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Daniel Hale Williams
1858-1931
Birth:
January 18, 1858 in Pennsylvania, United States
Death: August
4, 1931
Occupation: Surgeon
Source: Dictionary of
American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies,
1928-1936.
Williams, Daniel Hale (Jan. 18, 1858 - Aug.
4, 1931), negro surgeon, was born at Hollidaysburg, Pa., the son of Daniel
and Sarah (Price) Williams. For a time he attended Stanton School at
Annapolis, Md., but after the death of his father the family moved first
to Rockford, Ill., and later to Janesville, Wis., 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. On Apr. 8, 1898, he married Alice D. Johnson of
Washington and later in that year 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, Tenn., 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, Mar. 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. 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, Ga., in 1895. 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.
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. His
writings were confined to articles on surgical subjects, published in
medical journals of the highest class. 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. These
were aggravated by several years of semi-invalidism before his death at
his summer home at Idlewild, Mich.
[Who's Who of the Colored Race,
1915; Who's Who in Colored America, 1927; Who's Who in
America, 1920-21; J. A. Kenney, The Negro in Medicine (1912);
Jour. of the Nat. Medic. Asso. (Washington, D. C.), Oct.-Dec. 1931;
Jour. Am. Medic. Asso., Sept. 5, 1931; Chicago Tribune, Aug.
7, 1931.]
"Daniel Hale Williams."Dictionary of American
Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.
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