Today in History: A Black Surgeon Performs The First Successful Open-Heart Surgery In America
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By James Janega, Chicago Tribune
The first successful open-heart surgery took place on Chicago’s South Side on July 9, 1893. The patient was James Cornish, a young man with a knife wound to the chest from a barroom brawl. The surgeon, who had gone into medicine because he disliked earlier work as a shoemaker’s apprentice, was Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.
The surgery took place in Provident Hospital, the city’s first interracial hospital, which Williams helped to found. Both patient and surgeon were African-American.
Medical textbooks of the time said that operating on a human heart was too dangerous, and there was no precedent for opening the chest, longtime Tribune science and medical reporter Ronald Kotulak wrote more than a century later.
Despite lacking X-rays, antibiotics, adequate anesthesia or other tools of modern surgery, Williams stepped in.
Learn more about Williams’ accomplishment.
Many Black achievements have been erased from history while the myth of race persists.
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