Meet The Medical Pioneer Who Founded America’s First Black-Owned Hospital
Daniel Hale Williams was a brilliant surgeon, innovator and leader, who pioneered lifesaving procedures and medical education.
On the morning of July 10, 1893, Daniel Hale Williams had a difficult decision to make. James Cornish, a 24-year-old Black man who had been stabbed in a street brawl the night before, was struggling to breathe and deteriorating fast. Dr. Dan, as he was known to colleagues and patients, suspected that the knife had pierced the young man’s heart.
Luckily, Cornish had two things on his side. First, he was being treated at Chicago’s Provident Hospital and Training School, which Williams had founded two years earlier to serve Black patients. Second, he was in the hands of a gifted surgeon. Dr. Dan decided to do something that no other surgeon had attempted in an emergency setting: He cut open Cornish’s chest to repair the pierced pericardium with sheep’s intestine.
The result was one of the world’s first successful open-heart surgeries. Cornish recovered and went on to live for decades more.
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