biography
| name: |
Williams, Daniel Hale
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1858–1931)
|
| biography:
| Surgeon and medical educator, born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, USA. One of the first African-Americans to graduate from medical school (Chicago Medical College, Northwestern University, 1883), he organized Provident Hospital in Chicago (1891), establishing training programmes for the medical education of African-American men (interns) and women (nurses). While there he performed the first successful surgical closure of a wound to the heart and the pericardium (1893), perfected the suture technique for stopping haemorrhage from the spleen, and was also an early advocate of asepsis. President Grover Cleveland appointed him surgeon-in-chief at the Freedmen's hospital in Washington, DC (1893–8), where he established a second training programme for African-American men and women. He then became a professor of clinical surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN (1899). In 1913 he was made a charter member (the only African-American so honoured) of the American College of Surgeons, and for many decades he was regarded as the premier African-American in the medical profession. |
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