BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY : AFRICAN AMERICAN " Dr DANIEL HALE WILLIAMS " WAS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN GENERAL SURGEON AND PERFORM ONE OF THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL PERICARDIUM SURGERIES IN THE UNITED STATES : GOES INTO THE " HALL OF BLACK GENIUS "

                     BLACK                      SOCIAL                   HISTORY                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Daniel Hale Williams  January 18, 1856 – August 4, 1931  was an American surgeon. He was an African-American general surgeon, and performed one of the first successful pericardium surgeries in the United States.  He also founded Provident Hospital, the first non-segregated hospital in the United States. At the time that he graduated from medical school, black

doctors were not allowed to work in Chicago hospitals. As a result, in 1891, Williams started the Provident Hospital (Chicago) and training school for nurses in Chicago, Illinois. This was established mostly for African-American citizens.                                                                            Career

Williams was the second to have successfully performed pericardium surgery to repair a wound. Henry Dalton was the first.^[6] Dalton successfully performed pericardium surgery to repair a wound in 1891, with the patient fully recovering. Earlier surgeries, on the pericardium, which resulted in the death of the patient, were attempted by Francisco Romero in 1801, and Dominique Jean Larrey prior to 1850.  In 1893 Williams repaired the torn pericardium of a knife wound patient, James Cornish, the second on record. He performed this surgery, without the benefit of penicillin or blood transfusion, at Provident Hospital, Chicago, on 10 July 1893  About fifty-five days later, James Cornish had successfully recovered from the surgery. In 1893, during the administration of President Grover Cleveland, Williams was appointed surgeon-in-chief of Freedman's Hospital in Washington, D.C., a post he held until 1898 when he married and moved to Chicago. In addition to organizing the hospital, Williams also established a training school for African-American nurses at the facility.

Williams was a teacher of Clinical Surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee and was an attending surgeon at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. He worked to create more hospitals and accessibility for African Americans. In 1895 he co-founded the National Medical Association for African American doctors, and in 1913 he became a charter member and the only African American doctor in the American College of Surgeons.

Personal life

Daniel Hale Williams was born and raised in the city of Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. His father, Daniel Hale Williams, Jr. was the son of a black barber and a Scots-Irish woman.

He lived with his father who was a "free negro" barber, his mother, his one brother and five sisters and was the fifth child of the family. His family eventually moved to Annapolis, Maryland. Shortly after when Daniel was nine, his father died of tuberculosis. Daniel's mother realized she could not manage the entire family and sent some of the children to live with relatives. Daniel was apprenticed to a shoemaker in Baltimore, Maryland but ran away to join his mother who had moved to Rockford, Illinois. He later moved to Edgerton, Wisconsin, where he joined his sister and opened his own barber shop. After moving to nearby Janesville, Wisconsin, Daniel became fascinated with a local physician and decided to follow his path. He began working as an apprentice to Dr. Henry W. Palmer for two years and in 1880 entered Chicago Medical College, now known as Northwestern University Medical School. After graduation from Northwestern in 1883, he opened his own medical office in Chicago, Illinois.

Williams was married in 1898 to Alice Johnson, daughter of sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel and a maid of mixed ancestry. Williams died of a stroke in Idlewild, Michigan on August 4, 1931. His wife, Alice Johnson, died in 1924.