Daniel Hale Williams

Williams, Daniel Hale (1856–1931), surgeon and educator, pioneer in both surgical technique and race relations.Born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, Williams possessed a mixed racial ancestry, with Caucasian, Native American, and African‐American antecedents on both sides of his family. Williams considered himself a “Negro,” and it was as a Negro that he moved to Janesville, Wisconsin, where at the age of seventeen he worked as a barber while attending a local academy and later reading law at night. Deciding against a career in law, he apprenticed with a local physician and then attended Chicago Medical College.

Williams evinced great skill as a surgeon and clinician. His most noteworthy contribution to medical practice came in 1893, when he performed the first successful open‐heart surgery. He helped found both the American College of Surgeons and the National Medical Association (1895), the black equivalent of the the all‐white American Medical Association. He also was the prime mover behind the Provident Hospital and Training School in Chicago, the nation's first interracial hospital, founded in 1891.

Williams achieved renown as an educator, both at Provident Hospital and at Freedmen's Hospital, an institution attached to Howard University in Washington, D.C. Appointed chief surgeon at Freedmen's in the mid‐1890s, William worked to improve its clinical program. Although his later years were mired in political controversy, Williams remains a major figure in African‐American medicine and in American medical history.
See also African Americans; Heart Disease; Hospitals; Medicine: From the 1870s to 1945; Surgery.

Bibliography

Helen Buckler , Daniel Hale Williams: Negro Surgeon, 1968.
Vanessa Northington Gamble , The Provident Hospital Project: An Experiment in Race Relations and Medical Education, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 65 (1991): 457–75.

Robert Oliver

Daniel Hale Williams 1858-1931, American surgeon, b. Hollidaysburg, Pa., M.D. Northwestern Univ., 1883. As surgeon of the South Side Dispensary in Chicago (1884-91), he became keenly aware of the lack of facilities for training African Americans like himself as doctors and nurses. As a result he organized the Provident Hospital, the first black hospital in the United States. In 1893, Williams performed the first successful closure of a wound of the heart and pericardium. In the same year President Cleveland appointed him surgeon in chief of Freedmen's Hospital, Washington, D.C., and during his five-year tenure there he reorganized the hospital and provided a training school for African American nurses. From 1899 until his death he was professor of clinical surgery at Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tenn.

Daniels, William (b. 1927), character actor. The loud, strident supporting player was born in Brooklyn, educated at Northwestern, and trained with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio before making his New York debut in 1943 as one of the sons in Life with Father. Daniels was involved with important productions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as a replacement for the bitter Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (1958) and originating the role of Peter in the first American production of The Zoo Story (1960). He also shone as the narrow‐minded social worker Albert in A Thousand Clowns (1962), the over‐practical fiancé Warren in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965), and most memorably as the quarrelsome delegate John Adams in 1776 (1969).