Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 3: Today we are going to talk about doctor.
Speaker 2: Daniel Hale Williams, who's often described as the first person
Speaker 2: to successfully perform an open heart surgery.
Speaker 3: That's not completely correct.
Speaker 2: There were some other earlier open heart procedures, but he
Speaker 2: was still a surgical innovator at a time when the
Speaker 2: field of surgery was not nearly as advanced as it
Speaker 2: is today. And he was also a huge part of
Speaker 2: the Black hospital movement that was in the pretty much
Speaker 2: the first half of the twentieth century, opening hospitals for
Speaker 2: black patients when a lot of the US medical system
Speaker 2: was racially segregated and a lot of places black patients
Speaker 2: did not have anywhere they could receive care.
Speaker 1: Daniel Hale Williams, the third known as Dan, was born
Speaker 1: on January eighteenth, eighteen fifty six, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He
Speaker 1: was the fifth of seven children born to Sarah Price
Speaker 1: Williams and Daniel Hale Williams Junior, who was a barber.
Speaker 1: The family were Methodists, and they had white, Indigenous and
Speaker 1: African ancestry. Sarah's mother had been enslaved on the same
Speaker 1: plantation in Maryland as Frederick Douglas, and she and Douglas
Speaker 1: were cousins.
Speaker 2: There's not a lot of detail recorded about the younger
Speaker 2: Dan's earliest years, but in eighteen sixty seven, after the
Speaker 2: Civil War, the family went to Annapolis, Maryland, where Sarah
Speaker 2: had had family.
Speaker 3: Traveling to Maryland.
Speaker 2: Would not have been nearly as easy or possible before
Speaker 2: that point. Not long after they got there, though, Dan's
Speaker 2: father died of tuberculosis and Dan and his siblings were
Speaker 2: split up. Dan's brother was the oldest, and he was
Speaker 2: already in law school. Dan's two oldest sisters and their
Speaker 2: mother all went to Illinois to live with relatives and
Speaker 2: study hair dressing. Then the next two oldest sisters were
Speaker 2: placed in a convent school, and the youngest sister stayed
Speaker 2: with Dan's grandmother. Dan was pulled out of school and
Speaker 2: sent to Baltimore to live with a family friend and
Speaker 2: trained to be a shoemaker. Various accounts of all of
Speaker 2: this are pretty uncharitable toward Dan's mother. Although they were
Speaker 2: not rich, there were businessmen and landowners on both sides
Speaker 2: of the family, so Sarah did have some financial resources
Speaker 2: that she may have been able to draw on. At
Speaker 2: the same time, though she had gotten married at the
Speaker 2: age of fifteen, and without a husband, she didn't have
Speaker 2: a way to support herself and her children. It is
Speaker 2: absolutely reasonable that Dan would have felt abandoned. He was
Speaker 2: only eleven years old. But at the same time, it's
Speaker 2: seems like Sarah may have just been trying to do
Speaker 2: her best in some very difficult circumstances. Yeah, without like
Speaker 2: some specifics, I really could not tell whether there were
Speaker 2: legitimate criticisms of how she handled things or if people
Speaker 2: were just being really judgy. Dan's feelings might also have
Speaker 2: been influenced by the fact that he did not like
Speaker 2: making shoes. He was not enjoying this apprenticeship at all. Eventually,
Speaker 2: he talked one of his late father's friends into giving
Speaker 2: him a railroad pass, and he used that to go
Speaker 2: to Rockford, Illinois, where his mother and sisters were. Later on,
Speaker 2: he told a niece that when he got there at
Speaker 2: the age of only twelve, his mother told him that
Speaker 2: he seemed to have enough spunk to take care of himself.
Speaker 2: You could read that as impressed with what he had done,
Speaker 2: or as kind of flippant, and I don't really know
Speaker 2: which way she meant that. Sarah later moved again, leaving
Speaker 2: Dan and one of his sisters in Illinois with their cousins.
Speaker 2: Dan and his sister moved around a bit over the
Speaker 2: next few years, eventually making their.
Speaker 1: Way to Wisconsin. Dan wanted to be in school and
Speaker 1: he liked learning, but they also needed money. He learned
Speaker 1: to be a barber like his late father, and he
Speaker 1: worked part time while living in Edgerton, Wisconsin. He left
Speaker 1: school without graduating after a series of respiratory illnesses. He
Speaker 1: wanted to finish his education, though, so he later enrolled
Speaker 1: in a private school called the Classical Academy in Janesville, Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: which was run by a doctor, Hayre. Dan paid his
Speaker 1: way by working part time at Charles Henry Anderson's Tonsorial
Speaker 1: parlor and bathing rooms, and Dan and his sister also
Speaker 1: boarded with the Andersons. As I understand it, the Andersons
Speaker 1: were the only black family in the neighborhood.
Speaker 3: As we said, there's not a lot.
Speaker 2: Of concrete detail about William's earlier years, but he did
Speaker 2: have some experiences with racism, while living in Wisconsin. Williams
Speaker 2: had light skin and reddish hair, and while he identified
Speaker 2: himself in the parlance of the time as a Negro,
Speaker 2: people did not always immediately recognize that about him. At
Speaker 2: one point, the parents of another student at the Classical
Speaker 2: Academy threatened to withdraw their daughter because they did not
Speaker 2: want her to attend school with a black student. Doctor
Speaker 2: Hare's response to this was to offer to return her tuition.
Speaker 1: Dan also had a relationship, or perhaps just a flirtation,
Speaker 1: with a young white woman named Ida Williams. They were
Speaker 1: not related, She was another student at Classical Academy, and
Speaker 1: it seems like she was more serious about him than
Speaker 1: he was about her. When her parents learned about the relationship,
Speaker 1: her father casually dropped that he was thinking of sending
Speaker 1: her and her sister to public school. Ida seems to
Speaker 1: have read between the lines that this was really about
Speaker 1: getting her away from Dan, and soon she was courting
Speaker 1: a white man named Jim Lord, who she later married.
Speaker 1: Aida and Dan kept in touch, though, and much later on,
Speaker 1: when her son was sick, Williams performed surgery on him,
Speaker 1: and he did not charge Aida for it.
Speaker 2: In addition to going to school and working at the
Speaker 2: Tomsorial Parlor, Williams learned to play the fiddle and played
Speaker 2: with the Harry Anderson Orchestra and the Unitarian Church that
Speaker 2: he joined. After he graduated from the classical academy, he
Speaker 2: started law school, following the footsteps of his older brother,
Speaker 2: who was now a successful lawyer. When Williams decided he
Speaker 2: didn't like law, he changed courses and he got an
Speaker 2: apprenticeship with doctor Henry Palmer, who was a very well
Speaker 2: respected doctor and former Surgeon General of Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: While medical schools did exist in the US by this point,
Speaker 1: it was more common for people to at least start
Speaker 1: their metal education as an apprentice. Palmer was a little
Speaker 1: reluctant to take Williams on at first because of his
Speaker 1: short time studying law. Palmer wanted to make sure that
Speaker 1: Williams was actually committed to medical study and wasn't going
Speaker 1: to just switch tracks again. Palmer also accepted to other apprentices,
Speaker 1: Frank Pember and James S. Mills, which allowed all three
Speaker 1: of them to study at the same time and for
Speaker 1: Palmer to run his clinic twenty four hours a day.
Speaker 1: After a two year apprenticeship, all three of them went
Speaker 1: to Chicago Medical School, which later became Northwestern University Medical School.
Speaker 1: They all started in eighteen eighty and due to some
Speaker 1: kind of a miscommunication, they all got there a week early.
Speaker 1: They showed up at the school and the only person
Speaker 1: there was the janitor, who gave them a tour of
Speaker 1: the building and some tips about the unwritten rules of
Speaker 1: etiquette among the students, like as first years, they should
Speaker 1: not take the good seats in the operating theater when
Speaker 1: they were watching procedures. Williams really struggled to pay for
Speaker 1: medical school. He lived with a widowed family friend known
Speaker 1: as missus John Jones. Her late husband had been a
Speaker 1: friend of his late father. This was less expensive than
Speaker 1: other housing options, but he still didn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of money. He cut hair and he played music, but
Speaker 1: medical school required most of his time and attention. He
Speaker 1: wrote to his mother for help, and she said she
Speaker 1: didn't have any money to give him, but that she
Speaker 1: had made some loans to other people. She suggested that
Speaker 1: he try to collect on their notes, which immediately proved
Speaker 1: to be impossible, and then he wound up taking loans
Speaker 1: from other people, including his former mentor Harry Anderson. While
Speaker 1: Williams was in medical school, an outbreak of smallpox struck
Speaker 1: the city of Chicago. Edward Jenner had started really publicizing
Speaker 1: the smallpox vaccine more than eighty years before this, but
Speaker 1: vaccination hadn't completely become a routine practice yet. As a
Speaker 1: medical student working with patients, Williams was exposed and contracted
Speaker 1: smallpox himself. He had some scars alongside his nose afterward,
Speaker 1: but beyond that he recovered. While Williams was a student,
Speaker 1: the medical school became connected to Saint Luke's Hospital, and
Speaker 1: he started doing some clinical work there. The hospital was
Speaker 1: employing Joseph Lister's techniques for antiseptic surgery, which Lister had
Speaker 1: started publishing in the late eighteen sixties. This included using
Speaker 1: carbolic acid to kill pathogens on instruments and services and
Speaker 1: on surgeon's hands, as well as a carbolic acid spray
Speaker 1: to kill pathogens in the air around the patient. This
Speaker 1: was also fairly early in the development of modern anesthesia.
Speaker 1: While alcohol, opium, and other substances had been used earlier
Speaker 1: on in history, gases like nitrous oxide, t ether, and
Speaker 1: chloroform had come into use in the mid nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: The methods of delivering these gases weren't always efficient, though,
Speaker 1: so the operating theater could be filled with a haze
Speaker 1: of carbolic acid and the gas used to anesthetize the patient.
Speaker 2: Williams graduated from medical school in eighteen eighty three. Initially,
Speaker 2: he planned to move closer to where his mother was living,
Speaker 2: so he applied for a license to practice medicine in Washington,
Speaker 2: d c. But then he changed his mind and he
Speaker 2: decided to stay in Chicago, so he applied for a
Speaker 2: license to practice in Illinois as well. He established his
Speaker 2: own practice, and he started working to pay back all
Speaker 2: the money he had borrowed to go to medical school.
Speaker 3: Which he was able to do, but it was.
Speaker 2: Difficult since the United States was in the middle of
Speaker 2: a huge economic downturn.
Speaker 1: He also built a life for himself in the city.
Speaker 1: He lived and practiced medicine in a multiracial neighborhood and
Speaker 1: taught as an anatomy demonstrator at Chicago Medical College. He
Speaker 1: enjoyed opera and attended All Souls Unitarian Church. He also
Speaker 1: joined a Republican organization called the Hamilton Club, where he
Speaker 1: was one of just a few black members. While he
Speaker 1: was still in school, the people in his community had
Speaker 1: gotten to know him as Dan, not as doctor Williams,
Speaker 1: and some of them really struggled to start referring to
Speaker 1: him in this more formal way, So before long he
Speaker 1: was just known as doctor Dan. We'll talk about doctor
Speaker 1: Dan's early medical career. After a sponsor break, after finishing
Speaker 1: medical school, Daniel Hale Williams was hired as part of
Speaker 1: the staff at south Side Dispensary. The dispensaries of this
Speaker 1: era were walk in clinics that were meant for people
Speaker 1: who couldn't afford to see a private doctor. They were
Speaker 1: often funded by churches and charitable organizations, or sometimes they
Speaker 1: were part of the hands on training for medical students.
Speaker 1: He was able to do very minor outpatient surgical procedures
Speaker 1: at the dispensary, but he really wanted to be able
Speaker 1: to do surgeries that were more involved than that. None
Speaker 1: of the hospitals in Chicago would grant surgical privileges to
Speaker 1: a black doctor, though, so he did these surgeries in
Speaker 1: his patients' homes. He followed antiseptic procedures as much as
Speaker 1: he could in a home environment, including doing things like
Speaker 1: baking the patient's bedsheets in the oven to use them
Speaker 1: as surgical drapes. As he got himself established as a
Speaker 1: doctor and surgeon, Williams became the first black surgeon to
Speaker 1: be hired by the City Railway Company, and in eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine he accepted an unpaid two year appointment to
Speaker 1: the Illinois State Board of Health. His appointment it was
Speaker 1: renewed two years later, but ended after it wasn't renewed
Speaker 1: a third time following the election of a new governor.
Speaker 1: During these years, Williams fell in love with a woman
Speaker 1: named Kitty May Black, who had a similar multi racial
Speaker 1: ancestry to his own, but since she had very light skin,
Speaker 1: her parents really wanted hur to marry someone white, and
Speaker 1: they arranged for her to marry a white lawyer. Williams
Speaker 1: was really heartbroken about this, and even more so after
Speaker 1: she died of a sudden illness a few years later,
Speaker 1: with her friends saying it had not seemed like she
Speaker 1: wanted to survive. After this, Williams really threw himself into
Speaker 1: his work. While Williams had not been kept out of
Speaker 1: medical school because of his race, at this point, there
Speaker 1: were no nursing schools in Chicago that were accepting black students.
Speaker 1: In December of eighteen ninety, the Reverend Lewis Reynolds, pastor
Speaker 1: of Saint Stephen's African Methodist Church, a pro coached Williams
Speaker 1: on behalf of his sister, Emma. Emma had come to
Speaker 1: Chicago to live with her brother and to learn to
Speaker 1: be a nurse, but every nursing school in the city
Speaker 1: had turned her down because she was black.
Speaker 2: This was still really early in the development of nursing
Speaker 2: as a professionalized field. The first nursing school in the
Speaker 2: United States had been established less than twenty years before this,
Speaker 2: in eighteen seventy two. Before this, people who worked as
Speaker 2: nurses had often been through some kind of informal or
Speaker 2: on the job training, or sometimes they were people who
Speaker 2: were helping to take care of the sick and injured
Speaker 2: without really a lot of training or education in that
Speaker 2: at all. A lot of the nurses that were working
Speaker 2: were really dedicated and knowledgeable. But the field of medicine
Speaker 2: was rapidly becoming a lot more complex. There were all
Speaker 2: kinds of new developments in things like infection control, anesthesia,
Speaker 2: and surgery, so hospitals and medical practices were also seeing
Speaker 2: a need for nurses that had a more formal, broader education.
Speaker 1: Williams had patients who were recovering from surgery at home
Speaker 1: or living at home with chronic or progressive conditions, and
Speaker 1: they needed nurses, and those nurses needed to have specific skills.
Speaker 1: He also knew that some of his black patients really
Speaker 1: would not be comfortable in the care of a white nurse,
Speaker 1: that they didn't know if he could even find a
Speaker 1: white nurse willing to do the job. So simultaneously, he
Speaker 1: thought no one should be denied in education in nursing
Speaker 1: because of their race, and that there was a need
Speaker 1: for black nurses specifically, and another need was running alongside
Speaker 1: that one. There was only one hospital in Chicago that
Speaker 1: would admit black patients. That was Cook County Hospital on
Speaker 1: the west side. Williams was living and working on the
Speaker 1: city's south side, and the black members of his community
Speaker 1: just didn't have a hospital nearby that they could go to.
Speaker 1: He realized that he could try to fill all of
Speaker 1: these gaps at once, establishing a hospital that would accept
Speaker 1: patients regardless of their race, which would also be a
Speaker 1: place to train black nurses, and it would be a
Speaker 1: place where black doctors and surgeons could work since they
Speaker 1: were being barred from existing hospitals because of their race
Speaker 1: as well. With the help of churches and community organizations,
Speaker 1: Williams and the Reverend Reynolds started raising money. People held
Speaker 1: bake sales and also donated furniture and other items from
Speaker 1: their own homes for use in the hospital. Several white
Speaker 1: industrialists became major financial backers, including George Pullman and Cyrus McCormick.
Speaker 1: This wasn't just about philanthropy, but also making sure their
Speaker 1: black employees had access to medical care so that they
Speaker 1: could recover from ill lists and injuries and get back
Speaker 1: to work. Armor Meat Packing Company provided the down payment
Speaker 1: for the hospital building. Williams faced some fierce disagreement from
Speaker 1: people who did not support his plans to open a hospital,
Speaker 1: and a lot of that disagreement came from within the
Speaker 1: black community. His critics argued that he was reinforcing racial
Speaker 1: segregation at a time when Chicago was becoming increasingly racially segregated.
Speaker 1: They thought he should instead be focused on fighting segregation
Speaker 1: at the hospitals and nursing schools that already existed instead.
Speaker 1: In spite of that opposition, articles of incorporation were filed
Speaker 1: for a twelve bed facility called Provident Hospital and Training
Speaker 1: School Association on January twenty third, eighteen ninety one, and
Speaker 1: staffing turned out to be a challenge. The nursing program
Speaker 1: was overwhelmed with one hundred and seventy five applications for
Speaker 1: its eighteen month training program, but only seven of them
Speaker 1: were accepted, including Emma Reynolds. Williams wanted applicants who were
Speaker 1: quote fairly educated, as well as being prompt, neat, and organized.
Speaker 1: They had to have a gentle voice and a patient temper,
Speaker 1: and he felt that a lot of the applicants just
Speaker 1: did not meet those criteria, and because black doctors and
Speaker 1: surgeons had been excluded from a lot of medical programs
Speaker 1: and from working at other hospitals, he also had trouble
Speaker 1: finding top tier doctors and surgeons who were also black.
Speaker 2: The hospital did open its doors, though, and it was
Speaker 2: integrated for both patients and staff. The surgical ward was
Speaker 2: always very busy, treating a lot of people who worked
Speaker 2: in Chicago's stockyards and railroads who had been injured on
Speaker 2: the job. The hospital and the nursing school both did
Speaker 2: really well, although they did face some serious financial issues
Speaker 2: during the Panic of eighteen ninety three. Pent the hospitals
Speaker 2: survived this financial crisis, largely thanks to Frederick Douglas, who
Speaker 2: raised money for it during the Chicago World's Fair. On
Speaker 2: July ninth, eighteen ninety three, a man named James Cornish
Speaker 2: was stabbed in a fight and brought to Provident Hospital.
Speaker 2: They didn't have the knife and he couldn't really describe it,
Speaker 2: and X rays and other imaging techniques had not been
Speaker 2: invented yet, so it wasn't really clear exactly how deep
Speaker 2: the wound was from the outside, though it looked relatively shallow.
Speaker 2: Cornish was admitted for observation, and overnight he started experiencing
Speaker 2: increasing pain and showing signs of shock. Williams thought that
Speaker 2: he might be bleeding internally or having some other more
Speaker 2: serious issue, and the only way to tell was to
Speaker 2: open his chest to look. Williams invited six surgeons to
Speaker 2: observe this, four of them white and two of them black.
Speaker 2: Williams made an incision between Cornish's ribs, essentially extending the
Speaker 2: edges of the stab wound. Then he lifted the intercostal
Speaker 2: cartilage like a trap door to see what was underneath.
Speaker 2: He could see that the knife had damaged the left
Speaker 2: internal memory artery, it had also penetrated through the pericardium
Speaker 2: that's the sack that surrounds and protects the heart, and
Speaker 2: into the heart muscle itself. First, Williams repaired the damage
Speaker 2: to that artery. Then he irrigated the wounds to the
Speaker 2: pericardium and heart with saline. The heart muscle wasn't hemorrhaging,
Speaker 2: and he left that part of the injury alone. He
Speaker 2: used forceps to hold the damaged edges of the pericardium
Speaker 2: and he sutured them together, and once he had done that,
Speaker 2: he closed all of his incisions. Williams did all of
Speaker 2: this without a lot of the tools that would be
Speaker 2: used for this kind of surgery today. In addition to
Speaker 2: the lack of X ray and other imaging, antibiotics and
Speaker 2: anticoagulants had not been invented yet. Neither had rib spreaders
Speaker 2: or tools for keeping a patient's airway open while they
Speaker 2: were anesthetized. Obviously, neither had heart bypass machines that allow
Speaker 2: surgeons to stop a person's heart during surgery today. So
Speaker 2: Williams was doing this surgery as the heart was beating
Speaker 2: and the edges of the torn pericardium were continually fluttering.
Speaker 2: In addition to carrying out this procedure on a beating
Speaker 2: heart with very basic tools, Williams was also doing something
Speaker 2: that most of the surgical community thought was impossible. Williams
Speaker 2: had read a paper that had theorized about a surgical
Speaker 2: repair to the pericardium while he was in medical school,
Speaker 2: but that surgeon had not actually tried to perform one. Really,
Speaker 2: most surgeons in Europe and North America believed that even
Speaker 2: trying to explore a beating heart was likely to just
Speaker 2: kill the patient. German surgeon Theodore bill Roth, who is
Speaker 2: sometimes called the founder of abdominal surgery, was quoted as saying, quote,
Speaker 2: any surgeon who would attempt to suture a wound of
Speaker 2: the heart is not worthy of the serious consideration of
Speaker 2: his colleagues. The common course of treatment for an injury
Speaker 2: like Cornish's was cold rest and opium, and not surgery.
Speaker 1: Cornish survived this surgery. A few days later, The Chicago
Speaker 1: Daily inter Ocean reported on it, describing it as a
Speaker 1: marvelous surgical operation and an astonishing feat. Twenty one days
Speaker 1: into Cornish's recovery, he developed cardiac tampanaud or, a build
Speaker 1: up of fluid in his pericardium, and Williams performed another
Speaker 1: procedure to remove it through a needle. He did know
Speaker 1: about earlier attempts to remove excess fluid from the pericardium,
Speaker 1: although without today's imaging technologies that was extremely risky. Cornish
Speaker 1: was discharged from the hospital after fifty one days. Williams
Speaker 1: searched through medical literature to see if he could find
Speaker 1: evidence of another surgeon having done something similar, and he
Speaker 1: came up with nothing. After following up with Cornish three
Speaker 1: years later and confirming that he was alive and in
Speaker 1: good health, Williams wrote up a paper on the surgery,
Speaker 1: and that was published in the Medical Record in eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety seven. Although it was initially hailed as a first,
Speaker 1: it was later discovered that doctor Henry Dalton had published
Speaker 1: on a similar procedure in the Annals of Surgery in
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety one, and there.
Speaker 2: Were also some other even earlier examples of similar procedures.
Speaker 2: By the time his paper was published, Williams had moved
Speaker 2: on from Provident Hospital, and we'll get to that after
Speaker 2: a sponsor break. Not long after his surgery on James Cornish,
Speaker 2: Daniel Hale Williams was appointed to the position of surgeon
Speaker 2: in chief at Freedman's Hospital in Washington, d C. The
Speaker 2: federal government had established Freedman's Hospital in eighteen sixty two,
Speaker 2: and in eighteen sixty eight it had also become a
Speaker 2: teaching hospital for Howard University Medical School. As chief surgeon,
Speaker 2: that would also make Williams a professor of surgery at Howard.
Speaker 2: Williams was really reluctant to leave Provident Hospital, but he
Speaker 2: apparently changed his mind after a conversation with Secretary of
Speaker 2: State Walter Q.
Speaker 3: Gresham.
Speaker 2: Gresham told him quote, if it's service to your race,
Speaker 2: you're thinking of Freedman's needs, you more than Provident from
Speaker 2: all I hear. William's start date was unfortunately delayed by
Speaker 2: an accident. While out quail hunting, he was shot in
Speaker 2: the foot. He developed an infection, and for a while
Speaker 2: it looked like his leg might have to be amputated.
Speaker 2: Once Williams was well enough to return to work, he
Speaker 2: was months later than planned and really still recovering. He
Speaker 2: had also been targeted by a smear campaign by another surgeon,
Speaker 2: George Cleveland Hall, who seems to have had a grudge
Speaker 2: against Williams after Williams didn't back him for an appointment
Speaker 2: at Provident Hospital. William's predecessor at Friedman's Hospital was Charles
Speaker 2: Burley Purvis, who had been the hospital's surgeon in Chards
Speaker 2: for over a decade. Purvis had also served in the
Speaker 2: Union Army during the Civil War and had been one
Speaker 2: of the founders of Howard Medical School. But a lot
Speaker 2: had changed in the world of medicine over all those years,
Speaker 2: and William's perception was that Purvis and the hospital had
Speaker 2: just not kept up with those changes. Purvis later alleged
Speaker 2: that he had been replaced because of politics.
Speaker 1: When Williams started, Freedman's Hospital was organized into three general wards,
Speaker 1: one for men, one for women, and one for.
Speaker 3: Labor and delivery.
Speaker 1: The nursing staff was mostly made up of people who
Speaker 1: had not been through formal training, meaning they also didn't
Speaker 1: have the kind of experience or skills that Williams thought
Speaker 1: was necessary. He also found the hospital's surgical mortality rate
Speaker 1: of almost ten percent to be unacceptable.
Speaker 2: Williams reorganized the hospital into departments. I used all the
Speaker 2: modern terms for these departments today. They were general medicine, surgery, gynecology, obstetrics, dermatology, urology,
Speaker 2: and pulmonology. He also established an ambulance service, which was
Speaker 2: essentially a delivery wagon that could bring patients to the hospital.
Speaker 2: He replaced the nursing staff and updated surgical techniques and
Speaker 2: antiseptic procedures. In addition to recruiting new medical and surgical staff,
Speaker 2: he also granted surgical privileges to some of the area's
Speaker 2: best surgeons. Soon, the surgical mortality rate at the hospital
Speaker 2: had dropped to one point five percent. Williams also wanted
Speaker 2: Freedman's Hospital to be seen as a highly respected and
Speaker 2: cutting edge facility, which meant getting the public to trust
Speaker 2: the abilities of black surgeons. To that end, he offered
Speaker 2: lectures and demonstrations at the hospital, including opportunities for the
Speaker 2: public to observe surgical procedures in the operating theater. Williams
Speaker 2: resigned from Freedman's Hospital in eighteen ninety eight after about
Speaker 2: five years. The hospital was still under the control of
Speaker 2: the Department of the Interior, and that meant that it
Speaker 2: was often in the crosshairs of various political squabbles. An
Speaker 2: investigation into charitable institutions in Washington, d C. Including the
Speaker 2: hospital had also started in eighteen ninety six, and Purvis
Speaker 2: hadn't been trying to get reinstated to his position. Williams
Speaker 2: was accused of financial mismanagement, but the reason he gave
Speaker 2: for leaving was that he was just tired of all
Speaker 2: the politics. That same year, at the age of forty two,
Speaker 2: Williams married thirty nine year old Alice Johnson, who was
Speaker 2: the daughter of American artist Moses jacob Ezekiel, who was
Speaker 2: Jewish and a formerly enslaved woman. Alice was a teacher
Speaker 2: and a graduate of Howard University who had remained single
Speaker 2: after an ugly breakup when she was much younger. She
Speaker 2: didn't want to wear white for her wedding because her
Speaker 2: mother had recently died, so instead she wore a navy
Speaker 2: blue suit. Dan's friend Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote a poem
Speaker 2: to commemorate his marriage, titled to Dan. That poem started
Speaker 2: step me now a bridal measure, work, give way to
Speaker 2: love and leisure. Hearts be free, and hearts be gay.
Speaker 2: Doctor Dan Doth wed today. They moved back to Chicago,
Speaker 2: and they had one child together, who sadly died at birth.
Speaker 2: A congressional report about Friedman's Hospital was released after Dan
Speaker 2: and Alice had gotten married, and it detailed a lot
Speaker 2: of issues at the hospital. A lot of those issues, though,
Speaker 2: were ones that Williams had reported to the Department of
Speaker 2: the Interior but which had not been dealt with. The
Speaker 2: report recommended huge cuts to the staff, including to the
Speaker 2: nursing staff, and it described Howard Medical School as quote
Speaker 2: encroaching on the hospital.
Speaker 1: There were some newspapers that defended Williams after this report
Speaker 1: was released, and others that attacked him. He was questioned
Speaker 1: about his work, including a lot of questions about hospital spending.
Speaker 1: This included very specific questions about transactions that had happened
Speaker 1: years before the sale of two cameras that he said
Speaker 1: were his personal property but that were implied to have
Speaker 1: really belonged to the government, and and how much was
Speaker 1: spent on various equipment that was both expensive and useless
Speaker 1: if it was damaged or worn. This has to have
Speaker 1: been frustrating, considering that he brought a lot of his
Speaker 1: own equipment with him when he started working at the
Speaker 1: hospital because the hospital didn't have it, and a lot
Speaker 1: of that equipment he never got back. Yeah, some of
Speaker 1: these questions were like questions about purchases of needles from
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety four or something, and he was like, how
Speaker 1: do you expect me to know this? There's a stationary invoice.
Speaker 2: Back in Chicago, Williams went back to working at Provident Hospital,
Speaker 2: which had moved to a new sixty five bed location.
Speaker 2: George Cleveland Hall was now on the board there, and
Speaker 2: there continued to be a lot of friction between him
Speaker 2: and Williams. Williams also started writing to Booker T. Washington
Speaker 2: trying to get a teaching hospital established at the Tuskegee
Speaker 2: Institute in Alabama. The Tuskegee Institute had been founded in
Speaker 2: eighteen eighty one.
Speaker 3: Booker T.
Speaker 2: Washington seems to have thought a hospital would be taking
Speaker 2: on too much, too fast and put the institute at risk,
Speaker 2: but Williams thought there was an obvious need for one.
Speaker 2: In addition to thinking it was critical to training doctors,
Speaker 2: he had seen black patients who had come all the
Speaker 2: way from Alabama trying to get access to medical care.
Speaker 2: Washington eventually stopped answering Williams letters, and Williams later learned
Speaker 2: that Washington had also been getting a lot of letters
Speaker 2: from George Cleveland Hall. There seems to just have been
Speaker 2: a lot of animosity between the two of them. In
Speaker 2: eighteen ninety nine, George Hubbard, president and dean of Mahary
Speaker 2: Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, contacted Williams about conducting surgical
Speaker 2: clinics at the college. Maharry is a historically black medical
Speaker 2: school founded in eighteen seventy six, but at the time
Speaker 2: it wasn't connected to a teaching hospital. Williams's first clinic
Speaker 2: was held in a cramped room, and afterward he stressed
Speaker 2: that the only way for doctors insurgeons to really excel,
Speaker 2: or even to be truly ready to practice medicine and
Speaker 2: surgery was to have the opportunity for hands on instruction
Speaker 2: and practice at a teaching hospital. He was quoted as saying,
Speaker 2: we can't sit any longer idly and inanely deploring the
Speaker 2: existing conditions. We must start our own hospitals and training schools.
Speaker 2: In January of nineteen hundred, Williams returned to Nashville to
Speaker 2: give a lecture on this subject at the Phyllis Wheetlee Club.
Speaker 2: He advocated for every city in the South with a
Speaker 2: population of more than ten thousand black people to have
Speaker 2: its own black hospital with an attached nursing training school.
Speaker 2: This would provide hospitals that would accept black patients and
Speaker 2: places for black doctors and surgeons to work. He talked
Speaker 2: about how to get such a hospital started by renting
Speaker 2: a house with ten or twelve rooms, preferably with a basement,
Speaker 2: furnishing it modestly so that it would be easy to clean,
Speaker 2: and hiring a level headed graduate nurse to act as
Speaker 2: the superintendent, and then appointing the best physicians that could
Speaker 2: be found to work there. Then he passed on something
Speaker 2: Frederick Douglass had written to him in a letter in
Speaker 2: eighteen ninety four, quote, the only way you can succeed
Speaker 2: is to override the obstacles in your path. Hope will
Speaker 2: be of no avail by the power that is within you.
Speaker 2: Do what you hope to do. A teaching hospital was
Speaker 2: established in Nashville that September. Williams continued to hold his
Speaker 2: annual surgical clinics there and they were described as the
Speaker 2: highlight of every year for the medical students. He was
Speaker 2: paid only a travel stipend, and he donated that.
Speaker 3: Back to Mahary.
Speaker 2: A lot of the time he was doing surgeries that
Speaker 2: the students really didn't have other opportunities to see. They
Speaker 2: were often very complicated or uncommon procedures. He was known
Speaker 2: for operating incredibly skillfully and also very quickly given the
Speaker 2: limitations of general anesthesia at the time. He was also
Speaker 2: continually pushing himself as a surgeon, and he was also
Speaker 2: breaking new ground in the field. In nineteen oh two,
Speaker 2: he became one of the first surgeons to successfully repair
Speaker 2: a traumatic hemorrhage in a spleen. At the time, it
Speaker 2: was more common to remove the spleen than to try
Speaker 2: to repair it. There had been at least one successful
Speaker 2: surgical spleen repair before this, but Williams did not know
Speaker 2: about it. In nineteen twelve, while he was still working
Speaker 2: at Provident Hospital, Williams also became associate attending surgeon at
Speaker 2: Saint Luke's Hospital in Chicago, but the following year he
Speaker 2: resigned from Provident. There are kind of multiple conflicting stories
Speaker 2: about why what is that Providence bore passed a policy
Speaker 2: that surgeons who worked at Provident could only work at Provident.
Speaker 2: That was a policy that was probably written to target Williams,
Speaker 2: and it might also have been connected to the ongoing
Speaker 2: animosity with George Cleveland Hall. It's also possible that Williams
Speaker 2: felt like Provident was no longer really aligned with his
Speaker 2: original vision for it. He had established it in order
Speaker 2: to train black nurses and to provide a place that
Speaker 2: would accept black patients and where black doctors could work.
Speaker 2: He had also helped to establish the National Medical Association
Speaker 2: since black doctors were being excluded from the American Medical Association,
Speaker 2: but he had wanted Provident to specifically be integrated and
Speaker 2: to provide connections between the white and black medical communities
Speaker 2: in Chicago. Over time, Providence staff had become less and
Speaker 2: less integrated and more predominantly black, and that was part
Speaker 2: of an increasing pattern of racial segregation in Chicago more generally.
Speaker 2: Williams kept working at Saint Luke's as well as teaching
Speaker 2: and consulting. Former students and colleagues would write to him
Speaker 2: for help and advice, and sometimes when his former students'
Speaker 2: patients did not have access to a hospital that would
Speaker 2: admit them, he would still perform surgery in their homes.
Speaker 2: He also continued to advocate for the establishment of black
Speaker 2: owned hospitals that would benefit black patients and doctors alike.
Speaker 2: He helped establish at least forty hospitals that were open
Speaker 2: to black patients. In nineteen thirteen, Williams also became the
Speaker 2: only black founding member of the American College of Surgeons,
Speaker 2: which got its second black member twenty one years later.
Speaker 2: Dan's wife, Alice, developed Parkinson's disease and died in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty four. They were married until her death, but their
Speaker 2: relationship had become more strained after d had an affair
Speaker 2: years before. Daniel Hale Williams moved to northern Michigan. In
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty six, he was partially paralyzed after a stroke.
Speaker 2: He died on August fourth, nineteen thirty one, at the
Speaker 2: age of seventy five, and he was buried in Chicago's
Speaker 2: Graceland Cemetery. He had become known as an advocate for
Speaker 2: medical and nursing training and medical care for black people,
Speaker 2: and for being an incredibly talented surgeon who charged people
Speaker 2: what they could afford to pay him. He took risks,
Speaker 2: and he attempted surgeries that he didn't know of anybody
Speaker 2: else trying before. And he had a reputation for going
Speaker 2: to great links to try to treat people's limbs rather
Speaker 2: than amputating them. But he also did not do surgeries
Speaker 2: if he knew that they would not be successful, and
Speaker 2: he didn't give people treatments that he didn't think they needed.
Speaker 2: If he decided someone was too sick or too badly
Speaker 2: injured to survive a surgery, he would stay with them
Speaker 2: until they died. In the words of biographer Helen Buckler, quote,
Speaker 2: it was as though in the sickroom, and only in
Speaker 2: the sickroom, could doctor Dan be a whole man, a
Speaker 2: man of feeling as well as a man of science
Speaker 2: and intellect. Here emotions buried deep by pride and circumstance
Speaker 2: were set free. Provident Hospital moved into a much bigger
Speaker 2: building on East fifty first Street in nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 2: This was followed by construction of an outpatient building, and
Speaker 2: two apartment buildings were purchased as housing for nursing students.
Speaker 2: But the hospital faced periods of financial struggle, especially in
Speaker 2: times of more widespread economic downturns. This included serious financial
Speaker 2: problems in the nineteen eighties, and the hospital was closed
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty seven. It was acquired by the Cook
Speaker 2: County Board of Commissioners in nineteen ninety one and reopened
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety three. It is now Provident Hospital of
Speaker 2: Cook County in Chicago and is affiliated with Loyola University's
Speaker 2: Stritch School of Medicine. Most of the hospitals that were
Speaker 2: established during the Black Hospital movement closed or merged with
Speaker 2: other hospitals after the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: four and the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid the following year.
Speaker 2: Hospitals accepting Medicare and Medicaid funding were required to comply
Speaker 2: with the Civil Rights Acts outlawing of racial discrimination. This
Speaker 2: was a huge part of desegregating the medical system. Desegregation
Speaker 2: gave black patients access to care that they might not
Speaker 2: have been able to access otherwise, but the loss of
Speaker 2: these hospitals could also be devastating to the communities where
Speaker 2: they had been operating. Many of them were major employers
Speaker 2: in their neighborhoods and also sources of civic pride and
Speaker 2: just major community resources. And of course, the desegregation of
Speaker 2: the medical system in the US did not allow eliminate
Speaker 2: medical racism, and there are ongoing disparities and access to
Speaker 2: medical care and outcomes across a lot of the country
Speaker 2: today and that is Daniel Hale Williams.
Speaker 1: Do you also have some listener mail for us?
Speaker 3: I do have listener mail.
Speaker 2: This is from Caitlin who wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly.
Speaker 2: I'm always delighted by the Unearthed episodes and this set
Speaker 2: with no exception. I especially appreciated the let's recreate this
Speaker 2: artifact from antiquity to see if we can use it
Speaker 2: as hypothesized item variety. How do I get a job
Speaker 2: checking a javelin from various heights on a scissor lift.
Speaker 2: I'm a grad student who teaches undergrads as part of
Speaker 2: my program, and this semester, I'm leading a historical research
Speaker 2: methodology course where we're showing students how to do archival
Speaker 2: research by working on a group project. Coincidentally, the day
Speaker 2: before the first class, an interstate construction project turned up
Speaker 2: an archaeologically significant find, a series of privy pits their
Speaker 2: thought to date to the construction of the Erie Canal.
Speaker 2: The archaeologist interviewed for the article I read was so
Speaker 2: incredibly excited about the chance to learn from the unearthed
Speaker 2: artifacts that had been rescued before the construction resumed. I
Speaker 2: shared this with my students as an example of how
Speaker 2: local history can be. I waxed rhapsodic about the potential
Speaker 2: discoveries for a few moments before one of my students
Speaker 2: raised his hand and said, wait, isn't a privy just
Speaker 2: a toilet? What's important about poop? Bless his heart, he
Speaker 2: didn't know how deep my repertoire of factoids and tidbits
Speaker 2: on Latrine's privy, septic systems, dumps, and so on is.
Speaker 2: Thanks Unearthed, Thank you as always for all you do.
Speaker 2: I look forward to the new episodes every week and
Speaker 2: am constantly re listening to favorites from the back catalog.
Speaker 3: Best Caitlin.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much Caitlin for this email, and thank
Speaker 2: you for your past emails. Caitlin is another frequent correspondent,
Speaker 2: and I loved this bit about the privies. The discoveries
Speaker 2: I thought of first connected to the privies were the
Speaker 2: ones that we've talked about that are all about how
Speaker 2: the Roman Empire was full of parasites, and wherever the
Speaker 2: Romans went, they took the parasites with the riddled with Romans.
Speaker 2: I also think in earlier years of doing Unearthed, we
Speaker 2: had a lot of discoveries that came from middens which
Speaker 2: were basically trash dumps. And I don't think I can
Speaker 2: remember a very recent midden discovery. Maybe there has been,
Speaker 2: I don't know, but anyway, thank you again, Caitlin for
Speaker 2: this email. If you would like to send us a
Speaker 2: note about this or any other podcast where at history
Speaker 2: podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to
Speaker 2: our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you'd
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Speaker 3: Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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