THE AFRICAN RENAISSANCE – THE BLACK SCIENTISTS – Daniel Hale Williams

THE AFRICAN RENAISSANCE – THE BLACK SCIENTISTS – Daniel Hale Williams

Our society has distorted who we are. From slavery to the reconstruction, to the precipice on which we now stand. We have seen powerful white men rule the world, while offering the poor white man a vicious lie as placation. And when the poor white man’s children wail with a hunger that cannot be satisfied, he feeds them that same vicious lie. A lie whispering to them that regardless of their lot in life, they can at least be triumphant in the fact that their whiteness makes them superior to blackness. But we know the TRUTH and we will go forward to that truth to freedom. No man, no myth and no malaise will stop this movement. We forbid it. Because we know that it is this darkness that murders in the best in us and the best of us.
                       ….. Dr Martin Luther King Jnr

This darkness is the darkness of the ignorance of our identity. The ignorance that we are kings and queens. Someone said that when black people learn our true history, that knowledge instantly changes how we see ourselves in the world. It then you will realize we are truly meant to be great.

I bet you have never heard that the first person to invent and perform an open heart surgery in America is a black man; Daniel Hale Williams.

Daniel Hale Williams was one of the first American cardiologists to perform open-heart surgery in the United States and went on perform other history making operations. founded a hospital with an interracial staff;  Provident Hospital and Training School and Co-founded the National Medical Association and also the first African American physician admitted to the American College of Surgeons.

Daniel Hale Williams III was born on January 18, 1856, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He was the fifth of eight children born to Daniel and Sarah Williams. Daniel's father was a barber who was deeply religious and imparted a sense of pride in his eight children. He moved the family to Annapolis, Maryland but died shortly thereafter of tuberculosis. Daniel's mother realized she could not manage the entire family and sent some of the children to live with relatives. 

First apprenticed to a cobbler, he rebelled against repetitive, menial labor and moved to Edgerton, Wisconsin, to live with his sister Sally. He boarded with a foster family. Like his father, he took up the barber career and bass violinist. Later he worked in a law office. With the sponsorship of a prominent physician, he ultimately decided he wanted to pursue his education. He worked as an apprentice with Dr. Henry Palmer, a highly accomplished surgeon, for two years and in 1880 entered what is now known as Northwestern University Medical School. Daniel graduated with an M.D. degree in 1883.  Dr. Williams practiced medicine in Chicago at a time when there were only three other black physicians in Chicago. Because African-American doctors were denied privileges at white hospitals, he worked as a surgeon at the South Side Dispensary in a ghetto area until 1892. "In 1890, Reverend Louis Reynolds, whose sister Emma was refused admission to nursing schools because she was black, approached Dr. Williams for help. To counteract this practice, Dr. Williams founded the Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses, now called Provident Hospital of Cook County in Chicago. This emerged as the first hospital in the country with a nursing and intern program that hired African Americans. This hospital had the distinction of being the first medical facility to have an interracial staff. In 1889, he was appointed to the Illinois State Board of Health and worked with medical standards and hospital rules. He was a surgeon at Provident (1892–93, 1898–1912) and surgeon in chief of Freedmen’s Hospital, Washington, D.C (1894–98), where he established another school for black nurses. He opened his own medical office in Chicago, Illinois, and then completed further training at Chicago Medical College. The hospital employed white and black American doctors and was dedicated to the belief that everyone deserved the best medical care possible. He became a trailblazer, setting high standards in medical procedures and sanitary conditions, including adopting recently-discovered sterilization procedures in regard to germ transmission and prevention.

He also worked with the Equal Rights League, a black civil rights organization active during the Reconstruction era.

In 1893, Williams continued to make history when he operated on James Cornish, a man with a severe stab wound to his chest who was brought to Provident. Without the benefits of a blood transfusion or modern surgical procedures, X-rays, antibiotics, surgical prep-work. Williams successfully sutured Cornish’s pericardium, the membranous sac enclosing the heart, thus becoming one of the first people to perform open-heart surgery. Williams’ procedure is cited as the first recorded repair of the pericardium in America. His patient survived and lived for many years after. He was discharged 51 days after his remarkable surgery (http://www.cookcountyhhs.org). He was considered a pioneering heart surgeon during a time when technological discoveries were revolutionizing the practice of medicine. The success of the procedure rated headlines in the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, although many people doubted that an African-American doctor could evolve such an innovation.

In 1902 he successfully sutured a heavily bleeding spleen, another first in the U.S. By 1901 Williams had operated on 357 ovarian cysts in African-American women also and white women. A condition previously believed to occur only in white women.

In 1894, Williams moved to Washington, D.C., where he was appointed the chief surgeon of the Freedmen’s Hospital, which provided care for formerly enslaved African Americans. The facility had fallen into neglect and had a high mortality rate. Williams worked diligently on revitalization, improving surgical procedures, increasing specialization, launching ambulance services and continuing to provide opportunities for black medical professionals, among other feats. In 1895, he co-founded the National Medical Association, a professional organization for black medical practitioners. This organization was instituted as an alternative to the all-white American Medical Association that did not extend membership to black doctors.

In 1913 Williams became the first African-American surgeon nominated as a charter member of the American College of Surgeons.

Williams left Freedmen’s Hospital in 1898. He married Alice Johnson, and the newlyweds moved to Chicago, where Williams returned to his work at Provident. Soon after the turn of the century, he worked at Cook County Hospital and later at St. Luke’s, a large medical institution with ample resources.

His papers were printed in their entirety in the Annals of Surgery and in abridged forms in the Chicago Medical Recorder and the Illinois Medical Journal. Williams became the only black charter member of the American College of Surgeons in 1913.

He retired from medicine in 1920. After his wife's death, he attended a few private patients, gardened and swam in his spare time. In 1926, Williams retired from St. Luke’s after surviving a debilitating stroke.  He lived out his retirement years in Idlewild, Michigan, an all-black resort community, until his death on August 4, 1931.  He was 75 at the time of his death.

Today, William's work as a pioneering physician and advocate for an African-American presence in medicine continues to be honored by institutions worldwide.

As a sign of the esteem of the black medical community, until this day, a "code blue" at the Howard University Hospital emergency room is called a "Dr. Dan." In words that could later be said of Vivien Thomas, a colleague wrote, "His greatest pride was that directly or indirectly, he had a hand in the making of most of the outstanding Negro surgeons of the current generation."

So today, slavery is over, the black man everywhere has access to equal social, political and economic rights but yet we are still in great darkness, especially in Africa. You may ask, when will we be free of this darkness? I say to you, despite the economic turmoil and political instability, our freedom will soon be upon us. For the truth rushing to earth is saying that the next level of freedom that is upon our generation is intellectual. Not fighting white supremacy, or a political arrangement. But fighting black emptiness. We have to prove intellectually that we are a free people. Soon and very soon, it will proved that God created all men equal intellectually. No lie can live forever. But for that to happen you and I need to get up, get responsible and think our way through this mess.

If we did it before, we can do it again. And even more!!!

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