, but it was there that Williams performed his most groundbreaking operation. In 1893, James Cornish was admitted with multiple stab wounds, one of which punctured his pericardium, the fluid-filled sac around the heart. At the time, the medical community thought that heart surgery was too risky, but Williams opened Cornish’s chest and repaired the pericardium, preventing Cornish from bleeding to death. Cornish left the hospital and survived another 20 years. Williams was also the first to repair a lacerated spleen.
Shortly after the heart surgery, Williams became a professor of surgery at Howard Universary. President Cleveland appointed him to surgeon-in-chief at the federally created Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington. Under his direction, Freedmen’s grew and lowered its surgical mortality rate from 10% to 1.5%. Williams founded the National Medical Society in 1895 because the AMA did not accept black doctors as members (and didn’t until 1964). While speaking at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Williams said “The only way you can succeed is to override the obstacles in your path. Hope will be of no avail. By the power that is within you, do what you hope to do.” Williams became a fellow of the American College of Surgeons in 1913 and continued to practice until suffering a stroke in 1926.