February 12, 2025 • 43 mins
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams is often described as the first person to successfully perform an open-heart surgery. That's not entirely accurate, but he was still a surgical innovator, and he was also a huge part of the Black Hospital Movement.
Research:
- "Daniel Hale Williams." Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 2, Gale, 1992. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1606000260/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=c4ae7664. Accessed 28 Jan. 2025.
- "Daniel Hale Williams." Notable Black American Men, Book II, edited by Jessie Carney Smith, Gale, 1998. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1622000479/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=80e75e7e. Accessed 28 Jan. 2025.
- Buckler, Helen. “Doctor Dan: Pioneer in American Surgery.” Little, Brown and Company. 1954.
- Cobb, W M. “Daniel Hale Williams-Pioneer and Innovator.” Journal of the National Medical Association vol. 36,5 (1944): 158-9.
- COBB, W M. “Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.” Journal of the National Medical Association vol. 45,5 (1953): 379-85.
- Cook County Health. “Celebrating 30 Years: Provident Hospital of Cook County.” https://cookcountyhealth.org/provident-hospital-30th-anniversary/
- Gamble, Vanessa Northington. “Making a place for ourselves : the Black hospital movement, 1920-1945.” New York : Oxford University Press. 1995.
- Gamble, Vanessa Northington. “The Provident Hospital Project: An Experiment in Race Relations and Medical Education.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, WINTER 1991. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44442639
- Gordon, Ralph C. “Daniel Hale Williams: Pioneer Black Surgeon and Educator.” Journal of Investigative Surgery, 18:105–106, 2005. DOI: 10.1080/08941930590956084
- Hughes, Langston. “Famous American Negroes.” Dodd Mead. 1954.
- Jackson State University. “Who Was Dr. Daniel Hale Williams?” https://www.jsums.edu/gtec/dr-daniel-hale-williams/
- Jefferson, Alisha J. and Tamra S. McKenzie. “Daniel Hale Williams, MD: ‘A Moses in the profession.’” American College of Surgeons CC2017 Poster Competition. 2017.
- Office of the Illinois Secretary of State. “51. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams Letter to Governor Joseph Fifer (1889).” 100 Most Valuable Documents at the Illinois State Archives. https://www.ilsos.gov/departments/archives/online_exhibits/100_documents/1889-williams-letter-gov.html
- Olivier, Albert F. “In Proper Perspective: Daniel Hale Williams, M.D.” Annals of Thoracic Surgery. Volume 37, Issue 1p96-97 January 1984. https://www.annalsthoracicsurgery.org/article/S0003-4975(10)60721-7/fulltext
- Raman, Jai. “Access to the Heart – Evolution of surgical techniques.” Global Surgery. Vol. 1, No. 2. doi: 10.15761/GOS.1000112
- Rock County, Wisconsin. “Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.” https://legacy.co.rock.wi.us/daniel-hale-williams
- Summerville, James. “Educating Black doctors : a history of Meharry Medical College.” University of Alabama Press. https://archive.org/details/educatingblackdo0000summ/
- The Provident Foundation. “History- Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.” https://provfound.org/index.php/history/history-dr-daniel-hale-williams
- “Early Chicago: Hospital of Hope.” DuSable to Obama: Chicago’s Black Metropolis. https://www.wttw.com/dusable-to-obama/provident-hospital
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Today we are going to talk about doctor.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Daniel Hale Williams, who's often described as the first person
to successfully perform an open heart surgery.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
That's not completely correct.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
There were some other earlier open heart procedures, but he
was still a surgical innovator at a time when the
field of surgery was not nearly as advanced as it
is today. And he was also a huge part of
the Black hospital movement that was in the pretty much
the first half of the twentieth century, opening hospitals for
(00:53):
black patients when a lot of the US medical system
was racially segregated and a lot of places black patients
did not have anywhere they could receive care.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Daniel Hale Williams, the third known as Dan, was born
on January eighteenth, eighteen fifty six, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He
was the fifth of seven children born to Sarah Price
Williams and Daniel Hale Williams Junior, who was a barber.
The family were Methodists, and they had white, Indigenous and
African ancestry. Sarah's mother had been enslaved on the same
(01:28):
plantation in Maryland as Frederick Douglas, and she and Douglas
were cousins.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
There's not a lot of detail recorded about the younger
Dan's earliest years, but in eighteen sixty seven, after the
Civil War, the family went to Annapolis, Maryland, where Sarah
had had family.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Traveling to Maryland.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Would not have been nearly as easy or possible before
that point. Not long after they got there, though, Dan's
father died of tuberculosis and Dan and his siblings were
split up. Dan's brother was the oldest, and he was
already in law school. Dan's two oldest sisters and their
mother all went to Illinois to live with relatives and
(02:10):
study hair dressing. Then the next two oldest sisters were
placed in a convent school, and the youngest sister stayed
with Dan's grandmother. Dan was pulled out of school and
sent to Baltimore to live with a family friend and
trained to be a shoemaker. Various accounts of all of
this are pretty uncharitable toward Dan's mother. Although they were
(02:32):
not rich, there were businessmen and landowners on both sides
of the family, so Sarah did have some financial resources
that she may have been able to draw on. At
the same time, though she had gotten married at the
age of fifteen, and without a husband, she didn't have
a way to support herself and her children. It is
(02:52):
absolutely reasonable that Dan would have felt abandoned. He was
only eleven years old. But at the same time, it's
seems like Sarah may have just been trying to do
her best in some very difficult circumstances. Yeah, without like
some specifics, I really could not tell whether there were
legitimate criticisms of how she handled things or if people
(03:16):
were just being really judgy. Dan's feelings might also have
been influenced by the fact that he did not like
making shoes. He was not enjoying this apprenticeship at all. Eventually,
he talked one of his late father's friends into giving
him a railroad pass, and he used that to go
to Rockford, Illinois, where his mother and sisters were. Later on,
(03:40):
he told a niece that when he got there at
the age of only twelve, his mother told him that
he seemed to have enough spunk to take care of himself.
You could read that as impressed with what he had done,
or as kind of flippant, and I don't really know
which way she meant that. Sarah later moved again, leaving
Dan and one of his sisters in Illinois with their cousins.
(04:03):
Dan and his sister moved around a bit over the
next few years, eventually making their.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Way to Wisconsin. Dan wanted to be in school and
he liked learning, but they also needed money. He learned
to be a barber like his late father, and he
worked part time while living in Edgerton, Wisconsin. He left
school without graduating after a series of respiratory illnesses. He
wanted to finish his education, though, so he later enrolled
(04:30):
in a private school called the Classical Academy in Janesville, Wisconsin,
which was run by a doctor, Hayre. Dan paid his
way by working part time at Charles Henry Anderson's Tonsorial
parlor and bathing rooms, and Dan and his sister also
boarded with the Andersons. As I understand it, the Andersons
were the only black family in the neighborhood.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
As we said, there's not a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Of concrete detail about William's earlier years, but he did
have some experiences with racism, while living in Wisconsin. Williams
had light skin and reddish hair, and while he identified
himself in the parlance of the time as a Negro,
people did not always immediately recognize that about him. At
(05:17):
one point, the parents of another student at the Classical
Academy threatened to withdraw their daughter because they did not
want her to attend school with a black student. Doctor
Hare's response to this was to offer to return her tuition.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Dan also had a relationship, or perhaps just a flirtation,
with a young white woman named Ida Williams. They were
not related, She was another student at Classical Academy, and
it seems like she was more serious about him than
he was about her. When her parents learned about the relationship,
her father casually dropped that he was thinking of sending
(05:55):
her and her sister to public school. Ida seems to
have read between the lines that this was really about
getting her away from Dan, and soon she was courting
a white man named Jim Lord, who she later married.
Aida and Dan kept in touch, though, and much later on,
when her son was sick, Williams performed surgery on him,
and he did not charge Aida for it.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
In addition to going to school and working at the
Tomsorial Parlor, Williams learned to play the fiddle and played
with the Harry Anderson Orchestra and the Unitarian Church that
he joined. After he graduated from the classical academy, he
started law school, following the footsteps of his older brother,
who was now a successful lawyer. When Williams decided he
(06:41):
didn't like law, he changed courses and he got an
apprenticeship with doctor Henry Palmer, who was a very well
respected doctor and former Surgeon General of Wisconsin.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
While medical schools did exist in the US by this point,
it was more common for people to at least start
their metal education as an apprentice. Palmer was a little
reluctant to take Williams on at first because of his
short time studying law. Palmer wanted to make sure that
Williams was actually committed to medical study and wasn't going
(07:13):
to just switch tracks again. Palmer also accepted to other apprentices,
Frank Pember and James S. Mills, which allowed all three
of them to study at the same time and for
Palmer to run his clinic twenty four hours a day.
After a two year apprenticeship, all three of them went
to Chicago Medical School, which later became Northwestern University Medical School.
(07:39):
They all started in eighteen eighty and due to some
kind of a miscommunication, they all got there a week early.
They showed up at the school and the only person
there was the janitor, who gave them a tour of
the building and some tips about the unwritten rules of
etiquette among the students, like as first years, they should
not take the good seats in the operating theater when
(08:01):
they were watching procedures. Williams really struggled to pay for
medical school. He lived with a widowed family friend known
as missus John Jones. Her late husband had been a
friend of his late father. This was less expensive than
other housing options, but he still didn't have a lot
of money. He cut hair and he played music, but
(08:24):
medical school required most of his time and attention. He
wrote to his mother for help, and she said she
didn't have any money to give him, but that she
had made some loans to other people. She suggested that
he try to collect on their notes, which immediately proved
to be impossible, and then he wound up taking loans
(08:44):
from other people, including his former mentor Harry Anderson. While
Williams was in medical school, an outbreak of smallpox struck
the city of Chicago. Edward Jenner had started really publicizing
the smallpox vaccine more than eighty years before this, but
vaccination hadn't completely become a routine practice yet. As a
(09:07):
medical student working with patients, Williams was exposed and contracted
smallpox himself. He had some scars alongside his nose afterward,
but beyond that he recovered. While Williams was a student,
the medical school became connected to Saint Luke's Hospital, and
he started doing some clinical work there. The hospital was
(09:27):
employing Joseph Lister's techniques for antiseptic surgery, which Lister had
started publishing in the late eighteen sixties. This included using
carbolic acid to kill pathogens on instruments and services and
on surgeon's hands, as well as a carbolic acid spray
to kill pathogens in the air around the patient. This
(09:48):
was also fairly early in the development of modern anesthesia.
While alcohol, opium, and other substances had been used earlier
on in history, gases like nitrous oxide, t ether, and
chloroform had come into use in the mid nineteenth century.
The methods of delivering these gases weren't always efficient, though,
(10:09):
so the operating theater could be filled with a haze
of carbolic acid and the gas used to anesthetize the patient.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Williams graduated from medical school in eighteen eighty three. Initially,
he planned to move closer to where his mother was living,
so he applied for a license to practice medicine in Washington,
d c. But then he changed his mind and he
decided to stay in Chicago, so he applied for a
license to practice in Illinois as well. He established his
(10:39):
own practice, and he started working to pay back all
the money he had borrowed to go to medical school.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Which he was able to do, but it was.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Difficult since the United States was in the middle of
a huge economic downturn.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
He also built a life for himself in the city.
He lived and practiced medicine in a multiracial neighborhood and
taught as an anatomy demonstrator at Chicago Medical College. He
enjoyed opera and attended All Souls Unitarian Church. He also
joined a Republican organization called the Hamilton Club, where he
was one of just a few black members. While he
(11:15):
was still in school, the people in his community had
gotten to know him as Dan, not as doctor Williams,
and some of them really struggled to start referring to
him in this more formal way, So before long he
was just known as doctor Dan. We'll talk about doctor
Dan's early medical career. After a sponsor break, after finishing
(11:46):
medical school, Daniel Hale Williams was hired as part of
the staff at south Side Dispensary. The dispensaries of this
era were walk in clinics that were meant for people
who couldn't afford to see a private doctor. They were
often funded by churches and charitable organizations, or sometimes they
were part of the hands on training for medical students.
(12:09):
He was able to do very minor outpatient surgical procedures
at the dispensary, but he really wanted to be able
to do surgeries that were more involved than that. None
of the hospitals in Chicago would grant surgical privileges to
a black doctor, though, so he did these surgeries in
(12:30):
his patients' homes. He followed antiseptic procedures as much as
he could in a home environment, including doing things like
baking the patient's bedsheets in the oven to use them
as surgical drapes. As he got himself established as a
doctor and surgeon, Williams became the first black surgeon to
be hired by the City Railway Company, and in eighteen
(12:53):
eighty nine he accepted an unpaid two year appointment to
the Illinois State Board of Health. His appointment it was
renewed two years later, but ended after it wasn't renewed
a third time following the election of a new governor.
During these years, Williams fell in love with a woman
named Kitty May Black, who had a similar multi racial
(13:14):
ancestry to his own, but since she had very light skin,
her parents really wanted hur to marry someone white, and
they arranged for her to marry a white lawyer. Williams
was really heartbroken about this, and even more so after
she died of a sudden illness a few years later,
with her friends saying it had not seemed like she
(13:36):
wanted to survive. After this, Williams really threw himself into
his work. While Williams had not been kept out of
medical school because of his race, at this point, there
were no nursing schools in Chicago that were accepting black students.
In December of eighteen ninety, the Reverend Lewis Reynolds, pastor
(13:57):
of Saint Stephen's African Methodist Church, a pro coached Williams
on behalf of his sister, Emma. Emma had come to
Chicago to live with her brother and to learn to
be a nurse, but every nursing school in the city
had turned her down because she was black.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
This was still really early in the development of nursing
as a professionalized field. The first nursing school in the
United States had been established less than twenty years before this,
in eighteen seventy two. Before this, people who worked as
nurses had often been through some kind of informal or
(14:34):
on the job training, or sometimes they were people who
were helping to take care of the sick and injured
without really a lot of training or education in that
at all. A lot of the nurses that were working
were really dedicated and knowledgeable. But the field of medicine
was rapidly becoming a lot more complex. There were all
(14:55):
kinds of new developments in things like infection control, anesthesia,
and surgery, so hospitals and medical practices were also seeing
a need for nurses that had a more formal, broader education.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Williams had patients who were recovering from surgery at home
or living at home with chronic or progressive conditions, and
they needed nurses, and those nurses needed to have specific skills.
He also knew that some of his black patients really
would not be comfortable in the care of a white nurse,
that they didn't know if he could even find a
(15:32):
white nurse willing to do the job. So simultaneously, he
thought no one should be denied in education in nursing
because of their race, and that there was a need
for black nurses specifically, and another need was running alongside
that one. There was only one hospital in Chicago that
would admit black patients. That was Cook County Hospital on
(15:56):
the west side. Williams was living and working on the
city's south side, and the black members of his community
just didn't have a hospital nearby that they could go to.
He realized that he could try to fill all of
these gaps at once, establishing a hospital that would accept
patients regardless of their race, which would also be a
(16:17):
place to train black nurses, and it would be a
place where black doctors and surgeons could work since they
were being barred from existing hospitals because of their race
as well. With the help of churches and community organizations,
Williams and the Reverend Reynolds started raising money. People held
bake sales and also donated furniture and other items from
(16:41):
their own homes for use in the hospital. Several white
industrialists became major financial backers, including George Pullman and Cyrus McCormick.
This wasn't just about philanthropy, but also making sure their
black employees had access to medical care so that they
could recover from ill lists and injuries and get back
(17:02):
to work. Armor Meat Packing Company provided the down payment
for the hospital building. Williams faced some fierce disagreement from
people who did not support his plans to open a hospital,
and a lot of that disagreement came from within the
black community. His critics argued that he was reinforcing racial
(17:24):
segregation at a time when Chicago was becoming increasingly racially segregated.
They thought he should instead be focused on fighting segregation
at the hospitals and nursing schools that already existed instead.
In spite of that opposition, articles of incorporation were filed
for a twelve bed facility called Provident Hospital and Training
(17:47):
School Association on January twenty third, eighteen ninety one, and
staffing turned out to be a challenge. The nursing program
was overwhelmed with one hundred and seventy five applications for
its eighteen month training program, but only seven of them
were accepted, including Emma Reynolds. Williams wanted applicants who were
(18:09):
quote fairly educated, as well as being prompt, neat, and organized.
They had to have a gentle voice and a patient temper,
and he felt that a lot of the applicants just
did not meet those criteria, and because black doctors and
surgeons had been excluded from a lot of medical programs
and from working at other hospitals, he also had trouble
(18:29):
finding top tier doctors and surgeons who were also black.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
The hospital did open its doors, though, and it was
integrated for both patients and staff. The surgical ward was
always very busy, treating a lot of people who worked
in Chicago's stockyards and railroads who had been injured on
the job. The hospital and the nursing school both did
really well, although they did face some serious financial issues
(18:56):
during the Panic of eighteen ninety three. Pent the hospitals
survived this financial crisis, largely thanks to Frederick Douglas, who
raised money for it during the Chicago World's Fair. On
July ninth, eighteen ninety three, a man named James Cornish
was stabbed in a fight and brought to Provident Hospital.
(19:17):
They didn't have the knife and he couldn't really describe it,
and X rays and other imaging techniques had not been
invented yet, so it wasn't really clear exactly how deep
the wound was from the outside, though it looked relatively shallow.
Cornish was admitted for observation, and overnight he started experiencing
(19:38):
increasing pain and showing signs of shock. Williams thought that
he might be bleeding internally or having some other more
serious issue, and the only way to tell was to
open his chest to look. Williams invited six surgeons to
observe this, four of them white and two of them black.
(19:59):
Williams made an incision between Cornish's ribs, essentially extending the
edges of the stab wound. Then he lifted the intercostal
cartilage like a trap door to see what was underneath.
He could see that the knife had damaged the left
internal memory artery, it had also penetrated through the pericardium
(20:20):
that's the sack that surrounds and protects the heart, and
into the heart muscle itself. First, Williams repaired the damage
to that artery. Then he irrigated the wounds to the
pericardium and heart with saline. The heart muscle wasn't hemorrhaging,
and he left that part of the injury alone. He
(20:42):
used forceps to hold the damaged edges of the pericardium
and he sutured them together, and once he had done that,
he closed all of his incisions. Williams did all of
this without a lot of the tools that would be
used for this kind of surgery today. In addition to
the lack of X ray and other imaging, antibiotics and
anticoagulants had not been invented yet. Neither had rib spreaders
(21:07):
or tools for keeping a patient's airway open while they
were anesthetized. Obviously, neither had heart bypass machines that allow
surgeons to stop a person's heart during surgery today. So
Williams was doing this surgery as the heart was beating
and the edges of the torn pericardium were continually fluttering.
(21:28):
In addition to carrying out this procedure on a beating
heart with very basic tools, Williams was also doing something
that most of the surgical community thought was impossible. Williams
had read a paper that had theorized about a surgical
repair to the pericardium while he was in medical school,
but that surgeon had not actually tried to perform one. Really,
(21:52):
most surgeons in Europe and North America believed that even
trying to explore a beating heart was likely to just
kill the patient. German surgeon Theodore bill Roth, who is
sometimes called the founder of abdominal surgery, was quoted as saying, quote,
any surgeon who would attempt to suture a wound of
the heart is not worthy of the serious consideration of
(22:15):
his colleagues. The common course of treatment for an injury
like Cornish's was cold rest and opium, and not surgery.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Cornish survived this surgery. A few days later, The Chicago
Daily inter Ocean reported on it, describing it as a
marvelous surgical operation and an astonishing feat. Twenty one days
into Cornish's recovery, he developed cardiac tampanaud or, a build
up of fluid in his pericardium, and Williams performed another
(22:47):
procedure to remove it through a needle. He did know
about earlier attempts to remove excess fluid from the pericardium,
although without today's imaging technologies that was extremely risky. Cornish
was discharged from the hospital after fifty one days. Williams
searched through medical literature to see if he could find
(23:08):
evidence of another surgeon having done something similar, and he
came up with nothing. After following up with Cornish three
years later and confirming that he was alive and in
good health, Williams wrote up a paper on the surgery,
and that was published in the Medical Record in eighteen
ninety seven. Although it was initially hailed as a first,
(23:30):
it was later discovered that doctor Henry Dalton had published
on a similar procedure in the Annals of Surgery in
eighteen ninety one, and there.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Were also some other even earlier examples of similar procedures.
By the time his paper was published, Williams had moved
on from Provident Hospital, and we'll get to that after
a sponsor break. Not long after his surgery on James Cornish,
(24:05):
Daniel Hale Williams was appointed to the position of surgeon
in chief at Freedman's Hospital in Washington, d C. The
federal government had established Freedman's Hospital in eighteen sixty two,
and in eighteen sixty eight it had also become a
teaching hospital for Howard University Medical School. As chief surgeon,
(24:26):
that would also make Williams a professor of surgery at Howard.
Williams was really reluctant to leave Provident Hospital, but he
apparently changed his mind after a conversation with Secretary of
State Walter Q.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Gresham.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Gresham told him quote, if it's service to your race,
you're thinking of Freedman's needs, you more than Provident from
all I hear. William's start date was unfortunately delayed by
an accident. While out quail hunting, he was shot in
the foot. He developed an infection, and for a while
(25:02):
it looked like his leg might have to be amputated.
Once Williams was well enough to return to work, he
was months later than planned and really still recovering. He
had also been targeted by a smear campaign by another surgeon,
George Cleveland Hall, who seems to have had a grudge
against Williams after Williams didn't back him for an appointment
(25:23):
at Provident Hospital. William's predecessor at Friedman's Hospital was Charles
Burley Purvis, who had been the hospital's surgeon in Chards
for over a decade. Purvis had also served in the
Union Army during the Civil War and had been one
of the founders of Howard Medical School. But a lot
(25:44):
had changed in the world of medicine over all those years,
and William's perception was that Purvis and the hospital had
just not kept up with those changes. Purvis later alleged
that he had been replaced because of politics.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
When Williams started, Freedman's Hospital was organized into three general wards,
one for men, one for women, and one for.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Labor and delivery.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
The nursing staff was mostly made up of people who
had not been through formal training, meaning they also didn't
have the kind of experience or skills that Williams thought
was necessary. He also found the hospital's surgical mortality rate
of almost ten percent to be unacceptable.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Williams reorganized the hospital into departments. I used all the
modern terms for these departments today. They were general medicine, surgery, gynecology, obstetrics, dermatology, urology,
and pulmonology. He also established an ambulance service, which was
essentially a delivery wagon that could bring patients to the hospital.
(26:51):
He replaced the nursing staff and updated surgical techniques and
antiseptic procedures. In addition to recruiting new medical and surgical staff,
he also granted surgical privileges to some of the area's
best surgeons. Soon, the surgical mortality rate at the hospital
had dropped to one point five percent. Williams also wanted
(27:14):
Freedman's Hospital to be seen as a highly respected and
cutting edge facility, which meant getting the public to trust
the abilities of black surgeons. To that end, he offered
lectures and demonstrations at the hospital, including opportunities for the
public to observe surgical procedures in the operating theater. Williams
(27:35):
resigned from Freedman's Hospital in eighteen ninety eight after about
five years. The hospital was still under the control of
the Department of the Interior, and that meant that it
was often in the crosshairs of various political squabbles. An
investigation into charitable institutions in Washington, d C. Including the
(27:56):
hospital had also started in eighteen ninety six, and Purvis
hadn't been trying to get reinstated to his position. Williams
was accused of financial mismanagement, but the reason he gave
for leaving was that he was just tired of all
the politics. That same year, at the age of forty two,
(28:17):
Williams married thirty nine year old Alice Johnson, who was
the daughter of American artist Moses jacob Ezekiel, who was
Jewish and a formerly enslaved woman. Alice was a teacher
and a graduate of Howard University who had remained single
after an ugly breakup when she was much younger. She
didn't want to wear white for her wedding because her
(28:38):
mother had recently died, so instead she wore a navy
blue suit. Dan's friend Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote a poem
to commemorate his marriage, titled to Dan. That poem started
step me now a bridal measure, work, give way to
love and leisure. Hearts be free, and hearts be gay.
Doctor Dan Doth wed today. They moved back to Chicago,
(29:01):
and they had one child together, who sadly died at birth.
A congressional report about Friedman's Hospital was released after Dan
and Alice had gotten married, and it detailed a lot
of issues at the hospital. A lot of those issues, though,
were ones that Williams had reported to the Department of
the Interior but which had not been dealt with. The
(29:23):
report recommended huge cuts to the staff, including to the
nursing staff, and it described Howard Medical School as quote
encroaching on the hospital.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
There were some newspapers that defended Williams after this report
was released, and others that attacked him. He was questioned
about his work, including a lot of questions about hospital spending.
This included very specific questions about transactions that had happened
years before the sale of two cameras that he said
were his personal property but that were implied to have
(29:57):
really belonged to the government, and and how much was
spent on various equipment that was both expensive and useless
if it was damaged or worn. This has to have
been frustrating, considering that he brought a lot of his
own equipment with him when he started working at the
hospital because the hospital didn't have it, and a lot
of that equipment he never got back. Yeah, some of
(30:20):
these questions were like questions about purchases of needles from
eighteen ninety four or something, and he was like, how
do you expect me to know this? There's a stationary invoice.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Back in Chicago, Williams went back to working at Provident Hospital,
which had moved to a new sixty five bed location.
George Cleveland Hall was now on the board there, and
there continued to be a lot of friction between him
and Williams. Williams also started writing to Booker T. Washington
trying to get a teaching hospital established at the Tuskegee
(30:54):
Institute in Alabama. The Tuskegee Institute had been founded in
eighteen eighty one.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Booker T.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Washington seems to have thought a hospital would be taking
on too much, too fast and put the institute at risk,
but Williams thought there was an obvious need for one.
In addition to thinking it was critical to training doctors,
he had seen black patients who had come all the
way from Alabama trying to get access to medical care.
(31:24):
Washington eventually stopped answering Williams letters, and Williams later learned
that Washington had also been getting a lot of letters
from George Cleveland Hall. There seems to just have been
a lot of animosity between the two of them. In
eighteen ninety nine, George Hubbard, president and dean of Mahary
Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, contacted Williams about conducting surgical
(31:47):
clinics at the college. Maharry is a historically black medical
school founded in eighteen seventy six, but at the time
it wasn't connected to a teaching hospital. Williams's first clinic
was held in a cramped room, and afterward he stressed
that the only way for doctors insurgeons to really excel,
(32:08):
or even to be truly ready to practice medicine and
surgery was to have the opportunity for hands on instruction
and practice at a teaching hospital. He was quoted as saying,
we can't sit any longer idly and inanely deploring the
existing conditions. We must start our own hospitals and training schools.
(32:29):
In January of nineteen hundred, Williams returned to Nashville to
give a lecture on this subject at the Phyllis Wheetlee Club.
He advocated for every city in the South with a
population of more than ten thousand black people to have
its own black hospital with an attached nursing training school.
This would provide hospitals that would accept black patients and
(32:52):
places for black doctors and surgeons to work. He talked
about how to get such a hospital started by renting
a house with ten or twelve rooms, preferably with a basement,
furnishing it modestly so that it would be easy to clean,
and hiring a level headed graduate nurse to act as
the superintendent, and then appointing the best physicians that could
(33:14):
be found to work there. Then he passed on something
Frederick Douglass had written to him in a letter in
eighteen ninety four, quote, 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. A teaching hospital was
(33:36):
established in Nashville that September. Williams continued to hold his
annual surgical clinics there and they were described as the
highlight of every year for the medical students. He was
paid only a travel stipend, and he donated that.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
Back to Mahary.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
A lot of the time he was doing surgeries that
the students really didn't have other opportunities to see. They
were often very complicated or uncommon procedures. He was known
for operating incredibly skillfully and also very quickly given the
limitations of general anesthesia at the time. He was also
(34:14):
continually pushing himself as a surgeon, and he was also
breaking new ground in the field. In nineteen oh two,
he became one of the first surgeons to successfully repair
a traumatic hemorrhage in a spleen. At the time, it
was more common to remove the spleen than to try
to repair it. There had been at least one successful
(34:35):
surgical spleen repair before this, but Williams did not know
about it. In nineteen twelve, while he was still working
at Provident Hospital, Williams also became associate attending surgeon at
Saint Luke's Hospital in Chicago, but the following year he
resigned from Provident. There are kind of multiple conflicting stories
(34:56):
about why what is that Providence bore passed a policy
that surgeons who worked at Provident could only work at Provident.
That was a policy that was probably written to target Williams,
and it might also have been connected to the ongoing
animosity with George Cleveland Hall. It's also possible that Williams
(35:19):
felt like Provident was no longer really aligned with his
original vision for it. He had established it in order
to train black nurses and to provide a place that
would accept black patients and where black doctors could work.
He had also helped to establish the National Medical Association
since black doctors were being excluded from the American Medical Association,
(35:44):
but he had wanted Provident to specifically be integrated and
to provide connections between the white and black medical communities
in Chicago. Over time, Providence staff had become less and
less integrated and more predominantly black, and that was part
of an increasing pattern of racial segregation in Chicago more generally.
(36:06):
Williams kept working at Saint Luke's as well as teaching
and consulting. Former students and colleagues would write to him
for help and advice, and sometimes when his former students'
patients did not have access to a hospital that would
admit them, he would still perform surgery in their homes.
He also continued to advocate for the establishment of black
(36:28):
owned hospitals that would benefit black patients and doctors alike.
He helped establish at least forty hospitals that were open
to black patients. In nineteen thirteen, Williams also became the
only black founding member of the American College of Surgeons,
which got its second black member twenty one years later.
(36:49):
Dan's wife, Alice, developed Parkinson's disease and died in nineteen
twenty four. They were married until her death, but their
relationship had become more strained after d had an affair
years before. Daniel Hale Williams moved to northern Michigan. In
nineteen twenty six, he was partially paralyzed after a stroke.
(37:11):
He died on August fourth, nineteen thirty one, at the
age of seventy five, and he was buried in Chicago's
Graceland Cemetery. He had become known as an advocate for
medical and nursing training and medical care for black people,
and for being an incredibly talented surgeon who charged people
what they could afford to pay him. He took risks,
(37:33):
and he attempted surgeries that he didn't know of anybody
else trying before. And he had a reputation for going
to great links to try to treat people's limbs rather
than amputating them. But he also did not do surgeries
if he knew that they would not be successful, and
he didn't give people treatments that he didn't think they needed.
(37:54):
If he decided someone was too sick or too badly
injured to survive a surgery, he would stay with them
until they died. In the words of biographer Helen Buckler, quote,
it was as though in the sickroom, and only in
the sickroom, could doctor Dan be a whole man, a
man of feeling as well as a man of science
and intellect. Here emotions buried deep by pride and circumstance
(38:19):
were set free. Provident Hospital moved into a much bigger
building on East fifty first Street in nineteen thirty three.
This was followed by construction of an outpatient building, and
two apartment buildings were purchased as housing for nursing students.
But the hospital faced periods of financial struggle, especially in
times of more widespread economic downturns. This included serious financial
(38:44):
problems in the nineteen eighties, and the hospital was closed
in nineteen eighty seven. It was acquired by the Cook
County Board of Commissioners in nineteen ninety one and reopened
in nineteen ninety three. It is now Provident Hospital of
Cook County in Chicago and is affiliated with Loyola University's
Stritch School of Medicine. Most of the hospitals that were
(39:07):
established during the Black Hospital movement closed or merged with
other hospitals after the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty
four and the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid the following year.
Hospitals accepting Medicare and Medicaid funding were required to comply
with the Civil Rights Acts outlawing of racial discrimination. This
(39:29):
was a huge part of desegregating the medical system. Desegregation
gave black patients access to care that they might not
have been able to access otherwise, but the loss of
these hospitals could also be devastating to the communities where
they had been operating. Many of them were major employers
(39:49):
in their neighborhoods and also sources of civic pride and
just major community resources. And of course, the desegregation of
the medical system in the US did not allow eliminate
medical racism, and there are ongoing disparities and access to
medical care and outcomes across a lot of the country
(40:09):
today and that is Daniel Hale Williams.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Do you also have some listener mail for us?
Speaker 3 (40:16):
I do have listener mail.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
This is from Caitlin who wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly.
I'm always delighted by the Unearthed episodes and this set
with no exception. I especially appreciated the let's recreate this
artifact from antiquity to see if we can use it
as hypothesized item variety. How do I get a job
checking a javelin from various heights on a scissor lift.
(40:41):
I'm a grad student who teaches undergrads as part of
my program, and this semester, I'm leading a historical research
methodology course where we're showing students how to do archival
research by working on a group project. Coincidentally, the day
before the first class, an interstate construction project turned up
an archaeologically significant find, a series of privy pits their
(41:04):
thought to date to the construction of the Erie Canal.
The archaeologist interviewed for the article I read was so
incredibly excited about the chance to learn from the unearthed
artifacts that had been rescued before the construction resumed. I
shared this with my students as an example of how
local history can be. I waxed rhapsodic about the potential
(41:25):
discoveries for a few moments before one of my students
raised his hand and said, wait, isn't a privy just
a toilet? What's important about poop? Bless his heart, he
didn't know how deep my repertoire of factoids and tidbits
on Latrine's privy, septic systems, dumps, and so on is.
Thanks Unearthed, Thank you as always for all you do.
(41:47):
I look forward to the new episodes every week and
am constantly re listening to favorites from the back catalog.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Best Caitlin.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Thank you so much Caitlin for this email, and thank
you for your past emails. Caitlin is another frequent correspondent,
and I loved this bit about the privies. The discoveries
I thought of first connected to the privies were the
ones that we've talked about that are all about how
(42:15):
the Roman Empire was full of parasites, and wherever the
Romans went, they took the parasites with the riddled with Romans.
I also think in earlier years of doing Unearthed, we
had a lot of discoveries that came from middens which
were basically trash dumps. And I don't think I can
(42:38):
remember a very recent midden discovery. Maybe there has been,
I don't know, but anyway, thank you again, Caitlin for
this email. If you would like to send us a
note about this or any other podcast where at history
podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to
our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you'd
(42:58):
like to get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you
Speaker 3 (43:14):
Listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Today we are going to talk about doctor.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Daniel Hale Williams, who's often described as the first person
to successfully perform an open heart surgery.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
That's not completely correct.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
There were some other earlier open heart procedures, but he
was still a surgical innovator at a time when the
field of surgery was not nearly as advanced as it
is today. And he was also a huge part of
the Black hospital movement that was in the pretty much
the first half of the twentieth century, opening hospitals for
(00:53):
black patients when a lot of the US medical system
was racially segregated and a lot of places black patients
did not have anywhere they could receive care.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Daniel Hale Williams, the third known as Dan, was born
on January eighteenth, eighteen fifty six, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He
was the fifth of seven children born to Sarah Price
Williams and Daniel Hale Williams Junior, who was a barber.
The family were Methodists, and they had white, Indigenous and
African ancestry. Sarah's mother had been enslaved on the same
(01:28):
plantation in Maryland as Frederick Douglas, and she and Douglas
were cousins.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
There's not a lot of detail recorded about the younger
Dan's earliest years, but in eighteen sixty seven, after the
Civil War, the family went to Annapolis, Maryland, where Sarah
had had family.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Traveling to Maryland.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Would not have been nearly as easy or possible before
that point. Not long after they got there, though, Dan's
father died of tuberculosis and Dan and his siblings were
split up. Dan's brother was the oldest, and he was
already in law school. Dan's two oldest sisters and their
mother all went to Illinois to live with relatives and
(02:10):
study hair dressing. Then the next two oldest sisters were
placed in a convent school, and the youngest sister stayed
with Dan's grandmother. Dan was pulled out of school and
sent to Baltimore to live with a family friend and
trained to be a shoemaker. Various accounts of all of
this are pretty uncharitable toward Dan's mother. Although they were
(02:32):
not rich, there were businessmen and landowners on both sides
of the family, so Sarah did have some financial resources
that she may have been able to draw on. At
the same time, though she had gotten married at the
age of fifteen, and without a husband, she didn't have
a way to support herself and her children. It is
(02:52):
absolutely reasonable that Dan would have felt abandoned. He was
only eleven years old. But at the same time, it's
seems like Sarah may have just been trying to do
her best in some very difficult circumstances. Yeah, without like
some specifics, I really could not tell whether there were
legitimate criticisms of how she handled things or if people
(03:16):
were just being really judgy. Dan's feelings might also have
been influenced by the fact that he did not like
making shoes. He was not enjoying this apprenticeship at all. Eventually,
he talked one of his late father's friends into giving
him a railroad pass, and he used that to go
to Rockford, Illinois, where his mother and sisters were. Later on,
(03:40):
he told a niece that when he got there at
the age of only twelve, his mother told him that
he seemed to have enough spunk to take care of himself.
You could read that as impressed with what he had done,
or as kind of flippant, and I don't really know
which way she meant that. Sarah later moved again, leaving
Dan and one of his sisters in Illinois with their cousins.
(04:03):
Dan and his sister moved around a bit over the
next few years, eventually making their.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
Way to Wisconsin. Dan wanted to be in school and
he liked learning, but they also needed money. He learned
to be a barber like his late father, and he
worked part time while living in Edgerton, Wisconsin. He left
school without graduating after a series of respiratory illnesses. He
wanted to finish his education, though, so he later enrolled
(04:30):
in a private school called the Classical Academy in Janesville, Wisconsin,
which was run by a doctor, Hayre. Dan paid his
way by working part time at Charles Henry Anderson's Tonsorial
parlor and bathing rooms, and Dan and his sister also
boarded with the Andersons. As I understand it, the Andersons
were the only black family in the neighborhood.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
As we said, there's not a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Of concrete detail about William's earlier years, but he did
have some experiences with racism, while living in Wisconsin. Williams
had light skin and reddish hair, and while he identified
himself in the parlance of the time as a Negro,
people did not always immediately recognize that about him. At
(05:17):
one point, the parents of another student at the Classical
Academy threatened to withdraw their daughter because they did not
want her to attend school with a black student. Doctor
Hare's response to this was to offer to return her tuition.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Dan also had a relationship, or perhaps just a flirtation,
with a young white woman named Ida Williams. They were
not related, She was another student at Classical Academy, and
it seems like she was more serious about him than
he was about her. When her parents learned about the relationship,
her father casually dropped that he was thinking of sending
(05:55):
her and her sister to public school. Ida seems to
have read between the lines that this was really about
getting her away from Dan, and soon she was courting
a white man named Jim Lord, who she later married.
Aida and Dan kept in touch, though, and much later on,
when her son was sick, Williams performed surgery on him,
and he did not charge Aida for it.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
In addition to going to school and working at the
Tomsorial Parlor, Williams learned to play the fiddle and played
with the Harry Anderson Orchestra and the Unitarian Church that
he joined. After he graduated from the classical academy, he
started law school, following the footsteps of his older brother,
who was now a successful lawyer. When Williams decided he
(06:41):
didn't like law, he changed courses and he got an
apprenticeship with doctor Henry Palmer, who was a very well
respected doctor and former Surgeon General of Wisconsin.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
While medical schools did exist in the US by this point,
it was more common for people to at least start
their metal education as an apprentice. Palmer was a little
reluctant to take Williams on at first because of his
short time studying law. Palmer wanted to make sure that
Williams was actually committed to medical study and wasn't going
(07:13):
to just switch tracks again. Palmer also accepted to other apprentices,
Frank Pember and James S. Mills, which allowed all three
of them to study at the same time and for
Palmer to run his clinic twenty four hours a day.
After a two year apprenticeship, all three of them went
to Chicago Medical School, which later became Northwestern University Medical School.
(07:39):
They all started in eighteen eighty and due to some
kind of a miscommunication, they all got there a week early.
They showed up at the school and the only person
there was the janitor, who gave them a tour of
the building and some tips about the unwritten rules of
etiquette among the students, like as first years, they should
not take the good seats in the operating theater when
(08:01):
they were watching procedures. Williams really struggled to pay for
medical school. He lived with a widowed family friend known
as missus John Jones. Her late husband had been a
friend of his late father. This was less expensive than
other housing options, but he still didn't have a lot
of money. He cut hair and he played music, but
(08:24):
medical school required most of his time and attention. He
wrote to his mother for help, and she said she
didn't have any money to give him, but that she
had made some loans to other people. She suggested that
he try to collect on their notes, which immediately proved
to be impossible, and then he wound up taking loans
(08:44):
from other people, including his former mentor Harry Anderson. While
Williams was in medical school, an outbreak of smallpox struck
the city of Chicago. Edward Jenner had started really publicizing
the smallpox vaccine more than eighty years before this, but
vaccination hadn't completely become a routine practice yet. As a
(09:07):
medical student working with patients, Williams was exposed and contracted
smallpox himself. He had some scars alongside his nose afterward,
but beyond that he recovered. While Williams was a student,
the medical school became connected to Saint Luke's Hospital, and
he started doing some clinical work there. The hospital was
(09:27):
employing Joseph Lister's techniques for antiseptic surgery, which Lister had
started publishing in the late eighteen sixties. This included using
carbolic acid to kill pathogens on instruments and services and
on surgeon's hands, as well as a carbolic acid spray
to kill pathogens in the air around the patient. This
(09:48):
was also fairly early in the development of modern anesthesia.
While alcohol, opium, and other substances had been used earlier
on in history, gases like nitrous oxide, t ether, and
chloroform had come into use in the mid nineteenth century.
The methods of delivering these gases weren't always efficient, though,
(10:09):
so the operating theater could be filled with a haze
of carbolic acid and the gas used to anesthetize the patient.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Williams graduated from medical school in eighteen eighty three. Initially,
he planned to move closer to where his mother was living,
so he applied for a license to practice medicine in Washington,
d c. But then he changed his mind and he
decided to stay in Chicago, so he applied for a
license to practice in Illinois as well. He established his
(10:39):
own practice, and he started working to pay back all
the money he had borrowed to go to medical school.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Which he was able to do, but it was.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Difficult since the United States was in the middle of
a huge economic downturn.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
He also built a life for himself in the city.
He lived and practiced medicine in a multiracial neighborhood and
taught as an anatomy demonstrator at Chicago Medical College. He
enjoyed opera and attended All Souls Unitarian Church. He also
joined a Republican organization called the Hamilton Club, where he
was one of just a few black members. While he
(11:15):
was still in school, the people in his community had
gotten to know him as Dan, not as doctor Williams,
and some of them really struggled to start referring to
him in this more formal way, So before long he
was just known as doctor Dan. We'll talk about doctor
Dan's early medical career. After a sponsor break, after finishing
(11:46):
medical school, Daniel Hale Williams was hired as part of
the staff at south Side Dispensary. The dispensaries of this
era were walk in clinics that were meant for people
who couldn't afford to see a private doctor. They were
often funded by churches and charitable organizations, or sometimes they
were part of the hands on training for medical students.
(12:09):
He was able to do very minor outpatient surgical procedures
at the dispensary, but he really wanted to be able
to do surgeries that were more involved than that. None
of the hospitals in Chicago would grant surgical privileges to
a black doctor, though, so he did these surgeries in
(12:30):
his patients' homes. He followed antiseptic procedures as much as
he could in a home environment, including doing things like
baking the patient's bedsheets in the oven to use them
as surgical drapes. As he got himself established as a
doctor and surgeon, Williams became the first black surgeon to
be hired by the City Railway Company, and in eighteen
(12:53):
eighty nine he accepted an unpaid two year appointment to
the Illinois State Board of Health. His appointment it was
renewed two years later, but ended after it wasn't renewed
a third time following the election of a new governor.
During these years, Williams fell in love with a woman
named Kitty May Black, who had a similar multi racial
(13:14):
ancestry to his own, but since she had very light skin,
her parents really wanted hur to marry someone white, and
they arranged for her to marry a white lawyer. Williams
was really heartbroken about this, and even more so after
she died of a sudden illness a few years later,
with her friends saying it had not seemed like she
(13:36):
wanted to survive. After this, Williams really threw himself into
his work. While Williams had not been kept out of
medical school because of his race, at this point, there
were no nursing schools in Chicago that were accepting black students.
In December of eighteen ninety, the Reverend Lewis Reynolds, pastor
(13:57):
of Saint Stephen's African Methodist Church, a pro coached Williams
on behalf of his sister, Emma. Emma had come to
Chicago to live with her brother and to learn to
be a nurse, but every nursing school in the city
had turned her down because she was black.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
This was still really early in the development of nursing
as a professionalized field. The first nursing school in the
United States had been established less than twenty years before this,
in eighteen seventy two. Before this, people who worked as
nurses had often been through some kind of informal or
(14:34):
on the job training, or sometimes they were people who
were helping to take care of the sick and injured
without really a lot of training or education in that
at all. A lot of the nurses that were working
were really dedicated and knowledgeable. But the field of medicine
was rapidly becoming a lot more complex. There were all
(14:55):
kinds of new developments in things like infection control, anesthesia,
and surgery, so hospitals and medical practices were also seeing
a need for nurses that had a more formal, broader education.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Williams had patients who were recovering from surgery at home
or living at home with chronic or progressive conditions, and
they needed nurses, and those nurses needed to have specific skills.
He also knew that some of his black patients really
would not be comfortable in the care of a white nurse,
that they didn't know if he could even find a
(15:32):
white nurse willing to do the job. So simultaneously, he
thought no one should be denied in education in nursing
because of their race, and that there was a need
for black nurses specifically, and another need was running alongside
that one. There was only one hospital in Chicago that
would admit black patients. That was Cook County Hospital on
(15:56):
the west side. Williams was living and working on the
city's south side, and the black members of his community
just didn't have a hospital nearby that they could go to.
He realized that he could try to fill all of
these gaps at once, establishing a hospital that would accept
patients regardless of their race, which would also be a
(16:17):
place to train black nurses, and it would be a
place where black doctors and surgeons could work since they
were being barred from existing hospitals because of their race
as well. With the help of churches and community organizations,
Williams and the Reverend Reynolds started raising money. People held
bake sales and also donated furniture and other items from
(16:41):
their own homes for use in the hospital. Several white
industrialists became major financial backers, including George Pullman and Cyrus McCormick.
This wasn't just about philanthropy, but also making sure their
black employees had access to medical care so that they
could recover from ill lists and injuries and get back
(17:02):
to work. Armor Meat Packing Company provided the down payment
for the hospital building. Williams faced some fierce disagreement from
people who did not support his plans to open a hospital,
and a lot of that disagreement came from within the
black community. His critics argued that he was reinforcing racial
(17:24):
segregation at a time when Chicago was becoming increasingly racially segregated.
They thought he should instead be focused on fighting segregation
at the hospitals and nursing schools that already existed instead.
In spite of that opposition, articles of incorporation were filed
for a twelve bed facility called Provident Hospital and Training
(17:47):
School Association on January twenty third, eighteen ninety one, and
staffing turned out to be a challenge. The nursing program
was overwhelmed with one hundred and seventy five applications for
its eighteen month training program, but only seven of them
were accepted, including Emma Reynolds. Williams wanted applicants who were
(18:09):
quote fairly educated, as well as being prompt, neat, and organized.
They had to have a gentle voice and a patient temper,
and he felt that a lot of the applicants just
did not meet those criteria, and because black doctors and
surgeons had been excluded from a lot of medical programs
and from working at other hospitals, he also had trouble
(18:29):
finding top tier doctors and surgeons who were also black.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
The hospital did open its doors, though, and it was
integrated for both patients and staff. The surgical ward was
always very busy, treating a lot of people who worked
in Chicago's stockyards and railroads who had been injured on
the job. The hospital and the nursing school both did
really well, although they did face some serious financial issues
(18:56):
during the Panic of eighteen ninety three. Pent the hospitals
survived this financial crisis, largely thanks to Frederick Douglas, who
raised money for it during the Chicago World's Fair. On
July ninth, eighteen ninety three, a man named James Cornish
was stabbed in a fight and brought to Provident Hospital.
(19:17):
They didn't have the knife and he couldn't really describe it,
and X rays and other imaging techniques had not been
invented yet, so it wasn't really clear exactly how deep
the wound was from the outside, though it looked relatively shallow.
Cornish was admitted for observation, and overnight he started experiencing
(19:38):
increasing pain and showing signs of shock. Williams thought that
he might be bleeding internally or having some other more
serious issue, and the only way to tell was to
open his chest to look. Williams invited six surgeons to
observe this, four of them white and two of them black.
(19:59):
Williams made an incision between Cornish's ribs, essentially extending the
edges of the stab wound. Then he lifted the intercostal
cartilage like a trap door to see what was underneath.
He could see that the knife had damaged the left
internal memory artery, it had also penetrated through the pericardium
(20:20):
that's the sack that surrounds and protects the heart, and
into the heart muscle itself. First, Williams repaired the damage
to that artery. Then he irrigated the wounds to the
pericardium and heart with saline. The heart muscle wasn't hemorrhaging,
and he left that part of the injury alone. He
(20:42):
used forceps to hold the damaged edges of the pericardium
and he sutured them together, and once he had done that,
he closed all of his incisions. Williams did all of
this without a lot of the tools that would be
used for this kind of surgery today. In addition to
the lack of X ray and other imaging, antibiotics and
anticoagulants had not been invented yet. Neither had rib spreaders
(21:07):
or tools for keeping a patient's airway open while they
were anesthetized. Obviously, neither had heart bypass machines that allow
surgeons to stop a person's heart during surgery today. So
Williams was doing this surgery as the heart was beating
and the edges of the torn pericardium were continually fluttering.
(21:28):
In addition to carrying out this procedure on a beating
heart with very basic tools, Williams was also doing something
that most of the surgical community thought was impossible. Williams
had read a paper that had theorized about a surgical
repair to the pericardium while he was in medical school,
but that surgeon had not actually tried to perform one. Really,
(21:52):
most surgeons in Europe and North America believed that even
trying to explore a beating heart was likely to just
kill the patient. German surgeon Theodore bill Roth, who is
sometimes called the founder of abdominal surgery, was quoted as saying, quote,
any surgeon who would attempt to suture a wound of
the heart is not worthy of the serious consideration of
(22:15):
his colleagues. The common course of treatment for an injury
like Cornish's was cold rest and opium, and not surgery.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
Cornish survived this surgery. A few days later, The Chicago
Daily inter Ocean reported on it, describing it as a
marvelous surgical operation and an astonishing feat. Twenty one days
into Cornish's recovery, he developed cardiac tampanaud or, a build
up of fluid in his pericardium, and Williams performed another
(22:47):
procedure to remove it through a needle. He did know
about earlier attempts to remove excess fluid from the pericardium,
although without today's imaging technologies that was extremely risky. Cornish
was discharged from the hospital after fifty one days. Williams
searched through medical literature to see if he could find
(23:08):
evidence of another surgeon having done something similar, and he
came up with nothing. After following up with Cornish three
years later and confirming that he was alive and in
good health, Williams wrote up a paper on the surgery,
and that was published in the Medical Record in eighteen
ninety seven. Although it was initially hailed as a first,
(23:30):
it was later discovered that doctor Henry Dalton had published
on a similar procedure in the Annals of Surgery in
eighteen ninety one, and there.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Were also some other even earlier examples of similar procedures.
By the time his paper was published, Williams had moved
on from Provident Hospital, and we'll get to that after
a sponsor break. Not long after his surgery on James Cornish,
(24:05):
Daniel Hale Williams was appointed to the position of surgeon
in chief at Freedman's Hospital in Washington, d C. The
federal government had established Freedman's Hospital in eighteen sixty two,
and in eighteen sixty eight it had also become a
teaching hospital for Howard University Medical School. As chief surgeon,
(24:26):
that would also make Williams a professor of surgery at Howard.
Williams was really reluctant to leave Provident Hospital, but he
apparently changed his mind after a conversation with Secretary of
State Walter Q.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Gresham.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Gresham told him quote, if it's service to your race,
you're thinking of Freedman's needs, you more than Provident from
all I hear. William's start date was unfortunately delayed by
an accident. While out quail hunting, he was shot in
the foot. He developed an infection, and for a while
(25:02):
it looked like his leg might have to be amputated.
Once Williams was well enough to return to work, he
was months later than planned and really still recovering. He
had also been targeted by a smear campaign by another surgeon,
George Cleveland Hall, who seems to have had a grudge
against Williams after Williams didn't back him for an appointment
(25:23):
at Provident Hospital. William's predecessor at Friedman's Hospital was Charles
Burley Purvis, who had been the hospital's surgeon in Chards
for over a decade. Purvis had also served in the
Union Army during the Civil War and had been one
of the founders of Howard Medical School. But a lot
(25:44):
had changed in the world of medicine over all those years,
and William's perception was that Purvis and the hospital had
just not kept up with those changes. Purvis later alleged
that he had been replaced because of politics.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
When Williams started, Freedman's Hospital was organized into three general wards,
one for men, one for women, and one for.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Labor and delivery.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
The nursing staff was mostly made up of people who
had not been through formal training, meaning they also didn't
have the kind of experience or skills that Williams thought
was necessary. He also found the hospital's surgical mortality rate
of almost ten percent to be unacceptable.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Williams reorganized the hospital into departments. I used all the
modern terms for these departments today. They were general medicine, surgery, gynecology, obstetrics, dermatology, urology,
and pulmonology. He also established an ambulance service, which was
essentially a delivery wagon that could bring patients to the hospital.
(26:51):
He replaced the nursing staff and updated surgical techniques and
antiseptic procedures. In addition to recruiting new medical and surgical staff,
he also granted surgical privileges to some of the area's
best surgeons. Soon, the surgical mortality rate at the hospital
had dropped to one point five percent. Williams also wanted
(27:14):
Freedman's Hospital to be seen as a highly respected and
cutting edge facility, which meant getting the public to trust
the abilities of black surgeons. To that end, he offered
lectures and demonstrations at the hospital, including opportunities for the
public to observe surgical procedures in the operating theater. Williams
(27:35):
resigned from Freedman's Hospital in eighteen ninety eight after about
five years. The hospital was still under the control of
the Department of the Interior, and that meant that it
was often in the crosshairs of various political squabbles. An
investigation into charitable institutions in Washington, d C. Including the
(27:56):
hospital had also started in eighteen ninety six, and Purvis
hadn't been trying to get reinstated to his position. Williams
was accused of financial mismanagement, but the reason he gave
for leaving was that he was just tired of all
the politics. That same year, at the age of forty two,
(28:17):
Williams married thirty nine year old Alice Johnson, who was
the daughter of American artist Moses jacob Ezekiel, who was
Jewish and a formerly enslaved woman. Alice was a teacher
and a graduate of Howard University who had remained single
after an ugly breakup when she was much younger. She
didn't want to wear white for her wedding because her
(28:38):
mother had recently died, so instead she wore a navy
blue suit. Dan's friend Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote a poem
to commemorate his marriage, titled to Dan. That poem started
step me now a bridal measure, work, give way to
love and leisure. Hearts be free, and hearts be gay.
Doctor Dan Doth wed today. They moved back to Chicago,
(29:01):
and they had one child together, who sadly died at birth.
A congressional report about Friedman's Hospital was released after Dan
and Alice had gotten married, and it detailed a lot
of issues at the hospital. A lot of those issues, though,
were ones that Williams had reported to the Department of
the Interior but which had not been dealt with. The
(29:23):
report recommended huge cuts to the staff, including to the
nursing staff, and it described Howard Medical School as quote
encroaching on the hospital.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
There were some newspapers that defended Williams after this report
was released, and others that attacked him. He was questioned
about his work, including a lot of questions about hospital spending.
This included very specific questions about transactions that had happened
years before the sale of two cameras that he said
were his personal property but that were implied to have
(29:57):
really belonged to the government, and and how much was
spent on various equipment that was both expensive and useless
if it was damaged or worn. This has to have
been frustrating, considering that he brought a lot of his
own equipment with him when he started working at the
hospital because the hospital didn't have it, and a lot
of that equipment he never got back. Yeah, some of
(30:20):
these questions were like questions about purchases of needles from
eighteen ninety four or something, and he was like, how
do you expect me to know this? There's a stationary invoice.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Back in Chicago, Williams went back to working at Provident Hospital,
which had moved to a new sixty five bed location.
George Cleveland Hall was now on the board there, and
there continued to be a lot of friction between him
and Williams. Williams also started writing to Booker T. Washington
trying to get a teaching hospital established at the Tuskegee
(30:54):
Institute in Alabama. The Tuskegee Institute had been founded in
eighteen eighty one.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Booker T.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Washington seems to have thought a hospital would be taking
on too much, too fast and put the institute at risk,
but Williams thought there was an obvious need for one.
In addition to thinking it was critical to training doctors,
he had seen black patients who had come all the
way from Alabama trying to get access to medical care.
(31:24):
Washington eventually stopped answering Williams letters, and Williams later learned
that Washington had also been getting a lot of letters
from George Cleveland Hall. There seems to just have been
a lot of animosity between the two of them. In
eighteen ninety nine, George Hubbard, president and dean of Mahary
Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, contacted Williams about conducting surgical
(31:47):
clinics at the college. Maharry is a historically black medical
school founded in eighteen seventy six, but at the time
it wasn't connected to a teaching hospital. Williams's first clinic
was held in a cramped room, and afterward he stressed
that the only way for doctors insurgeons to really excel,
(32:08):
or even to be truly ready to practice medicine and
surgery was to have the opportunity for hands on instruction
and practice at a teaching hospital. He was quoted as saying,
we can't sit any longer idly and inanely deploring the
existing conditions. We must start our own hospitals and training schools.
(32:29):
In January of nineteen hundred, Williams returned to Nashville to
give a lecture on this subject at the Phyllis Wheetlee Club.
He advocated for every city in the South with a
population of more than ten thousand black people to have
its own black hospital with an attached nursing training school.
This would provide hospitals that would accept black patients and
(32:52):
places for black doctors and surgeons to work. He talked
about how to get such a hospital started by renting
a house with ten or twelve rooms, preferably with a basement,
furnishing it modestly so that it would be easy to clean,
and hiring a level headed graduate nurse to act as
the superintendent, and then appointing the best physicians that could
(33:14):
be found to work there. Then he passed on something
Frederick Douglass had written to him in a letter in
eighteen ninety four, quote, 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. A teaching hospital was
(33:36):
established in Nashville that September. Williams continued to hold his
annual surgical clinics there and they were described as the
highlight of every year for the medical students. He was
paid only a travel stipend, and he donated that.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
Back to Mahary.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
A lot of the time he was doing surgeries that
the students really didn't have other opportunities to see. They
were often very complicated or uncommon procedures. He was known
for operating incredibly skillfully and also very quickly given the
limitations of general anesthesia at the time. He was also
(34:14):
continually pushing himself as a surgeon, and he was also
breaking new ground in the field. In nineteen oh two,
he became one of the first surgeons to successfully repair
a traumatic hemorrhage in a spleen. At the time, it
was more common to remove the spleen than to try
to repair it. There had been at least one successful
(34:35):
surgical spleen repair before this, but Williams did not know
about it. In nineteen twelve, while he was still working
at Provident Hospital, Williams also became associate attending surgeon at
Saint Luke's Hospital in Chicago, but the following year he
resigned from Provident. There are kind of multiple conflicting stories
(34:56):
about why what is that Providence bore passed a policy
that surgeons who worked at Provident could only work at Provident.
That was a policy that was probably written to target Williams,
and it might also have been connected to the ongoing
animosity with George Cleveland Hall. It's also possible that Williams
(35:19):
felt like Provident was no longer really aligned with his
original vision for it. He had established it in order
to train black nurses and to provide a place that
would accept black patients and where black doctors could work.
He had also helped to establish the National Medical Association
since black doctors were being excluded from the American Medical Association,
(35:44):
but he had wanted Provident to specifically be integrated and
to provide connections between the white and black medical communities
in Chicago. Over time, Providence staff had become less and
less integrated and more predominantly black, and that was part
of an increasing pattern of racial segregation in Chicago more generally.
(36:06):
Williams kept working at Saint Luke's as well as teaching
and consulting. Former students and colleagues would write to him
for help and advice, and sometimes when his former students'
patients did not have access to a hospital that would
admit them, he would still perform surgery in their homes.
He also continued to advocate for the establishment of black
(36:28):
owned hospitals that would benefit black patients and doctors alike.
He helped establish at least forty hospitals that were open
to black patients. In nineteen thirteen, Williams also became the
only black founding member of the American College of Surgeons,
which got its second black member twenty one years later.
(36:49):
Dan's wife, Alice, developed Parkinson's disease and died in nineteen
twenty four. They were married until her death, but their
relationship had become more strained after d had an affair
years before. Daniel Hale Williams moved to northern Michigan. In
nineteen twenty six, he was partially paralyzed after a stroke.
(37:11):
He died on August fourth, nineteen thirty one, at the
age of seventy five, and he was buried in Chicago's
Graceland Cemetery. He had become known as an advocate for
medical and nursing training and medical care for black people,
and for being an incredibly talented surgeon who charged people
what they could afford to pay him. He took risks,
(37:33):
and he attempted surgeries that he didn't know of anybody
else trying before. And he had a reputation for going
to great links to try to treat people's limbs rather
than amputating them. But he also did not do surgeries
if he knew that they would not be successful, and
he didn't give people treatments that he didn't think they needed.
(37:54):
If he decided someone was too sick or too badly
injured to survive a surgery, he would stay with them
until they died. In the words of biographer Helen Buckler, quote,
it was as though in the sickroom, and only in
the sickroom, could doctor Dan be a whole man, a
man of feeling as well as a man of science
and intellect. Here emotions buried deep by pride and circumstance
(38:19):
were set free. Provident Hospital moved into a much bigger
building on East fifty first Street in nineteen thirty three.
This was followed by construction of an outpatient building, and
two apartment buildings were purchased as housing for nursing students.
But the hospital faced periods of financial struggle, especially in
times of more widespread economic downturns. This included serious financial
(38:44):
problems in the nineteen eighties, and the hospital was closed
in nineteen eighty seven. It was acquired by the Cook
County Board of Commissioners in nineteen ninety one and reopened
in nineteen ninety three. It is now Provident Hospital of
Cook County in Chicago and is affiliated with Loyola University's
Stritch School of Medicine. Most of the hospitals that were
(39:07):
established during the Black Hospital movement closed or merged with
other hospitals after the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty
four and the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid the following year.
Hospitals accepting Medicare and Medicaid funding were required to comply
with the Civil Rights Acts outlawing of racial discrimination. This
(39:29):
was a huge part of desegregating the medical system. Desegregation
gave black patients access to care that they might not
have been able to access otherwise, but the loss of
these hospitals could also be devastating to the communities where
they had been operating. Many of them were major employers
(39:49):
in their neighborhoods and also sources of civic pride and
just major community resources. And of course, the desegregation of
the medical system in the US did not allow eliminate
medical racism, and there are ongoing disparities and access to
medical care and outcomes across a lot of the country
(40:09):
today and that is Daniel Hale Williams.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Do you also have some listener mail for us?
Speaker 3 (40:16):
I do have listener mail.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
This is from Caitlin who wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly.
I'm always delighted by the Unearthed episodes and this set
with no exception. I especially appreciated the let's recreate this
artifact from antiquity to see if we can use it
as hypothesized item variety. How do I get a job
checking a javelin from various heights on a scissor lift.
(40:41):
I'm a grad student who teaches undergrads as part of
my program, and this semester, I'm leading a historical research
methodology course where we're showing students how to do archival
research by working on a group project. Coincidentally, the day
before the first class, an interstate construction project turned up
an archaeologically significant find, a series of privy pits their
(41:04):
thought to date to the construction of the Erie Canal.
The archaeologist interviewed for the article I read was so
incredibly excited about the chance to learn from the unearthed
artifacts that had been rescued before the construction resumed. I
shared this with my students as an example of how
local history can be. I waxed rhapsodic about the potential
(41:25):
discoveries for a few moments before one of my students
raised his hand and said, wait, isn't a privy just
a toilet? What's important about poop? Bless his heart, he
didn't know how deep my repertoire of factoids and tidbits
on Latrine's privy, septic systems, dumps, and so on is.
Thanks Unearthed, Thank you as always for all you do.
(41:47):
I look forward to the new episodes every week and
am constantly re listening to favorites from the back catalog.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Best Caitlin.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
Thank you so much Caitlin for this email, and thank
you for your past emails. Caitlin is another frequent correspondent,
and I loved this bit about the privies. The discoveries
I thought of first connected to the privies were the
ones that we've talked about that are all about how
(42:15):
the Roman Empire was full of parasites, and wherever the
Romans went, they took the parasites with the riddled with Romans.
I also think in earlier years of doing Unearthed, we
had a lot of discoveries that came from middens which
were basically trash dumps. And I don't think I can
(42:38):
remember a very recent midden discovery. Maybe there has been,
I don't know, but anyway, thank you again, Caitlin for
this email. If you would like to send us a
note about this or any other podcast where at history
podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to
our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you'd
(42:58):
like to get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you
Speaker 3 (43:14):
Listen to your favorite shows
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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