Profile · Janesville, Wisconsin
Daniel Hale Williams
Surgeon who founded Provident Hospital; raised and apprenticed in Janesville as a teenager before Chicago Medical College
$8,000
Daniel Hale Williams is remembered for founding Chicago’s interracial Provident Hospital and for a celebrated 1893 pericardium repair—popularly called the first successful heart surgery—after teenage years in Janesville that turned a barber into a surgeon’s apprentice. Rock County still claims the shop-and-academy stretch, and it should. He was born January 18, 1858—some files say 1856—in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. After his father died he was apprenticed to a Baltimore shoemaker, ran, and worked west. In Janesville he took a chair at Charles Henry “Harry” Anderson’s Tonsorial Parlor and Bathing Rooms, finished school at Haire’s Classical Academy, sang tenor, and played the bass fiddle in Anderson’s orchestra. A customer, Orrin Guernsey, opened his library. Dr. Henry Palmer, Wisconsin’s former surgeon general, took him as apprentice from about 1878 to 1880. Northwestern’s Chicago Medical College gave him an M.D. in 1883. In 1891 he founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, interracial on purpose, with a nursing school that would admit Black women—Emma Reynolds, turned away from white nursing schools, was in the first class. On July 9–10, 1893, he opened the chest of James Cornish, stabbed in a fight, sutured the pericardium without transfusion or penicillin, and watched the man walk out weeks later; Cornish lived for decades. Henry Dalton in St. Louis had sutured a pericardium in 1891, unpublished; Williams published in the Medical Record in 1897. He later ran Freedmen’s Hospital under Cleveland, helped found the National Medical Association, and died at Idlewild, Michigan, on August 4, 1931. The Janesville tie is teenage years and training, not birth.