Daniel Hale Williams and Provident Hospital

Daniel Hale Williams, born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, finished his course at the Chicago Medical College, an affiliate of Northwestern University, in March 1883. He opened a practice in Chicago, operated at the South Side Dispensary, taught anatomy at the college and served on the Illinois State Board of Health.

Hospitals under white control usually turned away Black interns, nurses and physicians. After a Black woman, Emma Reynolds, was refused entry to nursing school, Williams began a campaign in 1890, and the Provident Hospital and Training School Association was incorporated on 23 January 1891. The National Park Service nomination for Williams's house calls it the first hospital in America founded and fully controlled by Black Americans. Its staff and patients were integrated, and its nursing school, with an 18-month course, was the first in the United States for Black nurses. In its first year Provident treated 189 patients, of whom 141 recovered entirely and 22 died.

In July 1893 James Cornish, a Black expressman, was brought in with a stab wound near the heart. Medical opinion then held that heart wounds should be left alone. Williams opened the chest without X-rays or blood transfusion and found that the knife had cut the pericardium, the sac around the heart, and nicked the heart muscle, which did not need stitches. He sewed up the pericardium and closed the chest. Cornish left the hospital 51 days later and lived about 20 more years.

The operation is often called the first successful heart surgery. Williams repaired the pericardium, not the heart itself, and H. C. Dalton of St. Louis had performed a similar operation in 1891, which Williams did not know about. Britannica describes Williams's case as the first recorded repair of the pericardium while noting Dalton's claim.

From 1894 to 1898 Williams was surgeon in chief of Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he reorganized the wards into departments, created internships and set up another school for Black nurses. He returned to Provident, and in 1913 he became the only African American charter member of the American College of Surgeons. He died in Idlewild, Michigan, on 4 August 1931.