This Day in African-American History (Dr. Williams Performs Open-Heart Surgery)

July 10, 1893—James Cornish, a 24-year-old African-American stabbed in a fight, was experiencing a rapid decline in his condition when the attending surgeon at Chicago’s Provident Hospital and Medical Center, Daniel Hale Williams, decided to open him up and see if something could be done before the patient bled to death internally. Williams’ solution—suture the pericardium (the fluid sac surrounding the myocardium), while leaving the heart muscle to heal by itself—was daring and pioneered a whole new medical field.

Americans are obsessed with anything that’s first or most. It’s a little bit like the Olympics—nobody cares who came in second. Over the years, it has become common to see many reference sources in hard copy or online credit Dr. Williams with performing the first open-heart surgery.

Well, to some extent that depends on how you define “open-heart surgery.” If you see it as suturing a heart wound itself, then credit for that would properly go to Ludwig Rehn of Germany, who did so in 1896. Henry C. Dalton appears to have performed an operation similar to Williams two years before.

In another sense, it doesn’t matter. Williams had performed an unbelievably risky operation—without the benefit, let it be noted, of any X-ray machine—and he had done so in an interracial hospital that he himself had founded because opportunities for African-American physicians and nurses were so limited: Provident Hospital of Chicago.

In a time when history is being forgotten, let it also be recorded that Williams’ yeoman service was being done when African-Americans needed such pioneers more than ever, both because of their swelling presence in Chicago (where their population increased from 3,700 in 1870 to nearly 10 times that—30,000—in 1900) and because of the opportunities dwindling nationally during the desperate post-Reconstruction period.