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Daniel
Hale Williams
Surgeon (1858-1931) Daniel Hale Williams
was born January 18, 1958, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, the
son (the fifth of
seven children) of Daniel and Sarah Ann Price Williams.
He began his elementary education at Stanton School, Annapolis,
Maryland, but upon the death of his father (a barber who died of
tuberculosis). Unable to care for her family Sarah sent some of
the children to live with relatives and moved farther west,
living first in Rockford, Illinois. Daniel was apprenticed to a
shoemaker in Baltimore but ran away and joined his mother in
Rockford. Later Daniel moved to Edgerton, Wisconsin where
he joined his sister and opened his own barbershop. He then
moved to Janesville, Wisconsin. Here Daniel Williams
graduated from the high school, and in 1878 from Hare's
Classical Academy.
He began the study of medicine that same year in the office
of Dr. Henry Palmer, a leading surgeon of the locality, who took
a great interest in him. And
in 1880, he continued at the Chicago medical College, the
medical department of Northwestern University, receiving his
M.D. in 1883, and served as intern at mercy Hospital, Chicago.
From 1884 to 1891 he was surgeon to the South Side Dispensary and
then a clinical instructor in anatomy at Northwestern.
He was also, 1887 to 1891, a member of the Illinois
State Board of Health. Realizing the vital necessity
of a training school for colored nurses, he founded in
1891 Provident Hospital, Chicago, a
three-story building which held 12 beds and served members of
the community as a whole. It was the first school of this
kind in the United States. Within
its first year, Provident Hospital treated 189 patients
and 141 saw a complete recovery, 23 recovered significantly,
three saw a change in their condition and only 22 died.
Considering the financial and health conditions of the patient,
and primitive conditions of most hospitals, Provident a brand
new hospital, at that time, to see an 87% success rate was
phenomenal. Much can be attributed to Williams insistence
on the highest standards concerning procedures and sanitary
conditions.
Dr. Williams was
on the staff of the hospital from 1891 to 1912 except for a
period of five years in Washington, D.C., where he was called in
1893 by President Cleveland who appointed him surgeon-in-chief
of Freedmen's Hospital. He reorganized the hospital and
established there also a training school for Negro nurses.
On July
9, 1893, James Cornish, a young Black man, was injured in
a bar fight, stabbed in the chest with a knife. Cornish lost a
great deal of blood and by the time he reached Provident he had
gone into shock. Williams was faced with the choice of opening
the man's chest and possibly operating internally when that was
almost unheard of in that day, entrance into the chest or
abdomen of a patient would almost surely bring with it resulting
infection and therefore death. Williams made the decision to
operate and opened the man's chest. He was a most
skillful surgeon, and thus performed the first successful
surgical closure of a wound of the heart and pericardium. Three
years later, the patient still being alive, he wrote an account
of this operation for the Medical Record, New York.
Before leaving Washington he married Alice D. Johnson of that
city, April 8, 1898.
Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tennessee, offered him in
1899 the chair of Professor of Clinical Surgery, and he
established the first surgical clinics at Meharry. From 1900 to
1906 he was on the surgical staff of Cook County Hospital, and
in 1906 became an associate surgeon on the staff of St. Luke's
Hospital, a post he held until his death. During the first World
War, he was medical examiner on the Illinois state board of
appeals.
Dr. Williams was keenly aware of the problems facing the
Negro in the United States. He exerted every effort to promote
the advancement of his people and felt intensely the
discrimination directed against them as a group, although
because of his distinction in his profession, he himself was
usually accorded the greatest respect. he made a continual plea
for hospitals and training schools for Negroes in the South.
When the American College of Surgeons was organized in 1913,
Dr. Williams was invited to be a charter member, a distinction
accorded to no other colored doctor. He was a member of the
American Medical Association and of his city and state medical
societies, besides being one of the founders and the first
vice-president of the National Medical Association, a society of
Negro doctors organized in 1895 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Dr. Williams suffered much from illness in the last years of
his life. He died August 4, 1931, at his summer home, Idlewild,
Michigan. It was not generally known he had embraced the
Catholic faith. His funeral was held at St. Anselm's Roman
Catholic Church, Chicago, and the burial was in Graceland
Cemetery.
Writings
The need of hospitals and training schools for the colored
people of the South. [Detroit, 1900] 6p. Reprint from National Hospital and Sanitarium Record,
Detroit, 1920.
Ovarian cysts in colored women, with notes on the relative
frequency of fibromata in both races. Chicago [1901] 12p. Reprint from Chicago Medical Reporter 1901.
Penetrating wounds of the chest, perforating the
diaphragm, and involving the abdominal viscera. St. Louis,
1904. p. 676-686, 2 pl. Reprint from Annals of Surgery, St. Louis, 1904.
Production of tetany in albino rats through decreased
atmospheric pressure. Transactions of the Royal Society
of Canada 23: 143-150, may 1929. Section V, Biological
Sciences.
A report of two cases of Cesarean section under positive
indications, with terminations in recovery. New York, W.
Wood and Co., 1901. 8p. Reprinted from American Journal of Obstetrics, New
York, 1901.
Stab wound of the heart and pericardium: suture of the
pericardium: recovery: patient alive three years afterward.
New York, Publishers' Printing Co., 1897. 8p Reprinted from Medical Record,
New York, 1897.
An unusual case of molluscum fibrosum. Philadelphia,
1900. 4p. Reprinted from Philadelphia Medical Journal, 1900
Sources: Sister
Mary Anthony Scally, R.S.M.
Negro
Catholic Writers (1900-1943): A Bio-Bibliography (1945) /
Princeton
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