Background
Daniel Hale Williams was born on January 18, 1856 at Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, the son of Daniel and Sarah (Price) Williams.
Daniel Hale Williams was born on January 18, 1856 at Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, the son of Daniel and Sarah (Price) Williams.
For a time he attended Stanton School at Annapolis, Maryland, but after the death of his father the family moved first to Rockford, Illinois, and later to Janesville, Wisconsin, where he graduated from the high school and from Hare's Classical Academy. He attracted the interest of Dr. Henry Palmer, one of the leading surgeons of that section, and in 1878 began the study of medicine in his office. In 1883 he was graduated with the degree of M. D. at the Chicago Medical College, the medical department of Northwestern University.
After an interneship in Mercy Hospital he entered practice in Chicago, associating himself with the surgical service of the South Side Dispensary (1884 - 91). He was appointed demonstrator of anatomy at his alma mater in 1885, holding the position for four years.
Realizing the lack of facilities for the training of colored men as internes and of colored women as nurses, he organized Provident Hospital in 1891, which stands as an enduring monument to him. Its training school for nurses was the first for colored women in the United States. He served on the surgical staff of this hospital from its opening until 1912. This service was interrupted in 1893, when President Cleveland appointed him surgeon-in-chief of Freedmen's Hospital in Washington. During his five-year tenure he reorganized the hospital and established a training school for colored nurses.
In 1898 he returned to his practice in Chicago. He served on the surgical staff of Cook County Hospital from 1900 to 1906, and from 1907 to the time of his death he was an associate attending surgeon to St. Luke's Hospital.
When in 1899 he was appointed professor of clinical surgery at Meharry Medical College at Nashville, Tennessee, he inaugurated the first surgical clinics given at that institution. Though careful and methodical in his surgical technique he was a daring operator.
He is credited with having performed in 1893 the first successful surgical closure of a wound of the heart and pericardium (Medical Record, New York, March 27, 1897). He also perfected a suture for the arrest of hemorrhage from the spleen. The beginning of his surgical career was coincident with the advent of asepsis, which he adopted and followed consistently.
His clinics and didactic instruction at Meharry Medical College were of a high order.
Always he was a strong advocate of the negro's right in medical education and of high standards for the special schools of the race.
He served the state of Illinois as a member of the board of health (1887 - 91) and during the World War he was a medical examiner on the state board of appeals.
His writings were confined to articles on surgical subjects, published in medical journals of the highest class.
He died on August 4, 1931 at his summer home at Idlewild, Michigan.
Williams was undoubtedly the most gifted surgeon and the most notable medical man that the colored race had produced. Through his connection with Provident Hospital and Meharry Medical College he exerted a profound influence upon the development of surgical thought and practice among numerous negro surgeons, to whom his career was a shining example.
When in 1913 the American College of Surgeons was organized he was invited to be a charter member, the only colored man so honored. In addition to being a member of his city and state medical societies and of the American Medical Association, he was one of the founders and first vice-president of the National Medical Association, a society of colored professional men organized in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1895.
He was handsome of face and figure, and of attractive personality, and was held in high esteem by his colleagues, regardless of color. His high rating in the surgical world brought him contacts, pleasant and otherwise, unusual to men of his race. Though he experienced them without apparent embarrassment, they left his later life shadowed by over-sensitiveness and bitterness of spirit.
On April 8, 1898, he married Alice D. Johnson of Washington.
