Daniel Hale Williams: A Pioneering Surgeon

Daniel Hale Williams founded Provident Hospital, which trained black nurses, cared for black patients, and advanced surgical knowledge during a time when blacks experienced institutional discrimination. Public Domain

Daniel Hale Williams (1856–1931) was the fifth of six children born to Daniel and Sarah Williams in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. His parents, being free black people, were firm abolitionists and devout Christians. They joined the National Equal Rights League when it was formed toward the end of the Civil War.

Shortly after the war, when Williams was 11, his father died of tuberculosis. The financial strain forced the family to move to Baltimore, where the young Williams was apprenticed with a shoemaker. After a year of tedious work that Williams found lonely and less than enjoyable, he left Baltimore to join his mother and her family in Rockford, Illinois.

While in Rockford, Williams worked odd jobs, but he soon took up the trade of cutting hair. By 17, he had moved with his sister about 50 miles north to Edgerton, Wisconsin, and opened his own barbershop. Though the business didn’t last long, he became a proficient barber. Once his barbershop was shuttered, he joined another barbershop called Anderson’s Tonsorial Parlor in nearby Janesville, Wisconsin.

While working at the barbershop, he tried unsuccessfully to finish high school. Harry Anderson, who owned the barbershop and the house where Williams and his sister now lived, suggested he attend Haire’s Classical Academy to complete his education. At age 21, Williams finally completed his secondary education, but he sought another challenge: medical school.

Though traditional schooling wasn't his strength, Daniel Hale Williams leveraged a learn-by-doing mentality to found a hospital, save thousands of lives, and pioneer new surgical practices. Public Domain

Medical Training

While working for Anderson, Williams met Dr. Henry Palmer, a surgeon who had enjoyed an interesting and successful career. Palmer had been a brigadier surgeon in the Union Army, but before that, he had been a surgeon during the Crimean War while, rather counterintuitively, on vacation. Palmer was one of Wisconsin’s most prominent citizens. He even became the state’s surgeon general in 1880. Two years before he took that position, Williams apprenticed with Palmer. The opportunity would change not only Williams’s life, but the medical and black communities, too.

After completing his apprenticeship in 1880, Williams returned to Illinois and began his studies at Chicago Medical School, which later became part of Northwestern University. By 1883, he had earned his medical degree. He spent the next year interning at Mercy Hospital in Chicago.

During the decade of 1880 to 1890, Chicago doubled in size to 1.09 million residents from 503,000. Despite the substantial growth, Williams could not break into an established medical practice because of his race. After his year at Mercy Hospital, he opened his own practice and was one of only three black doctors in what became by 1890 the country’s third largest city.

A Providential Opportunity

Williams’s surgical skills and medical knowledge were apparent despite discrimination. While running his private practice, he taught anatomy at Chicago Medical College from 1885 to 1888 and treated patients at the South Side Dispensary, a charity facility affiliated with the medical college. In 1889, he was appointed by Gov. Joseph Fifer to the Illinois State Board of Health, a position he held for four consecutive years.

Williams had established his name among every level of Chicago society. His influence across racial boundaries proved pivotal for future black nurses and doctors. In 1890, he was approached by Louis Reynolds, pastor of St. Stephen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, with a request. Reynolds’s sister, Emma, wished to become a nurse, but she was turned away from every opportunity. He wondered whether Williams could convince a school to accept his sister.

Williams’s efforts came to naught, but then the two men decided that what was needed was a new school that accepted and taught aspiring black nurses and doctors. They raised money from both black and white businessmen and colleagues. Armour & Co., a meat packing company that was Chicago’s largest business and employer, made a down payment on a three-story house. The house became the Provident Hospital and Training School Association. Emma Reynolds was among the seven women who made up the first graduating class of nurses.

Emma Reynolds' desire to be a nurse inspired Daniel Hale Williams to found Provident Hospital. Public Domain

Starting with just 12 beds in a booming city, the hospital’s charter stated, “The object for which it is formed is to maintain a hospital and training school for nurses in the City of Chicago, Illinois, for the gratuitous treatment of the medical and surgical diseases of the sick poor.”

Initially slated to help black patients offset the subpar care provided to the African American community, it eventually opened its doors to both white and black people, becoming Chicago’s first interracial hospital.

A Groundbreaking Surgery

It was early into Provident Hospital’s existence that Williams conducted his most groundbreaking surgical operation. In 1893, a patient by the name of James Cornish was rushed into the hospital with stab wounds. One of the stab wounds had punctured his pericardium, the protective fluid-filled sac that protects the heart and the great vessels. The medical community at the time still believed heart surgery was too risky to attempt. Had Williams abided by this notion, Cornish would have bled to death at the hospital. Williams decided on surgery.

He made an incision into the chest cavity, discovered the injury, sutured the pericardium, flushed the wound with a salt solution, and stitched the incision. The operation was an unmitigated success. Cornish left the hospital under his own power a month later and lived another 20 years.

Guiding Freedmen’s

Shortly after the successful surgery, Williams became professor of surgery at Howard University. The same year, Secretary of State Walter Gresham recommended to President Grover Cleveland that Williams become the surgeon-in-chief at the federally created and funded Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington.

The founder of the American College of Surgeons, Franklin Martin, further recommended Williams. He wrote: “I have known intimately Dr Daniel H. Williams for more than ten years. I know him to be a man of honor and as a member of society a superior gentleman. Professionally he stands at the top of the medical profession of Chicago. He is a surgeon of great scientific ability, and his executive ability as demonstrated in the organization and equipment of Provident Hospital of Chicago, is beyond question.”

Williams considered Cleveland’s offer. It seems, however, that Gresham may have convinced Williams to take the job, suggesting, “If it’s service to your race you’re thinking of, Freedmen’s needs you more than Provident.”

Freedmen’s Hospital was under the purview of the Department of the Interior at the time, and the department’s secretary agreed to let Williams do as he wished with the 220-bed hospital, as long as his measures didn’t go over budget. Under Williams’s leadership, the hospital was organized according to departments, including pathology and bacteriology laboratories. They added staff and started an ambulance service, and Williams initiated a training regimen that greatly improved the medical practice of the nurses and doctors.

As a result of these efforts, the surgical mortality rate among patients dropped to 1.5 percent from 10 percent by the end of the first year. Williams remained in this position until resigning in 1898, the same year he married Alice Johnson, a schoolteacher he had met in the nation’s capital.

Lydia Monroe was a student of Provident Hospital in 1942. Daniel Hale Williams's legacy provided her with the opportunity to become a nurse. Public Domain

A Lasting Legacy

Along with improving Freedmen’s Hospital and getting married, Williams helped found the National Medical Association in 1895. The NMA was in response to the restrictive racial policies of the American Medical Association. A year after founding the NMA, the Supreme Court decided the Plessy v. Ferguson case, legally authorizing ongoing racial segregation under the phrase “separate but equal.” In fact, the AMA remained segregated until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The NMA remains a robust medical organization.

Williams continued practicing medicine at Provident Hospital, which still operates today. In 1902, he was one of the first surgeons to successfully suture a wound to a patient’s spleen. The following year, as a visiting professor, he conducted the influential surgical clinics at Meharry Medical College in Nashville. While speaking at the historically black college, he encouraged students: “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.”

In 1909, while still practicing at Provident Hospital, Williams became a staff surgeon at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. In 1913, he became a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He resigned from Provident in 1912 to join St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago as staff surgeon, and he continued there until he suffered a stroke in 1926.

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