Daniel Hale Williams

Surgeon and medical educator, born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, USA. One of the first African-Americans to graduate from medical school (Chicago Medical College, Northwestern University, 1883), he organized Provident Hospital in Chicago (1891), establishing training programmes for the medical education of African-American men (interns) and women (nurses). While there he performed the first successful surgical closure of a wound to the heart and the pericardium (1893), perfected the suture technique for stopping haemorrhage from the spleen, and was also an early advocate of asepsis. President Grover Cleveland appointed him surgeon-in-chief at the Freedmen's hospital in Washington, DC (1893–8), where he established a second training programme for African-American men and women. He then became a professor of clinical surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN (1899). In 1913 he was made a charter member (the only African-American so honoured) of the American College of Surgeons, and for many decades he was regarded as the premier African-American in the medical profession.

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams (January 18, 1856 - August 4, 1931) was a bi-racial American surgeon. Williams is known today for performing an early surgery on the pericardium, repairing a knife wound with the use of sutures.

Daniel Hale Williams was born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, to Daniel and Sarah Price Williams.

In 1883, Williams graduated from the Chicago Medical School.

In 1893 Dr. Williams, with the assistance of five other surgeons, repaired the torn pericardium of James Cornish, who had suffered a knife wound to the heart.

Most experts do not consider operations on the pericardium to be true open heart surgery, as the pericardium is the sac surrounding the heart, and not the organ itself. ) then, that Williams performed the "first open heart surgery" are spurious.

He was subsequently appointed during the administration of President Grover Cleveland as Surgeon-in-Chief of Freedman's Hospital in Washington, DC. In addition to organizing the hospital, Dr. Williams also established a training school for African-American nurses at the facility.

Dr. 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.