Daniel Hale Williams

Daniel was forced to take on jobs at n early age. He became an apprentice to a cobbler, a shoemaker, for three years and also a laborer on a lake steamer. He attended Hare’s Classical Academy in 1877. After he graduated from there, he and his sister began traveling looking for job opportunities. He and his sister found jobs in Janesville, Wisconsin where they both began working in a barbershop. While working in the barbershop, Daniel met Henry Palmer who was a leading physician and surgeon general in Wisconsin. Although Daniel was only 16 when he met Dr. Palmer, he saw the special qualities that Daniel possessed. Dr. Palmer took him as an apprentice in 1878. Dr. Palmer then helped pay for Daniel to attend the Chicago Medical College, which was affiliated with Northwestern University and was considered

In 1899, he became a professor of clinical surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. Meharry was one of the two black Medical schools in the nation. Dr. Williams established it’s first surgical clinic. He also fought to encourage blacks to become doctors, nurses, and pharmacist as well as to become leaders in their communities.

The doctors believed that after careful evaluation, the open-heart surgery would be the best method for operating on Cornish. Without the aid of penicillin, blood transfusions, antibiotics, anesthetics, or x-rays, he opened the patient’s thoracic cavity, examined the heart, sutured the wound of the pericardium and closed the chest. “Finding that a blood vessel had been pierced and that the pericardium tissue around the heart had also received a stroke of the knife blade, Williams proceeded to close both lacerations with stitches of catgut thread” (African-American culture and History, p.2839). The patient lived 20 years after the operation. His hospital, funded by substantial volunteers, grew to a new 65 bed hospital following this land marking surgery.

He was considered a great surgeon and doctor who treated both white and black patients. In 1889, he was appointed to the Illinois State board of Health where he worked with medical standards and hospital rules and regulations. He then became the only African American charter member of the American College of Surgeons.

Some topics in this essay:
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