445 E 42nd St
Chicago, IL 60653, USA

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams House - National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance:
Daniel Hale Williams, an outstanding black doctor, is best known for his pioneer work in heart surgery. Though his work in this area was a great feat in itself, it does not begin to define the scope of his magnificent career which spanned nearly half a century.

Daniel Hale Williams was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1856, the fifth of seven children. When young Dan was eleven, his father died. His mother apprenticed him to a Baltimore shoemaker and moved to Rockford, Illinois. At twelve years old he traveled West, working in barber shops and on lake boats. He later moved to Janesville, Wisconsin, where he worked part time in Harry Anderson's Tonsorial Parlor and Bathing Rooms and attended school. In 1878, a year after Williams graduated from the Classical Academy in Janesville, the town's leading physician, Dr. Henry Palmer, Wisconsin's Surgeon-General, accepted Dan and two whites as apprentices. By the fall of 1880, the three young men were enrolled in the Chicago Medical College, an affiliate of Northwestern University. Boarding with a distant cousin and subsisting on a succession of loans, Dan Williams completed his course in March, 1883, after having served an internship in Mercy Hospital.

Dr. Williams was the fourth Negro doctor in Chicago when he opened an office at 3034 Michigan Avenue, in a well-to-do racially mixed neighborhood. As his reputation as a good practitioner grew, his clientele swelled.

During this period in medical history, surgeons developed as cases were thrust upon them. They learned techniques as they operated. Dr. Williams found an opportunity to perform minor operations regularly by securing an appointment to the surgical staff of the South Side Dispensary. As he operated, he gave clinical instruction to Chicago Medical College students. He also served as one of the school's demonstrators of anatomy. Due to these professional affiliations, when a former professor retired, Williams was appointed to replace him as staff physician of the Protestant Orphan Asylum, an unpaid job but a valuable one for experience and prestige. Williams later became a surgeon for the City RaiI way Company, and in 1889 and 1891 was appointed to the Illinois State Board of Health.

Although he was given many opportunities to develop as a surgeon and as a general practitioner, Dr. Williams keenly felt the need for a hospital where black interns, nurses, and physicians- usually rejected by white-controlled hospitals- could train and enjoy staff privileges. In 1890 he launched a drive to found a hospital. On January 23, 1891, the Provident Hospital and Training School Association was incorporated. Provident was the first hospital in America founded and fully controlled by blacks. Under Dr. Williams' exacting leadership, Provident set high standards, had an integrated staff and patients, built a good reputation, and soon became a mecca for black interns, nurses, and patients from all over America.

The Provident Hospital and Training School Association included a Nursing School which soon became a distinct source of pride for the black community. It was the first such training school set up for Negro nurses in the United States and Dr. Williams allowed no compromises in his nurses' training program. The training period was set for eighteen months, as long as any in the city, and the instruction was "most rigid," including all details of antiseptic preparation and nursing for surgery and care of serious medical cases.

Within a few months, the hospital's excellent standards were widely known and it became necessary to move the student nurses into rented quarters nearby to make room for the influx of patients. At the end of the first year, Dr. Williams made a public report of the hospital's work. Of 189 sick and injured, twenty-three had improved, three had not, twenty-two died, and 141 recovered entirely, a ratio of which any hospital would be proud

It was here that Williams performed his famous heart operation on July 9, 1893. James Cornish, a Negro expressman, was rushed to Provident Hospital with a stab wound in the region of the heart. Medical thinking of the day demanded that heart punctures be left, either to heal themselves or prove fatal. Dr. Williams dared to do the unthinkable, risking his reputation and that of his fledgling hospital, to save his patient by operating on the wounded heart.

Six doctors were invited to attend the operation. Williams had to thread his way through an uncertain, highly dangerous network of blood vessels and nerves as he entered the thoracic cavity and proceeded to perform a surgical exploration of the heart. At the same time, he had to be certain to do nothing to interfere with the continuous beating of the life mechanism. It should be noted that all of this operation was done without the benefit of experience or the aid of X-ray, modern anesthesia, or life-support systems now considered common and necessary to such cases. Williams found that the peri6ardium, the sac surrounding the heart, had been punctured by the knife and that the heart muscle, too, had been nicked, but did not require suturing. Dr. Williams deftly repaired the damage, sewing up the pericardium, and successfully completed the operation. Cornish walked out of the hospital in fifty-one days and lived another twenty years

Extensive nationwide newspaper publicity was given to the unprecedented operation. Four years later, medical journals learned that a similar operation, unknown to Williams at the time, had been performed by Dr. H. C. Dalton in St. Louis in 1891, but his patient remained hospitalized 103 days and it was not known how long he lived thereafter. Standard texts continued to list Williams' case as the first fully successful heart operation, a major contribution toward modern heart-transplants.

In years following this highly publicized case, Dr. Williams succeeded in many other daring operations far ahead of his time, including two stabbed heart cases, several Caesarean deliveries, removal of difficult uterine tumors, brain surgery, and suturing of the spleen. Many of these operations were recorded in national medical journals as "firsts" or "only such" cases: for example, his removal of an eighteen-pound uterine tumor from a pregnant woman, saving both the mother and child; and his ability to suture the spleen despite common medical opinion that this could not be done successfully due to the tendency of the spleen to tear when sewn. The publication of Dr. Williams' papers and lectures regarding procedures and techniques employed in these operations, afforded the medical world knowledge previously unavailable.

Dr. Williams' work with Provident Hospital and his reputation as an outstanding surgeon influenced President Grover Cleveland to appoint him surgeon-in-chief of the 200 bed Freedmen's Hospital and Asylum in Washington, D. C. Dr. Williams served for four years in this position, during which time he elevated the run-down institution to respectable status. Dr. Williams assembled a staff of twenty non sa laired specialists and systemized the hospital into seven departments: medical, surgical, gynecological, obstetrical, dermatological, genitourinary, and throat and chest. He also set up two modern adjuncts, a pathological department and a bacteriological department, and an ambulance system. His next step was to set up a system of internships to supplement the staff of twenty doctors. This move almost completely did away with the need for two former paid assistants and placed within the reach of young black medical graduates an opportunity for advancement which was accorded them only at Provident.

Dr. Williams next turned his attention to establishing a nurses' training program. His big difficulty lay in the prior existence of a so-called Training School for Nurses undertaken by the Howard University less than two years before. The Howard plan offered only out-mode didactic instruction two evenings a week with a promise of "some" practical experience in Freedmen's Hospital. In order to reduce the high mortality rate at Freedmen's, Dr. Williams wanted to eliminate all unfit attendants. He knew that carefully selected student nurses could, when supervised by a qualified superintendent and her assistants, give the bulk of the services in the hospital at the same time they were learning. The University agreed to carry on both schools, side by side. By the end of the year, the disgraceful mortality rate of the hospital had tumbled to an unprecedented low.

Dr. Williams resigned his post at Freedmen in 1898 and returned to Provident and his Chicago practice. He served on the surgical staff of Cook County Hospital from 1900 to 1906, and became associate attending surgeon at St. Luke's Hospital from 1907 through 1931. After his return to Chicago, many southern blacks traveled to Provident to be attended by Williams. Forbidden entrance to white hospitals, or treated offensively when they were admitted, many southern Negroes died by the thousands annually from lack of proper medical attention.