liiiM Hale Williams
NegK
Helen
One of the great unsung Negroes of Amer-
ican history is Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.
Why have so few people heard of him?
In 1893 Dr. Williams performed the world's
first successful heart operation.
Why iy this not a well-known fact?
These are the facts a^ r l questions that stim-
ulated Helen Buckler to spend 10 years in
States, with huncLcus of people and
government archives, documents, and rec-
ords in order to unearth the life story of
America's first Negro surgeon and the facts
and circumstances of his history-making
achievement.
The search led from question to question.
Where did he acquire the knowledge and
skill for this operation only 30 years after
emancipation? What happened to him after
he achieved this medical breakthrough?
What did he do to help the cause of his own
race? Why did some Negroes worship him
and some hate and fear him? Why was he
called "disloyal" and was he really? Since
he looked white, why didn't he "go white"?
From the answers emerge not only the fas-
cinating portrait of a complex and gifted
man, but a revealing picture of Negro life
and history from 1856-1931. Daniel Hale
Williams is a glowing tribute to a great man
which reads with the power and drama of
fiction.
92 W7223b2 $6*95
69-4606?
Buckler. Helen
Daniel Hale Williams, Negro
ns Pitman Pub * Corp?
Daniel Hale Williams
Daniel Hale Williams, M.D., M.S., LL.D., F.A.C.S.
DANIEL
HALE
WILLIAMS
Negro Surgeon
B Y
HELEN BUCKLER
Pitman Publishing Corporation
NEW YORK TORONTO LONDON
Copyright <g) 1954, 1968 by Helen Buckler
Originally published as
Doctor Dan: Pioneer in American Surgery
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress No. 54-6881
Mamtfactured in the United States of America
1.987654321
THE AUTHOR wishes to thank the following for permission to
reprint certain material: Harvard University Press for lines
from "Red Iron Ore" from Ballads and Songs of the Shantyboy,
collected and edited by Franz Fickaby. Copyright 1926, 1954.
Portia Washington Pittman for quotations from the letters of
her father, Booker T. Washington.
to the memory of
MY FATHER AND MY MOTHER
who taught me the meaning
of brotherhood
The only way you can succeed is to override
the obstacles in your way. By the power that
is within you, do what you hope to do.
Frederick Douglass to Daniel Hale Williams y
Ackno wledgments
PROPER thanks can be but imperfectly voiced here to the many
persons who contributed to the making of this book. The late
Dr. Louis T. Wright suggested the matter. A list of those who
submitted, often at inconvenience to themselves, to interviews and
the patient answering of correspondence is found on page 362.
Included there are members of the Williams and Price families
who were more than generous with letters, mementos, and photo-
graphs. I am grateful even to those two or three relatives who re-
fused me the door; their implacability made clear what Daniel
Hale Williams had suffered.
I wish to express appreciation for the unfailing courtesy and
care with which assistance was given by officers and staffs of the
Hall of Records, Annapolis; the National Archives; the American
Medical Association; the American College of Surgeons; the Janes-
ville, Wisconsin, Gazette; Provident Hospital, Chicago; the li-
braries of the New York Academy of Medicine, Northwestern
University Medical School, Fisk University, Franklin and Mar-
shall College, Atlanta University, and Howard University; the
Library of Congress; the public libraries of New York City,
Chicago, the State of Pennsylvania, the State of Illinois, of Janes-
ville, Wisconsin, and of Rockf ord, Illinois; the registrars of North-
western University Medical School, Howard University, Uni-
versity of Wisconsin, Milton College, Wilberforce University,
viii Daniel Hale Williams
and Meharry Medical College; the Courthouse officials of Anne
Arundel County, Maryland, of Blair, Cambria, Dauphin, Lan-
caster, Mifflin and York Counties in Pennsylvania, and of Cook
County in Illinois; the Historical Societies of Maryland, Pennsyl-
vania, Wisconsin, New York and Chicago, as well as of Mifflin,
Blair, Dauphin, Lancaster and York Counties in Pennsylvania, and
the Antiquarian Society of Worcester, Massachusetts. Special
mention should be made of the cheerful assistance outside of regu-
lar hours of Phil Waters, Librarian of the Johnstown, Pennsyl-
vania, Tribune, and of Ella Snowberger and Floyd Hoenstine of
the Blair County Historical Society.
From his invalid quarters the late Dr. Carl Glennis Roberts en-
couraged and assisted the research for five years. Dr. Ulysses
Grant Dailey took time out of a busy life to review the manuscript
in its medical and surgical aspects, as did Dr. Roberts. Various
friends and colleagues contributed their criticisms as the manu-
script progressed. Marquis James read an early draft and made
useful suggestions. For proposals as to the final form of the book
and their sympathetic yet uncompromising editorial pencils, I am
indebted to Jeannette and Dudley Cloud. And finally to my sister,
Mrs. Lyman Ball Johnson, I owe thanks for the drudgery of
typing.
The hospitality of Davis House, interracial hostel of the Re-
ligious Society of Friends, in Washington, made possible the pro-
longed research needed in the capital and nearby. And to Pendle
Hill, that rare Quaker community of work and worship, study
and creation, retreat and fellowship, I owe the year's shelter,
spiritual and physical, that enabled me to do the final writing.
Any errors, as 'well as matters of judgment and opinion upon
the controversial material herein presented, are, of course, my
responsibility.
H. B.
Foreword
TEN years ago when I was working on a magazine article, I came
across the statement that the first man in the world to operate
successfully on the human heart was an American Negro, Daniel
Hale Williams. Dr. Williams performed this feat in 1893, said my
information, only thirty years after Emancipation.
Surprised, and a good deal interested, I soon began the long
search that finally revealed the story told in these pages. That
search led me through fourteen states, and involved interviews
with some two hundred and thirty individuals, and correspond-
ence, often prolonged, with fifty more. I talked with doctors,
both black and white, many of whom Dr. Williams had trained,
to nurses who owed their profession to him, to patients whose
lives he had saved, to a man whose heart still beat vigorously be-
cause forty-five years previously Dr. Dan had "sewed it up."
I followed the trail to cellars and attics, to old courthouses and
government archives, to yellowed newspapers, some of them mud-
died by flood waters, to creased, brittle letters, to cracked photo-
graphs, tintypes, ambrotypes, to carefully folded away marriage
records all the fascinating memorabilia that lure the biographer.
I found an almost unbelievable story.
Daniel Hale Williams was a great American surgeon, accorded
top rank by his contemporary colleagues, white as well as black.
After his first heart operation in 1893 in Chicago, he went on to
x Daniel Hale Williams
perform other history-making operations. He was a charter mem-
ber of the American College of Surgeons and one of the founders
and first vice president of the Negro National Medical Associa-
tion. He founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, the first in-
terracial hospital in the United States and progenitor of a hundred
such institutions today. He introduced the training of colored
nurses and internes and was appointed by President Cleveland
head of Freedmen's Hospital in Washington. He became nation-
ally and internationally known. Why he has slipped into oblivion
is the story of these pages.
Dr. Dan was a handsome man, fair-skinned with red hair, and he
could have passed for white as some of his relatives and forebears
had. But he called himself a Negro and all his life he worked for
the advancement of the Negro race. His life was a stormy one,
filled with controversy, with struggle and remarkable achieve-
ment. His story is a heartening chapter in the development of
American surgery and throws new light on the history of the
Negro in this country.
On my search I encountered and penetrated the "black velvet
curtain" for the first time in my segregated white life. I visited
Negro campuses and Negro summer resorts. Through a thin sum-
mer-hotel partition I listened to a long evening bull session of
colored young people, in which one lone student tried passion-
ately, but without much success, to convince a roomful of skep-
tics that not all white people are insincere. "We mustn't condemn
a whole race," she cried, "for the sins of the majority. I myself
know a very nice white woman and I'm sure she's all right!"
I was assured by a seventy-year-old colored gentlewoman that
she had no race prejudice and she would continue to attend her
class reunions at the white college where she had been graduated
and continue to speak to white audiences when asked even though
her friends condemned her for it.
It was good for me to hear these things, to feel the shoe on the
unaccustomed foot, though sometimes a very kind person would
inadvertently administer a very sharp stab. An elderly colored
gentleman patted my hand as I left him after a long interview
FOREWORD XI
and said: "My dear, you haven't a single colored characteristic
left. You could go anywhere!" I went from his door with aching
heart, aching because of his revelation of what he had suffered,
aching because he assumed that only one with colored blood
would have interest enough to ask about Dr. Williams.
After some time in a Negro community, I being the only white
person there, I met a woman one day who said, "Oh, so you're a
writer. I thought when I noticed you staying here that you must
be either a writer or a social worker." This implication that only
a professional, not a personal, interest could bring a white person
among colored was another sad commentary on the state of affairs
in this country.
How little we peoples know each other and how much enjoy-
ment we miss! There are qualities of life in the Negro ghetto
that few whites have dreamed of. I have stepped off miserable
streets into houses of wealth and taste, into homes whose old wal-
nut and mahogany, china and crystal came from generations back,
whose books and paintings invited acquaintance. I remember a
reception room, a jewel of a room, exquisite in its restraint. It
was a small room, circular in shape; under my feet, a rare carpet
from old China; for my waiting a carved chair of some dark
wood; to feast my eyes, a lucent marble bust of a woman, a
Donatello-like woman, on a slim Florentine column.
I remember an old lady, fragile as Dresden, with snowy hair
and bright blue eyes, in whose veins flowed, so I had been told,
some of the "best" blood America had ever known, but who re-
fused to tell her nieces the story and hoped the painful past might
be forgotten when she died. I remember another old lady, one of
Oberlin's first graduates, who spoke seven languages fluently.
There were so many fascinating trails, but I was concerned
with only one Dr. Dan's. For the most part, as I pursued this
elusive fact, then that, I was received hospitably on my quest.
People were ungrudging of their time and patient in their atten-
tion beyond anything I had a right to expect. But once I sat up
all night on a local train to reach a distant town in Ohio and
then was denied an interview. "He wanted to be white," said
xii Daniel Hale Williams
Dr. Dan's cousin through the merest crack in her door. "He
wanted to be white, then let him be it." No persuasion availed.
Though Dr. Dan had been dead a dozen years, this woman's
hatred of one she believed to be a traitor was still a live thing.
Her face worked with emotion, her hand trembled, as she closed
her door firmly against me.
At the opposite extreme from this experience, a colored man
risked his life and received me a few days after he had suffered a
severe coronary occlusion. An oxygen tank stood ready by his
pillow. But Dr. Carl Roberts was determined to assist, if he could,
in restoring this great and forgotten surgeon to what he believed
was his rightful place in history.
So controversial a figure was the hero of this story, I soon
found, that I had always to weigh any evidence by the partisan-
ship, pro as well as con, of the witness. Then, too, I was of an alien
race and I had always to discount what was told me by this un-
happy fact. The truth was what I wanted, but it was difficult to
come by. All the more so since the curse hurled at this man by
his enemy had proved only too effective. "I'll punish him worse
than God ever will," his opponent had cried. "I'll see he's for-
gotten before he's ever dead." The means used to bring this male-
diction to eventuality, the obscuring of facts by the passage of
time, the death of so many who had been party to the drama all
made discovery of the true tale a slow and sometimes discouraging
process.
The surprises in the story were many. It turned out to bear lit-
tle resemblance to the usual Negro story. There are no slave
cabins, no cotton fields, no city slums, no lynchings only the
slow crucifixion of the spirit. And who knows of the Negro who
was "always free"? Yet he existed in numbers both North and
South from earliest times propertied, cultured, of global out-
look. Who knows of the many white women who chose to marry
darker husbands and lived happily ever after? But more especially,
who knows the Negro not as a type but as an individual, not as
victim, or as conqueror, but as an infinitely varied, infinitely in-
teresting mixture of strength and weakness, even as you and I?
FOREWORD Xlll
And who knows how bitter Is the struggle, not between Negro
and white, but between Negro and Negro, inside the segregation
camp of racial discrimination?
Each discovery brought another question. If Daniel Hale Wil-
liams looked white, and he did, then why did he feel like a Negro?
And what drives were in him that would not let him rest on his
own hard-won success, but made him try to carry his "race" for-
ward with him? And why, in the end, after he had become an
inspiration to colored people everywhere, after he had made the
greatest contribution of his day to the progress of the Negro
people, why was he cursed for disloyalty, driven into obscurity,
forced out of colored medicine, out of the hospital he founded
and spent twenty years building? And then, after this treatment
and after another twenty years on the staff of an important white
hospital, after having been a charter member of the American Col-
lege of Surgeons, how explain that his heart was still with Ne-
groes? Why did he, despite everything, send his library to a
Negro hospital and make a will giving the bulk of his money to
two Negro medical schools and the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People?
My search for fact in the end became a search for motivation.
And motives of course are always open to question. No one of us
can ever know another entirely. This is the story as it has seemed
to me.
In the nine years I have lived with this story I feel I have come
to know few persons as well as I now know Dr. Dan his aspira-
tions, his disappointments, and his success this sensitive, almost
shrinking human being, left so ill equipped by fortune for the
rough-and-tumble of the life that was his, and yet a human being
who could summon up a magnificent courage, a courage far be-
yond the modicum required by thicker-skinned individuals.
I might have met Dr. Dan face to face in 1920-1921, for I was
then a patient for some months in St. Luke's Hospital and he was
still active on the staff. I did watch operations, for my malady
was chronic rather than acute and my surgeon sought to save me
from boredom by sometimes allowing me to follow him about
xiv Daniel Hale Willicwns
at his work. I might have -watched instead some of Dr. Dan's
operations, some of those here described from his own notes. But
Fate ruled otherwise. Perhaps it is as well. I was young then, and
inexperienced. Perhaps I should have been put off by the fagade
he had built between himself and the -world. Perhaps I know Dr.
Dan better now than if I had met him in the halls of St. Luke's
years ago.
HELEN BUCKLER
Pendle Hill
Wallingford, Pennsylvania
June 1953
Foreword to the Second Edition
TIME has never passed more swiftly than in the fifteen years
since this volume first appeared. Scarcely a phase of life, at home
or abroad, has not known metamorphosis. Heart operations to
which Daniel Hale Williams dared open the door seventy-five
years ago have become actual heart transplants, though still occa-
sioning outcries against this disrespect for "the seat of the soule."
The black community to which he gave his loyalty, love, and
leadership has changed too. The goal is not yet reached; the
struggle goes on. But the community has changed. It has changed
its vocabulary. It no longer calls itself colored, but black. As
Doctor Dan did at Camp Funston, it speaks out more. It no longer
bows to the dictates or waits upon the wishes of one political
overlord.
In vain Dr. Williams tried to persuade Booker Washington to
allow him to open a surgical clinic at Tuskegee where he could
save black lives and teach black surgeons. "There is nothing,"
he assured Washington, "that our people cannot do once given
the chance. They make the best soldiers; they could make the
best surgeons too." Washington turned him down and the black
South, the whole country, was the loser.
Today we can only read about what might have been and hope
xvi Daniel Hale Williams
that the inspiration from this brave life may help the black men
and women, the black boys and girls, of the urban ghetto and
the forgotten rural slum "override the obstacles." As Frederick
Douglass urged Doctor Dan, "By the power that is within you,
do what you hope to do."
HELEN BUCKLER
Boentm Hill
Brooklyn, Ne<w York
June, 1968
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword ix
Foreword to the Second Edition xv
i The Wandering Barber Finds a Home 3
ii A Medical Apprentice in 1878 15
in Dan Goes to Medical School 28
iv The Barber Becomes a Doctor 40
v Operating in a Dining Room 50
vi First Interracial Hospital, 1^91 66
vii "Sewed Up His Heart! 7 ' 85
via A National Task 97
ix "Snatched from the Womb" 1 1 8
x Dr. Dan's Job in Jeopardy 1 3 1
xi Alice Johnson 146
xii Betrayal 159
xni Destroying Myths 173
Daniel Hale Williams
xiv Moses to Negro Medicine 191
xv History-Making Operations 207
xvi Alice Tries to Be a Good Wife 223
xvii Break with Booker T. Washington 231
xviii The Record Made Straight 259
Genealogical Chan of the Williams and Price Families 276
Notes and Sources 279
Notes by Chapters 287
Persons Consulted 363
Publications of Daniel Hale Williams 366
Index 369
Illustrations
Daniel Hale Williams, M.D., M.S., LL.D., F.A.C.S. Frontispiece
Daniel Williams, Jr., father of Daniel Hale Williams 6
Sarah Price Williams, mother of Daniel Hale Williams 6
Young Dan at about age 6 7
Dan at age 14 30
Charles Henry (Harry) and Ellen Byron Anderson 30
Daniel Williams as a medical student in 1880 31
Dan Williams, apprentice to Dr. Palmer 104
Young Doctor Dan with two companions 104
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, Chief Surgeon, Freedmen's
Hospital, 1 894- 1898 1 05
Alice D. Johnson as a young girl about 1875 146
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, 1883 146
Alice Johnson as a teacher at Mott School about 1890 147
Daniel Hale Williams
NEGRO SURGEON
CHAPTER I
The Wandering Barber Finds a Home
ON freezing nights in the winter of 1877 a young man might be
seen struggling down an unlighted side street, buffeting the wind
and often a blinding snow, in the little Wisconsin town of Janes-
ville. To any passer-by his battle with the fury hurled from the
Great Lakes must have seemed a losing one for a person of his
thin frame thin-seeming despite enveloping coat, thick scarf,
and cap and earlaps of fur. Frequently he carried a covered bass
viol in mittened hands, weaving the unwieldy instrument about
to keep it safe as he slipped and slid on the plank sidewalk.
On such a night, undoubtedly his one thought was to get home
quickly. At this time Daniel Hale Williams had dreams of better-
ing himself, but no well-defined plans for his future. He spent
his days working several hours as a barber in Charles Henry An-
derson's Tonsorial Parlor and Bathing Rooms and the rest of the
time attending classes at the Janesville Classical Academy. Half
his evenings he spent practicing or playing with Anderson's pop-
ular string band. His studying he squeezed in where he could.
It was a full schedule, but it seemed normal enough to Dan.
Every man in Janesville hustled from morning to night, and every
woman too. There was so much to be done in an expanding
country trying still to make up for the long stagnation and drain
of the War Between the States. The urge was in everyone to be
busy, never let up, and Dan felt the urge with the rest.
4 Daniel Hale Williams
Dan boarded at the Anderson home. Harry Anderson, more a
friend than an employer, had several years ago invited his new
assistant to move in with him and his family in the comfortable
two-story white frame house on Glen Street. There Dan, a lonely
lad, adrift in a strange town, had found a warm welcome. Harry's
wife Ellen mothered him, as she mothered her stepson George and
her own children the pretty, talented Traviata, usually called
Vytie (Dan said 'Viata), frail Tessie and little Alfie who was
crippled, and finally the new baby, Daniel Herbert, named for
Dan but called Bertie.
Ellen Anderson was a generous, loving woman, well content
with her life in this bustling, growing Western town. Perhaps
her family back in County Cork had found it strange when she
wrote some eighteen years ago that she was marrying a mulatto
in the New World. But who else could be so fine, so kind, so
openhanded as Charles Henry Anderson? That he was a widower
with a little brown boy to bring up had appealed to her warm
sympathies and she had never regretted her choice. She was
proud of her olive-skinned children. She was proud, too, of
George, her stepson, twenty-two now, darker-skinned than her
husband and with rounded African features and crinkly hair.
And she was proud of Dan, eager, red-haired, quick as a young
pacer and as graceful. Dan had needed her care and affection as
much as the others. His pale handsome face held contradictions.
There was intelligence in the fine forehead and shapely nose and
strength in the square-cut jaw and firm chin. But a dimple gave
that chin a womanish look and the thin, curving mouth was too
sensitive, the dark brown eyes too melancholy to promise much
happiness for their owner. No one would have guessed that the
pale, red-haired Dan had African blood in his veins, or Indian
blood. But Dan proudly claimed both.
Daniel Hale Williams had been born in Hollidaysburg, Penn-
sylvania, on January 18, 1856. He was the fifth child of Daniel
Williams, Jr., and Sarah Price Williams. His father was descended
from early pious German folk who had settled, long before the
THE WANDERING BARBER FINDS A HOME 5
Revolution, in the territory that became York County, and
had intermarried with the peace-loving Shawnee and Delaware
Indians. Their descendants had intermarried sometimes with
Negro and sometimes with Welsh, Scotch and Irish families until
Dan's father showed, except for some crinkle in his hair, the
contours of his high cheekbones, and his erect dignified bearing,
but little physical indication of the racial mixture that was his.
The Williamses were a proud, independent, God-fearing clan.
Farmers, small businessmen, barbers, all owned property and many
preached the word of God on Sunday. A few had disappeared
back into the white race out of which their forebears came. These
were the exceptions that only made more invincible the passion-
ate loyalty of the free Williamses to the interests and welfare
of their enslaved African brothers. They and others of like blood
and like views had by their own unflagging zeal encouraged Ben-
jamin Lundy, William Lloyd Garrison and the rest of the white
Abolitionists to greater and greater effort. The Williamses and
their friends held state and national conventions, made speeches,
published pamphlets, worked on committees, traveled back and
forth, got protests into the white newspapers. Each generation of
sons and daughters received the imprint of this intrepid devotion.
Though Dan's grandfather had married a white woman, Dan's
father married a girl darker than himself, a girl of the same three
racial strains as his own. When Sarah Price, a fifteen-year-old
bride, tied her bonnet over her straight black Indian tresses,
placed her hand trustfully in that of her tall twenty-three-year-
old husband and turned her face westward to the wild Alle-
ghenies, she left behind on Church Circle in Annapolis a com-
fortable, pleasant home. The Prices, like the Williamses, were a
free family, a family that could, even in the South, enter into
wedlock. It made all the difference. Sarah's grandfather Smith
Price had owned a small estate called Greenhill outside the town
gates and a shop and house in the city. Her father, the Reverend
Henry Price, canny in real estate matters, educated, fearless, was
respected by whites as well as by colored.
Dan's father prospered in Hollidaysburg, the boom town at
6 Daniel Hale Williams
the head of the Pennsylvania State Canal. He bought property in
town and land rich in iron ore on Brush Mountain. After Dan,
two more children were born, to swell the number to seven.
When Dan was eleven and the Civil War was over, the family
at last could go to visit his mother's ancestral home in Annapolis.
While they were there, his father fell victim to quick consump-
tion and died. Undoubtedly his arduous traveling and speaking
for the Equal Rights League had contributed to his early death.
For a time Sarah stayed on with her widowed mother. But she
was restless and uncertain. Her elder son Price, already a grown
man of twenty, went off on his own up North, teaching school
and studying law. Sarah wanted to go back West. With reckless
disregard for her purse, she placed two girls in an expensive con-
vent school, left the youngest with her mother, and, with Annie
and Sally, now in their late teens, she set off for Rockford,
Illinois. There the three of them would live with some Williams
cousins and learn the hair goods trade. Dan she took out of school
and apprenticed to a shoemaker in Baltimore.
Poor young Dan, bereft so suddenly of all that had made his
childhood happy, asked to sit still all day, pushing a needle through
ill-smelling hides, must have felt miserable. Often he must have
asked himself why his mother had abandoned him. One day when
he could stand his fate no longer, he bundled up his clothes, went
to a railroad man who had known his father and asked for a pass
to go West.
When twelve-year-old Dan suddenly appeared in Rockford,
his mother was startled. But she only laughed her easy laugh,
Dan years later told his niece, and said that with all that spunk
Dan could take care of himself. Soon her restless spirit would
drive her back East again. She took her eldest daughter with
her, but again left Dan behind, this time with his sister Sally
and his cousins. Dan made his own way, working sometimes in
barbershops, sometimes on the lake boats at whatever he could
get.
But the Rock River valley drew him. At seventeen he was
running his own small barbershop in the little village of Edgerton,
THE WANDERING BARBER FINDS A HOME J
Wisconsin, but soon he moved to the larger Janesville, a few miles
away. His sister Sally was with him. Sally at once found a job
in the hair goods trade, making the popular Saratoga frizzes,
chignons and waterfalls, and hair jewelry too. Dan went to Harry
Anderson and asked for work in his Tonsorial Parlor and Bathing
Rooms. Anderson's six-chair establishment was the biggest and
best in town, patronized by the best people, and offered a plumb-
ingless population warm baths at all hours, as well as fashionable
trimming of beards and mustaches, haircuts, and shaves for the
few smooth-faced men who wanted them.
Dan was well-mannered, neat and clean, and he was nimble
with scissors and blade. Anderson could use him. Barbers were a
nomad lot and Anderson had to exercise some ingenuity to keep
enough help. Good board was a lure and he had taken Dan to the
house on Glen Street to board, and with him his sister Sally.
More than anything else Dan wanted an education. Although
he had been only eleven when his father died, he remembered
his father had said over and over again, "We colored people must
cultivate the mind." Dan could support himself by working in
Anderson's barbershop only part-time and that way he was able
to attend the Jefferson High School.
It was a fine school, much better than the old shanty set aside
for colored children in Hollidaysburg, or even the new but seg-
regated Stanton School of the Freedmen's Bureau he had attended
for a few months near his grandmother's home in Maryland.
But Sally soon married and went north to live in Portage. Un-
doubtedly Dan again felt abandoned. He continued his high school
work a while, but he suffered frequent heavy chest colds and
finally left high school without being graduated.
One day Harry Anderson discovered Dan could strum a guitar
and sing in a very passable tenor. Perhaps he overheard him
singing to the children:
Come all ye bold sailors that follow the Lakes
On an iron ore vessel your living to make;
I shipp'd in Chicago, bid adieu to the shore,
8 Daniel Hale Williams
Bound away to Escanaba for red iron ore.
Der-ry down, down, down derry down!
Dan, usually reticent, disclosed he had followed the Lakes for
a time, playing and singing, though he just played by ear. He
wasn't as good as his uncle who had an orchestra back in Harris-
burg. His uncle, his mother's brother, used to go into a music store
and look at the music, not to buy it, just to whistle it off under
his breath. Then he would go home and play it all, without miss-
ing a note. In contrast to this glamorous uncle, Dan depreciated his
own abilities, but Anderson evidently thought Dan had the mak-
ings of a note-reader in him. At any rate the young barber started
going to the bandrooms after work. He learned to play the big
bull fiddle and became a member of Anderson's famous string
band, accompanying celebrities who came to the Meyer Opera
House, Modjeska among them, playing for the important enter-
tainments at Apollo Hall, the frequent square dances at the Grange
Hall, and traveling all over Wisconsin and sometimes outside
the state.
Among Janesville's citizenry of 10,000 were many strong, ven-
turesome men who had left New York State and New England
in the depressions of the '305 and '50$ and come out to sparsely
settled Wisconsin in search of new opportunities. They had found
them in the unusual beauty and riches of the Rock River valley.
The fertile prairies carpeted with luxuriant grasses needed no
clearing to yield the farmer his return, and the wide clear stream
flowing over a limestone bottom provided water power for a
variety of industries woolen and cotton mills, manufacture of
boots and shoes, of fine buggies and carriages, sleighs and cutters,
and the much-needed farm machinery.
These early settlers were men of vision and faith. Not a few
were college-trained. It mattered little what their business or pro-
fession, they were all civic-minded and put as much effort into
the affairs of Janesville as they put into their own affairs: W. T.
Van Kirk, the grocer; Orrin Guernsey, the insurance man; Henry
THE WANDERING BARBER FINDS A HOME 9
Palmer, the physician. Palmer was on the boards of the pickle
factory and the savings bank, of a commercial college and the
new cotton mill. These men held town office and went to the
state legislature.
Coming in to Anderson's barbershop for a haircut or to have
their beards trimmed, these settlers from the East who had brought
with them their books, their Abolitionism, their passion for better-
ment, stayed on to argue all sorts of matters. They argued the
virtues of free trade, the need for resuming specie payments,
Darwin's theories of evolution, the way Hayes was handing the
South back to its old leaders.
To young Dan Williams, snipping away with agile fingers,
listening to all that was said, the barbershop was a kind of school,
and between customers, it was a good place to get some reading
done.
"You like to read?" Orrin Guernsey asked the youth one day,
seeing him put aside a book as he jumped up to serve him.
Yes, Dan answered, he did, whenever he could get hold of a
book.
Guernsey was sympathetic. Janesville ought to have a library,
but he reminded Dan that they did have books at the reading
rooms of the Young Men's Association.
"I've read all those," Dan replied, "all I like, I've read."
Encouraged to say what he did like, Dan mentioned history
and great lives, and Guernsey promptly began bringing the boy
books to read from his own library.
But Dan was not satisfied with this life. What he really wanted
was to enter college. To do that he must have a high school
diploma or pass examinations that were beyond him.
Under the stimulation of Guernsey's books and his own yearn-
ing to make something of himself, he arranged for special tutor-
ing in the Classical Academy. Principal Haire's fees were within
his reach seventy-five cents a week for Latin and the higher
studies. Anderson agreed to let him go back on a part-time basis
at the shop, and apparently never referred to any difficulties
the new arrangement might cause him. The least a colored man
to Daniel Hale Williams
could do was help an ambitious lad of his race get on, especially
a lad you had come to love like your own son.
The day after Dan had attended his first classes at the Academy,
Dr. Haire received two callers In his office. The first was the beau-
tiful Minerva Guernsey, eighteen-year-old daughter of Dan's
kindly lender of books. Already Minnie was Janesville's favorite
elocutionist, and not without reason, for in time Minnie would
bring sophisticated audiences of Boston and New York to her
feet. Just now, however, she was preparing at the Academy for
her college entrance examinations. She still remembered, when
she was an old lady, how upset she was as she stood before the
tall, thin, bald-headed principal.
"Oh, Professor Haire," she cried, "Maggie Hullihan says her
father won't have Dan Williams in this school. She says her father
will make you put him out. Just because he has colored blood!"
Her young bosom heaved and her 'eyes were bright with unshed
tears as her Abolition inheritance and her flair for the dramatic
combined to urge her on.
"Professor Haire," she cried, "if you put Dan out of this school,
I'll -I'll leave, that's what I'll do!"
"Please control yourself, Miss Guernsey," replied the unper-
turbed principal. "We have no intention of dismissing Mr. Wil-
liams from our school."
Scarcely had Minnie departed than Maggie Hullihan's father,
an oculist and former North Carolinian, climbed the stairs to the
principal's office.
"I'm told one of those young barbers of Anderson's is in
attendance here. Is that true?" he demanded.
"If you mean Daniel Williams, sir," John Haire answered, "it
is. He's a very good student."
"Good student or not," Hullihan shouted, "he can't go to school
with my daughter! Don't you know he's got Negro blood in
him? Maybe he does look white, but he's a Negro all the
same."
"Yes, I know Mr. Williams has an African strain, Mr. Hulli-
han," the principal replied as he unlocked a small drawer in his
THE WANDERING BARBER FINDS A HOME II
roll-top desk. Out of It he took three silver dollars and handed
them to his caller. "Here is Miss Maggie's tuition, sir. I believe
you had paid one month in advance? Quite so." As the outraged
father picked up his hat, the unruffled principal added soothingly,
"This is Wisconsin, not North Carolina. I fear you do not realize
that fact, Mr. Hullihan."
If the Hullihans expected other families to follow their example,
they were disappointed. None did. But somehow Dan learned
what had happened. Dan who could well remember his sister Ida's
leading him past the white children's fine brick school back East
and on to the shabby frame shack where the colored children
received their second-rate education, Dan thanked his principal
by redoubling his time with his books.
Despite the spotlight focused on him, his demeanor remained
apparently unruffled as he pursued his serious quiet way. When
the girls discussed the new boy in the cloakroom Mara Franc
Edwards gave it as her opinion and she repeated it when she
was ninety-two that "He's just like everybody else," and since
Frankie's opinion counted, that settled the matter.
Janesville in the 'yos offered much to arouse and encourage
those disposed to accept it. Professor Haire conducted Home
Forums on Tuesday evenings, and on Wednesday evenings Liter-
ary Round Tables were led by blind, talented John Van Cleve.
A spirit of search and inquiry, a passion for learning and improve-
ment was in the air.
Janesville was not ingrown. The great men and women who
were stirring other parts of the country were invited to come to
Janesville. Henry Ward Beecher came, and Elizabeth Cady Stan-
ton, and the challenging Colonel Robert Ingersoll.
Dan came away from IngersolPs lecture excited and elated. The
man's words sparkled in his consciousness like an invasion of
meteors from another planet: "When people read, they begin to
reason, and when they reason, they progress." He was reading,
so perhaps he was progressing after all. What else had Ingersoll
said? "Every library is an arsenal, filled with the weapons and am-
munition of Progress, and every fact is a Monitor with sides of
1 2 Daniel Hale Williams
iron and a turret of steel . . . the life of a lie is simply a question
of time. Nothing but truth is immortal." That gave you hope.
At this time, Dan had the good fortune to come under the in-
fluence of the pastor of All Souls Unitarian Church. By rights
Dan should have attended the Methodist Church. His own father
had been an ardent worker in the Methodist Church and both
his grandfathers had been devout Methodist preachers. The
Andersons, too, went to the Methodist Church. But Dan became
a Unitarian.
The Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, pastor of All Souls, spear-
headed much of the intellectual and moral ferment of Janesville.
He was always startling people, saying women ought to vote, that
Negroes should be treated as equals, and announcing flatly that,
although he had fought in the Civil War, he would never don
uniform again.
He organized a Mutual Improvement Club for the young
people. Into its programs he brought a wide range of interests
scientific, civic, and philanthropic as well as literary. And to bal-
ance this serious hour he added an hour of square dancing to
follow and invited Anderson, George and Dan to come and play
for it.
Dan played at All Souls, too, for the dime entertainments of
the Sunday School and for the church services on Sunday. One
way and another, he saw a good deal of the inspiring preacher
with the advanced ideas. The Welshman's influence upon the
impressionable; aspiring youth was important.
While Dan was playing bass fiddle, barbering and attending,
classes, two years had slipped quickly by. Now he was twenty-
one. Soon he would have his diploma from the Academy and
another decision would lie ahead of him. He must do something,
get ahead, but how?
That spring of 1877 Dan had another problem. Despite him-
self, he was caught in a flirtation, an invasion of all his careful
program for work and study an invasion of the wall between
himself and white persons, a wall behind which he had proudly
withdrawn. It was blonde, apple-cheeked Ida Williams, by chance
THE WANDERING BARBER FINDS A HOME 13
of his same name, by fate of another race,. who had breached it.
It all started by chance. Various men in the orchestra stepped
out at times for a dance or two, and all the girls at the Academy
loved to dance with Dan; he had a true musician's grace and
rhythm. But Ida, pert, popular Ida, used to having her own way,
had pushed the matter beyond chance. It was not Dan's doing,
at least not in the beginning. Minnie Guernsey and Frankie Ed-
wards were positive about that. But soon he was dancing with
no one else.
"Ida's got a terrific crush on Dan Williams!" The word buzzed
around. It could be confirmed at any party. Sooner or later the
high-spirited Ida would be found in a set right under the nose of
the orchestra. And sooner or later Dan would be found on the
dance floor following Ida's white Paris muslin frock through the
mazes of circle left and circle right and ladies' chain to the grand
finale, when he turned with thumping heart and caught her hands
in his as Harry Anderson called out: u S-w-i~-n~g the girl behind
your
Dan might well have been disturbed to find himself thus perched
on the brink of so unwanted a situation. Some Williams men had
loved and married white women. His grandfather had chosen
a Scotch-Irish bride, his grandfather's cousin a German one.
Harry Anderson had married Ellen and it was a happy marriage.
It was all right, Dan could suppose, if a woman was ready to place
her loyalties where yours were, to stick out everything, through
thick and thin. His own father, however, had married a girl
darker than himself. And if Dan had thought of matrimony at all,
he doubtless had thought that of course he would do as his father
had done. Not many months later he wrote Anderson: "I might
have had thousands for liesure, but I would not marry a white
girl." But Ida's father solved his problem.
Gossip of the flirtation inevitably reached the ears of John P.
Williams, the town's leading basso, soloist in all the local can-
tatas, as popular in adult circles as his daughter was in younger
circles. He understood his willful offspring rather well He took
her aside for a frank talk, Ida confessed to Frankie Edwards, and
14 Daniel Hale Williams
suggested he was thinking of sending her to public school along
with her stepsister, Carrie Jacobs.
Ida wanted to stay on at the Academy. So she decided to be
more circumspect. Soon she was seen setting her cap for Blanche
Burdick's fiance Jim Lord.
And Dan, how could he make amends to Ida? It was a sweet
debt, and he did not forget it. Years later, when the widowed
Ida Williams Lord brought her ailing son to the famous Dr. Wil-
liams for an operation, he performed it and sent no bill. And
many years later still, -when he sat down to write his will, he be-
queathed, in the middle of a long list, a sum to Ida Lord, because,
he wrote, it had been her father who had first encouraged Ijim
to study medicine.
A strange explanation. Though old Simeon Lord was in fact a
doctor and had several daughters, Ida was only his daughter-in-
law. Moreover, not Dr. Lord but another Rock County physician
was to encourage Dan Williams to study medicine.
CHAPTER II
A Medical Apprentice In 1878
GRADUATION Day at the Academy came and went and still
Dan had made no decision as to his future.
Preaching had been the ardent, sincere pursuit of many of his
devout forebears. Both his grandfathers had preached on Sundays,
not to make a livelihood, but out of a dedicated spirit, offering
their people faith and hope and the love of God to carry them
through. But remembering the iconoclastic Ingersoll and the
Unitarian Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Dan could no longer accept the
theology of his ancestors.
Teaching should be possible, now that he had a diploma. Es-
pecially if he took a country school. But he was far too shy to
face a roomful of big strapping boys intent on worsting him.
Then there was the law. His brother Price, ten years older
than he, was a successful lawyer and politician, flitting from
Philadelphia to New York and back again to Washington. Daring,
voluble, Price was their mother's favorite. Now that Dan had
his diploma, why couldn't he read law like Price? He could keep
books and do clerical work for a lawyer, and read law while he
was doing it. Dan knew a white Congressman, a leading member
of the Janesville bar, who had delivered an eloquent address on
Emancipation Day. It would be easy enough to speak to the man
the next time he came into the barbershop.
So it came about that Dan Williams, destined to be a doctor,
16 Daniel Hale Williams
spent the winter turning the dusty pages of Littleton and Black-
stone and grew ever more miserable. He had not yet found his
true bent.
There is no one to tell us today just how Dan's interest was
first caught by medicine. His growing distaste for law in after-
life he said law was making money out of people's quarrels and
he always shrank from quarrels made him look around for some
more congenial profession. Medicine and surgery were spread
graphically before him in almost every issue of the local paper.
The Gazette liked nothing better, apparently, than to describe the
doings of the town's most prominent doctor and ex-mayor. If
Henry Palmer was not snowbound, forced to abandon his horse
and buggy, and trudging on foot to care for his patients "Show
us the man," cried the Gazette, "that says the doctor has not got
sand!" then he was amputating a child's leg, crushed when
the boy clambered up on a moving freight car. Or he was probing
to no avail for the bullet that had lodged somewhere in the body
of the victim of a drunken brawl.
The gunshot case was reported on regularly for several issues.
One bullet had passed clear through the body, another was se-
creted where it could not be found. Was the liver injured? Dr.
Palmer could not tell. It was not the most hopeful sort of case,
though sometimes bodies did heal with bullets inside them. Every-
one would have to wait and see what turn affairs took. Five or
six days might tell . . .
It was enough to stir an imagination far less vivid than Dan's.
His inquiring mind would understandably lead him to ask ques-
tions of the doctor when he encountered him as he had constant
occasion to do in the barbershop where he had found a friend in
Orrin Guernsey, at the Art Association reception where Dr. Palm-
er's interest in pictures would bring him and where Dan played
with Anderson's band, at Dr. Palmer's silver wedding anniversary
where again Dan played, or, perhaps, on the country road. Dan
used to take the Anderson buggy and drive Ellen's friend, Mrs.
Benjamin Hall another white woman married to a mulatto
when she had carpet rags ready to go to the weaver at Mt. Zion.
A MEDICAL APPRENTICE IN 1878 ly
When buggies pulled out to pass on country roads, folk stopped
a while to exchange news and rest their horses. But whether on
such an occasion or some other, Dan had every opportunity in a
small friendly town to talk with Dr. Palmer.
And eventually the talk led to his entering Dr. Palmer's busy
office as an apprentice. Dr. Palmer's daughter, Elizabeth Palmer
Taylor, then a little girl, remembers only that Dan came about the
time or shortly before her brother Will left for medical college
when her father needed another apprentice.
She recalls that her father did not accept Dan as an apprentice
right off. He made Dan go home and think it over, not once, but
several times. Young men should not be forever switching about,
the doctor pointed out. Did Dan want to throw away those
months he had put in at law? And was he strong enough for long
and irregular hours, for cold buggy rides on dark, stormy nights?
Was he prepared for the wear and tear of constant dealing with
pain and suffering and for being unable, sometimes, to do any-
thing whatever about it?
The red-haired, quicksilver Dan was made to do some sober,
solid thinking. But the more he thought, the more desirable medi-
cine became. In the end he convinced Palmer and was allowed to
take a place beside Will in the doctor's busy office in the Smith
Block, at the corner of Main and East Milwaukee Streets.
Now at last Dan began to be his own man. Now he could
put all his energy into his vocation for he was certain that
medicine was his vocation instead of dissipating half of it in
inner bewilderment and rebellion. The change in him was star-
tling. His health improved. His step quickened until he fairly ran.
No one could beat Dan when it came to driving himself in
hard work. And fortunately he had the dictionary habit. He
buckled down to learning the strange new vocabulary. His Latin
was a help, and his German. Soon he was turning the dog-eared
pages of Palmer's books Gray's Anatomy and The National
Dispensatory with twice the avidity he had employed in reading
Littleton's Tenures or Blackstone's Commentaries.
Reading medicine in some doctor's office was the method in
1 8 Daniel Hale Williams
1878 for beginning a medical career. Still earlier, apprenticeship
had been the sole means of acquiring a medical education. But
now, in Dan's youth, a student began with a practicing doctor
as his preceptor and, when the doctor was ready to give him
credentials, he went on to attend one or two terms of lectures
at some medical school. Dan could begin his medical education,
therefore, without any financial outlay. Later he would have to
find ways and means to complete his training.
The apprentice system was as good as the individuals involved.
If the student was eager and hard-working, if the preceptor was
both a skilled practitioner and a good teacher, then the results
were good. The actual contact with cases gave a reality to the
affair that was lost in the later system of purely didactic schooling
and not regained until the establishment of interneships. If Dan
had to sweep out the office, care for Palmer's horse and phaeton,
and help keep accounts, he also helped set fractures and dress
wounds. He put up powders and that gave him a knowledge of
the properties of drugs, their appearance, taste and feel, along
with the conditions for which they were used, and the dosage.
He became skillful in making a urinalysis. Above all he saw
disease and did not just read about it.
Dan was fortunate in his preceptor. Henry Palmer was fifty,
at the height of his powers, when Dan began studying with him.
For his day Palmer was unusually qualified. His short formal edu-
cation had been preceded by two years' apprenticeship with two
eminent physicians and professors of medicine in Albany, New
York, and followed by two years as resident surgeon of an
infirmary in Troy. Thus qualified he had come out to Janes-
ville in one of the early immigrant waves from the East and had
had almost ten years' experience before the Civil War broke out.
Volunteering then as a surgeon, he had come out of those arduous,
bloody years a seasoned, daring operator, and the director, as
well, of the largest military hospital of the war.
Palmer's horizons were not at any time confined to the Rock
River valley, nor was his reputation. He was active in the new
American Medical Association and served a term as vice-president.
A MEDICAL APPRENTICE IN 1878 19
He held the office of Surgeon General of Wisconsin for ten years
and, when the College of Physicians and Surgeons was founded
in Chicago, he was called not to one chair but to several oper-
ative surgery, surgical pathology, clinical surgery.
Dr. Palmer was cool, quick of eye, and dexterous. People
trusted him. Supported by a strong will and great powers of
endurance, he performed some of the most dangerous operations
under the difficult conditions of the preantiseptic era. Surgery was
rough then and often brutal. You made up your mind what had
to be done and did it quickly. There was no such thing as pre-
operative preparation either of patient or of instruments. Post-
operative infection was the expected thing. Internal surgery was
almost never tried. No opening the body to find lost bullets or
to inspect or remove diseased parts. Cases were confined to the
necessities of accident injuries. The new railroads, the agricultural
machines, and runaway horses sent many patients to Dr. Palmer's
office. Tobogganing on Janesville's hills brought in some cases,
too.
Broken noses were common affairs. The doctor would poke
his finger swiftly up one nostril, then up the other, slap on the
plaster Dan handed him, and say:
"Go on home now and go to bed, son. In a week you'll be
ready to go rooting again."
It was not the techniques learned from Dr. Palmer that were
to take Dan so far, but, what was more important, a certain
courageous promptness and dispatch.
Henry Palmer was a ripe scholar and a man of culture. He
found time while on a trip inspecting the hospitalization of
wounded in the Russo-Turkish War to make the best art collec-
tion known to Southern Wisconsin. On his return he had lectured
to his fellow townsmen and they packed the Baptist Church to
hear him. He went to other towns, when he could find time, and
repeated the lecture. He was part and parcel of important civic
enterprises, an indefatigable worker of broad interests. Associa-
tion with such a man left its inevitable mark on his apprentices.
Dan knew he was fortunate to be where he was.
20 Daniel Hale Williams
In the spring of 1879 Palmer accepted another apprentice,
Frank Pember, a year younger than Dan, who had spent three
years at Milton College eight miles away. And in the fall of 1879,
when his son Will went off to medical college, Palmer accepted
yet another, James S. Mills, four years Dan's senior, also from
Milton, a sober mature young Scot who after ten years of alter-
nate study and teaching had finally won his A.B. With three
apprentices on shift, Palmer could announce that his office was
open day and night.
Out of the association of these three young men came mutual
respect and lasting friendship. Pember gave Dan his autographed
photograph. "To my associate in study," he wrote, and Dan
put it alongside a photograph of Dr. Palmer's big brick house,
keeping them both in a leather-bound album of his friends, girls
and young men, colored and white.
In the late spring of 1880 Palmer told his apprentices that by
fall he would be ready to give them credentials for medical col-
lege. The time had come for Dan to leave Janesville. It promised
to be easier for Dan than he might once have found it, for every-
one else seemed to be leaving Janesville too. The Reverend Jenkin
Lloyd Jones was moving on to wider fields and All Souls Church
must find a new pastor. Mrs. Haire had died and her husband
had closed the Academy. The Andersons were moving from
Glen Street. Harry Anderson had fitted up living quarters over
his barbershop, "in fine style," the Gazette said, and was installing
his family there. Dan's friends from the Academy were scattered.
Minerva Guernsey, after good notices in Boston, was preparing
for her New York City debut. Ida Williams's father had died and
she had gone to Madison to live.
When Pember and Mills made up their minds to go to Chicago
to finish their training, Dan determined to go with them, though
where the money was coming from he scarcely knew. He had al-
ways made what money he could on the side; he had barbered
for Anderson and he played in the orchestra. Now he added
another occupation, stringing up wires for the new telephone ex-
A MEDICAL APPRENTICE IN 1878 21
change there were sixteen subscribers and the new electric
street lights. Henry Palmer's capital and energy were, of course,
behind both ventures and through him Dan secured the work.
Dan managed to save enough money to buy some necessities
and the new suit with the braid-bound cutaway without which
he did not feel he could face a strange new world. He grew a
drooping silky mustache. But he still lacked a good part of the
hundred dollars or more he would need for fees and books.
Harry Anderson had been enormously pleased with Dan's
change from law to medicine, pleased with the new vim it had
put into the young man, and pleased that his race, in the person
of Dan, should thus be making progress. Secretly he cherished the
hope that this restless, aspiring young man would someday marry
his daughter Vytie, though he had to admit it was only a hope.
So he suggested to Dan that he borrow the money he needed at
the bank; he said he would gladly go on his note.
There remained then the matter of living expenses. Dan felt
he might well get help from his mother. His grandfather Price
had died during the war, his grandmother in 1876. The Price
estate was now being settled between his mother and her brother's
widow, Mary. In July some Harrisburg property had been
awarded by the courts to Mary Price, and the home place in
Annapolis, together with a smaller property, had been assigned
to Sarah Williams. There remained two other small pieces of real
estate and twenty shares of bank stock, with dividends accumu-
lated during thirteen years, to be sold and divided between the
two women. All Sarah's older children were now married and
settled. The two younger were in their twenties and making their
own way, Alice by sewing and Florence in office work. There
seemed no reason why Dan should not now receive some help
from his mother.
She was slow in answering his plea, but on the strength of this
hope he wrote an old family friend, the elderly Mrs. John Jones,
who lived in Chicago near the college he hoped to attend. He
asked her if she would take him to board. Mrs. Jones would not
22 Daniel Hale Williams
commit herself in advance to boarding Dan, but she did write
him to come and see her when he got to Chicago.
When Dr. Palmer's three apprentices went to Chicago to com-
plete their training, mushroom medical schools, faddists and un-
chartered diploma mills were at their height. Homeopaths and
Eclectics were two of the more sober in a galaxy of medical sects
that ranged from the Botanic school to the Thompsonian. Some
self-styled colleges required only twelve or sixteen weeks' attend-
ance before they granted the degree of Doctor of Medicine. Many
were but a step or two ahead of the preceptor, if, indeed, they
were not behind him. Ill-prepared practitioners came in to brush
up. They were put in classes with boys of no educational back-
ground. All attended the same set of lectures an identical daily
dosage ladled out to all alike. The sine qua non was anatomy and
for this study dissecting material was essential. The inability to
secure cadavers by grave robbing or otherwise was often the event
that ended more than one of these hastily established and short-
lived educational institutions. Often irate citizens ended the ven-
ture with a shotgun.
Out of this array the serious student had but two real choices
in Chicago, Rush Medical College and Chicago Medical College
for the College of Physicians and Surgeons had not yet been
founded. Rush was the older, had four hundred students, twice
as many as Chicago Medical, and boasted a newer, larger building.
It stood at the corner of Wood and Harrison Streets, across from
Cook County Hospital. In contrast the gabled, turreted, ginger-
bread-trimmed quarters of its rival at Prairie Avenue and 2 6th
Street seemed old and shabby. But Chicago Medical had more
important advantages and it was these which had made it Henry
Palmer's choice for his son and for his apprentices. In fact, in all
the country, impecunious Dan Williams could not have hit upon
any better school.
Founded twenty years before as the medical department of the
defunct Lind University and now affiliated with Northwestern
University, Chicago Medical was not just another proprietary
A MEDICAL APPRENTICE IN 1878 23
school run for the profit of its owners. It had operated from the
first in a university setting. Its express mission was to carry out
the long-propounded reforms of that great educational innovator,
Nathan Smith Davis, one of the founders of the American Medi-
cal Association. Courageously those ideals had been put into prac-
tice: better preliminary education, a graded curriculum, more
and longer terms, direct clinical instruction. Not even the Eastern
schools had gone so far, nor did they for a dozen years after Chi-
cago Medical was founded.
In the fall of 1880 when Dan went to Chicago, Rush required
two terms of five months each. But Chicago Medical required
three terms of six months. In the face of such competition, the
standards of Chicago Medical were heroically high. Students who
failed to pass their first-year examinations at Chicago Medical
could and did go over to Rush, pass their examinations, and be
graduated at the end of the second year, a whole year ahead of
those with whom they had entered college. Chicago Medical
students had to draw their satisfaction from the fact their school
went in for quality, not quantity.
As soon as they arrived in the city, Dan and his companions had
but one thought, to register and unburden their pockets of un-
usual wealth before it was lost or stolen. As quickly as possible
they made their way, by horse car and on foot, to Prairie Avenue
and 26th Street. With some relief they saw the neighborhood
was superior. It was clean, which most of Chicago was not, with
paved streets and, along the borders, trees.
Entering the college building, they found it empty and echo-
ing. They were a week early and there was no one to greet them
but a middle-aged janitor. This was a chilling welcome, but the
janitor was amiable about showing new students around.
Dan, Pember and Mills eagerly followed him from room to
room, feasting their eyes on the cabinet of drugs in the museum,
on the casts and models and skeletons, including the mounted
skeleton of an elephant. At last they tore themselves away from
the museum, took a quick look into the chemical laboratory with
24 Darnel Hale Williams
its stained tables, scattered bottles and strange odors, then fol-
lowed their guide to the two amphitheaters. Chicago Medical
could give lectures to two classes simultaneously.
The young men looked down the descending tiers of cramped
seats. Far below in the dim funneled light they saw the lecture
platform, where operations sometimes were performed. The
janitor warned them not under any circumstances to try to sit in
the lower seats. First-year men did well to know their place and
that was not in the seats with the best view.
Grateful for the warning, the three then toured the dispensary
rooms. Through its eight departments passed a thousand patients
a month, more than they saw in many times that period in Dr.
Palmer's office. One door in the basement was not opened to them.
"That's the dead house," explained the janitor.
The dissection room was Chicago Medical's particular pride.
The Announcement declared that "special facilities for the preser-
vation of material are such that the supply is absolutely unfail-
ing." The young men wished to see these special facilities and,
hopefully, some of the "material," but they had to be content
with the janitor's description. The room, he said, had a double
wall of logs. Into the space between, tons of ice were poured each
season. What he did not tell them and what they must wait to
find out for themselves was that the logs became moist, soft, rotten
and moldy and the cadavers did too, often reaching the students
soft from decomposition or dry and leathery, and in either case
sure to be covered with long green moss. It was a hardy soul
who pursued his anatomical studies beyond the minimum require-
ments of dissection of "three parts of the body."
In blissful ignorance of what lay ahead of them, the neophytes
followed the janitor upstairs. They thanked him for his kindness
and went next door to take a look at the exterior of the great
Mercy Hospital on the corner of 2 6th Street and Calumet Avenue.
This "elegant structure," or so the Announcement styled it, was
staffed entirely by members of the college faculty and used ex-
clusively by Chicago Medical for the bedside instruction of ad-
vanced students. It was no mean asset at a time when Mercy and
A MEDICAL APPRENTICE IN 1878 25
Cook County were the only hospitals of consequence in Chicago.
Cook County, although next door to Rush, was not at the ex-
clusive disposal of Rush, but necessarily as a public institution
was open to all medical students in the city, unless the politicians
closed its doors completely against any students, as they occa-
sionally did. St. Luke's was but a modest frame building in Hell's
Half Acre of poverty and violence. On the North Side were two
or three Catholic institutions. That was all that boastful, thriv-
ing Chicago provided for the medical care of its 400,000 in-
habitants.
The Janesville trio walked slowly around two sides of the
famous red brick structure, twin of the college building. They
knew there were as many as 175 patients in Mercy Hospital, but
not for another year would they be permitted to go inside.
While Mills and Pember set out to make their living arrange-
ments, Dan went to call on Mrs. Jones. Walking south on Prairie
Avenue past the fantastic stone mansions of Millionaire Row, he
turned east on Ray Avenue, three blocks below the college, and
stopped at No. 43.
Mrs. Jones's home was a substantial white frame structure of
dignified classical lines. John Jones had built it in the suburbs, only
to have the spreading city engulf his property. It was the mush-
rooming city and some shrewd real estate investments, coupled
with a conscientiously built tailoring business, that had enabled
John Jones, at his decease the previous year, to leave his widow
and daughters a fortune. He left them as well a name outstanding
both in colored and white Chicago, for he had been a leader in
many civil rights reforms and was twice elected County Commis-
sioner. When Dan called on Mrs. Jones her husband's portrait
hung over the mantel in her walnut and horsehair parlor; later
it would go to the Chicago Historical Society.
If Dan felt no timidity in approaching this imperious old lady,
social arbiter and wealthiest of Chicago's colored elite, it was be-
cause his own family standing was the equal of that of Mary and
John Jones. John Jones might have died rich, but he had started
poor, and the Prices and the Williamses had been comfortably
z6 Daniel Hale Williams
well-to-do for many generations. And if the Joneses were of free,
mixed blood, the Prices and the Williamses had enjoyed that
status back to the Revolution and before.
John Jones and Dan's relatives had been through the long fight
for Emancipation together. Side by side with his Rockf ord cousins
in the state conventions of free colored people, and with his
father and other Williamses in the national conventions, Jones
and all of them had fought fought to keep up the hope of their
despairing brothers below the border, to organize and sustain the
resistance of their fellows in the North, to spur on the white Abo-
litionists. It had been a fight that had called for men of like char-
acter, men of courage and singleness of purpose, men who never
gave up. The friendships forged in those years were of a strength
that outlasted more than one generation.
Mrs. Jones was happy to receive the son of her husband's old
friend. She saw his purpose was serious and found his manners
correct, so she told Dan readily enough that he might come to
live in her home. He breathed a sigh of relief.
It was a feminine household, she told him, consisting of herself,
her widowed daughter, Lavinia Lee, and her adopted daughter,
Sarah Raynie Petit, still unmarried. Both the younger women were
in their middle thirties. There was also a nine-year-old grand-
daughter, Theodora Lee. And Theodora's poodle. Rather a
nuisance, but it seemed children had to have pets. Thedy was
perhaps a little spoiled, said the old lady dryly. Now what could
Dan tell her of his father's cousin, Samuel Williams, who had
gone to Liberia in the days of the exodus before the Civil War?
What had happened to him? Did he ever come back?
"That was before my time, ma'am," Dan answered, "but of
course I know the story," and he told her how Samuel Williams
had grown sick and tired of discrimination and had sold all his
considerable property in Johnstown and bought much equipment,
including a sawmill, and transported it with all his family and
thirty friends to Liberia. The sawmill had failed because he could
not get the logs down the swampy rivers, and his wife and his old
mother had died of the fever. However, Samuel lived to make
A MEDICAL APPRENTICE IN 1878 2J
several trips back and forth between the two continents. "He
wrote a book about his experiences," Dan wound up.
"I'd like to read it," said Mrs. Jones and regaled Dan with
accounts of visits to her home by John Brown. In short the two
got on famously.
CHAPTER III
Dan Goes to Medical School
ALL the medical colleges opened with fanfare and a public lec-
ture on the same evening. Each vied with the other to entertain
the laity and impress the new student by jocular accounts of the
ignorance of the medical past and complacent references to those
who "have purged the profession of its errors and brought it to
its present perfection." Audiences responded first with gratifying
laughter and then with applause. The customary benediction
followed.
Next morning the serious work of the year began. Dan hesi-
tated to set out. Even late in life, when he was famous, his friends
revealed he would sometimes have this reluctance to meet new
white people. He couldn't blurt out the facts of his mixed blood, he
wanted no one who discovered it- later to think he was trading
on his appearance, and especially he wanted no one to turn against
Pember and Mills because they were seen with him. But Pember
and Mills had long ago forgotten he was a Negro. They included
him in Chicago as they had in Janesville.
Dan sat between his two friends, high up in the amphitheater,
holding his bowler on his knees. Dean Davis stood before them,
deadly serious. His piercing eyes under shaggy white brows rested
on first this one, then that, dominating them each in turn by the
f orcefulness of his personality as he delivered his opening remarks.
"Gentlemen, you are at the threshold of a great profession. . . .
DAN GOES TO MEDICAL SCHOOL 29
Be worthy of your choice." The sonorous voice floated up to
them: ". . . conservators of the bodies of men . . . moral and
spiritual menders of the minds of weak humanity. . . . Favor not
the fleshpots of the wealthy, but serve alike the rich, the poor,
and yes, the sordid. ... Be ready for hardships. . . ." To con-
trol his emotion, for opening days always stirred him, the dean
pinched his nose with a gesture they would all come to recognize.
The young men before him relieved their feelings by shuffling
their feet and clearing their throats.
Finally Dean Davis concluded his opening oratory and settled
down to a plain talk on the importance of industry. Much hard
work lay ahead of them. . . .
Two days after college opened, a slightly homesick Dan sat
down and wrote to Janesville. Taking a pencil and a ruled tablet,
he inscribed "Chicago, III." with a great flourish at the top of
the page as if to convince himself he really was an inhabitant
of the fourth largest city in the country. But after he had written
"Mr. C. H. Anderson, My Dear Friend," with proper formality,
he was done with flourishes and opened his heart at once: "Many
times since I left your home," he wrote, "and come here to further
my end in life, have I realized your true interest and friendship.
When I get among strangers and observe there actions I can
well appretiate your fatherly interest in me." Though Professor
Haire's Classical Academy had not been able to make up for early
neglect in matters of spelling and grammar, Dan did not have
to be taught gratitude. "I hope," he wrote, "that I will never do
anything that will for an instant cause you to regret the part
you have taken in my career.
"I have been, and am happy to say, successful in obtaining board
and care in the Jones family. I know you are sure I could not do
better. I am faring better and have cheaper board than any stu-
dent in the college. Not even those that board themselves scan-
tily and live in cold cheerless rooms, live as cheaply as I do. Mrs.
Jones never has had a boarder and said she would take me as one
of the family. Gave me a nice room, bath tub, gas, heat and ist
30 Daniel Hale Williams
class board and they do try to make it pleasant for me. She
charges me $3.75, which I think is very reasonable. Do you? I
could not do better. If I hunt Chicago over. I am only three
blocks from the college and am well satisfied. I feel that I will
do a good winters work."
And then the big question they would not ask and he would
answer but indirectly: was he encountering any race prejudice?
"I get along nicely," he wrote, "with everyone and can see the
bright side for once in my life."
"I keep account of my expenses," he added next, "and will
render you account from time to time. Enclosed find itemized
account of the money I received from bank. You will observe
that I have carefully laid out my money. There is once in a
while that I or any one has to spend a few cents without much
benefit to themselves." Had he perhaps gone to see Goodwin's
Froliques at the Grand Opera House on Clark Street, or Josh
Whitcomb at McVicker's?
Once more he assured them, for he knew the letter would be
read by the whole family, of his determined optimism: "I like the
College and live in hopes of graduating a satisfaction to you and
all concerned." Then he ended: "With a fond hope that you and
family are well I remain Yours Obediently and Truly, D. H. W.
43 Ray Ave "
Everything was better than he had dared hope for. Dan set to
work with vigor. Then word came from his mother that she had
no cash to give him, she had been making some loans. Instead she
sent him notes and suggested he collect on them. He saw at once
they were of questionable value. ,Once more Sarah Williams had
failed her son in a critical moment.
There was his board to pay. He must have shivered when he
thought of Mrs. Jones. If only he had been franker when first he
made his arrangements with her. But Price pride and youthful
timorousness had ruled him. Dressed in his new clothes, he had
said nothing to her to counteract his appearance of prosperity. If
he had, his way would have been easier now. Wealthy Mrs. Jones
DAN GOES TO MEDICAL SCHOOL 31
had not always been rich; no one would have been more sympa-
thetic to his plight than she. But Dan had felt he must meet her
as an equal. He had got into her home, he saw now, under false
pretenses. What could he say to her?
In his extremity he threw himself on Harry Anderson, on the
man who was father to him. Anderson sent money for his imme-
diate emergency, but asked for enlightenment. Wouldn't Dan
get something when the Price home was sold? And if that was
delayed, would not Mrs. Jones, who certainly did not need the
money, wait until his inheritance came through? In a tangle of
emotions, Dan sat down to try to explain.
"I was delighted yesterday to receive my first letter from you,"
he wrote Anderson. "Not what it contained, but to know that
you would write me once in a while. Of course I was in need
of its contents, but am getting along nicely." He swung back
and forth between resigning himself to extreme despair and
lulling himself into a false sense of security. In neither did he come
to grips with his situation. Finally he took a big breath and
plunged in:
"I laid aside today to write and tell you everything. You know
just how I am fixed. The question is what can I do, situated as
I am. I can do nothing. Its hard for you to support your family,
meet your expenses and educate me."
Even as he wrote the words, Dan knew the obvious answer
was that his own family should help him, not Anderson. But he
had to acknowledge that he could not count on his family: "I
have written and appealed to them for means but it seems without
avail." He tried to soften the harsh words, and added: "I know
they have not got it. If Mother had it, she would send it." Evi-
dently he could not bring himself to mention the extravagances,
bad judgment, and indifference that explained why Sarah Williams
had seemed never to have any money despite her substantial in-
heritance. Instead he hastened to talk about the valueless notes she
had sent him: "Nor can I get a dollar out of that fellow I have
the notes on. I wrote to Mother and she is going to try and get
some money on them for me." Anxious to show her in the best
32 Daniel Hale Williams
light he could, he said: "You will see by the telegram which I
received last night that Mother is trying to help me. She wants
me to send the notes so that she can make some arrangements
with some one to get some money on them."
Now came the hardest part of all. "You ask me if I made
arrangements with Mrs. Jones to pay her when I get the money.
I did not dare tell her I was so poor. I really don't think she
would have taken me and not for such a small price. She took me
on the strength of knowing my relatives, etc."
It must have seemed to Dan as he sat in his comfortable room,
with classes under way a scant three weeks, that all his dreams
were dissolving in his hands. "I get so discouraged," he wrote
Anderson, "that I can't make much progress. I know that I have
a good friend in you and here I find myself when I sit down to
think it over. The question comes to me. What will I do. What
can I do. I can only do the best I can. I could quit for a year or
so and resume my studies again. But I am afraid that if I stop
now that I will never commence again. ... I have been up town
but three times since I've been here. ... I don't go anywhere
but from house to the College. ... I will write another letter,
one you can show to Viata and folks."
So Dan agonized over his dilemma, when he should have been
devoting all his energy to his difficult new studies. On a Sunday
early in November he again wrote Anderson; there was bitterness
in almost every word: "Today being rny day to write, if I had
any, I thought I would drop you a line. The money you sent
me of course you know I received. I am not in need of any money
today, though I have but 35 cents. But before another Sunday I
shall be. The money which you were so kind to send me, I paid to
Mrs. Jones for board. I paid her $8.75 and kept $1.25 for sundries.
I board by the month and she wants everything straight on ist
of each month. So do I, for she is rather of the old coon style,
if she is John Jones wife. I mean she is one of the old school
like Aunt Charlotte of Annapolis fame. They are very particular
about everything. It will do me good, it will learn me to think
before I act and say."
BAN GOES TO MEDICAL SCHOOL 33
The answer from Wisconsin was more satisfactory than that
from Maryland. Dan was touched. He filled his letters with ex-
pressions of appreciation. "I think of your genuine fatherly in-
terest in doing as much for me as you would for your own
children."
And so he stayed on in Chicago, though on an unsatisfactory
precarious footing. Each month brought its board bill and with
it the ordeal of making another appeal for funds. If there were
wash bills, it was necessary to ask for a little extra change. Any
delay seemed to produce agonies of guilt in the hypersensitive self-
conscious boarder. "My board I want to pay for as soon as con-
venient to you. They have not said anything about it, but I know
they think."
School itself, when Dan could concentrate on it, was all that
could be desired, a dream come true. "Everything is going along
nicely and we all bid fair to progress in our studies" such was
the prim report. And again: "I am making fair progress, I think.
It is hard work and much study, but I am up in the front rank
and keep neck and neck with the leaders."
Dan's curriculum that first year was formidable: descriptive
anatomy, physiology, histology, materia medica and general
chemistry. There was no clinical work before the second year.
Meanwhile Dan attended three lectures a day and burned the gas
far into the night.
Of the original Chicago Medical faculty, five men remained
on the staff of thirteen when Dan entered school. They were
notable men, dedicated to their profession. Like other practi-
tioners of their own youth, they still wore the distinctive garb
of their calling, a long-tailed black broadcloth frock coat but-
toned to the chin over a standing collar. They were never seen
without it in classroom or at operating table. Rush professors
relented so far as to wear turned-down collars, but Chicago Med-
ical faculty stuck to formality and discomfort. Dean Davis and
James S. Jewell, Professor of Nervous and Mental Diseases, wore
full evening dress all day long.
Despite this formality of attire, Dan soon found these men were
34 Daniel Hale Williams
warmly interested in their students. He forgot the fears and shy-
ness of that first day and relaxed into the easy naturalness of his
Janesville days. Pember and Mills and new friends too dropped
in at Mrs. Jones's to study and discuss and argue in Dan's comfort-
able heated room.
In materia medica, Dan sat under William E. Quine, the little
giant with the high-pitched voice. Quine hammered away con-
tinually at his thesis that materia medica overshadowed every
other subject in importance. So persuasive was he, or so effective
were the oratorical fireworks he brought to bear, that his classes
would terminate the hour with vociferous applause. The thunder
followed him as he entered his carriage.
Anatomy was Dan's favorite subject. He was fortunate to study
it under the tutelage of Robert Laughlin Rea whose equal as a
teacher of descriptive human anatomy perhaps never has stood
before a medical class. Rea was new at Chicago Medical that
year. He had a passion for order and for punctiliousness, and was
never late for a class. Dan learned to take his seat well before the
scheduled time. Professor Rea always came early. He would pace
the narrow limits of the waiting room and, at the last stroke of
the bell, stand before his class, a majestic figure, over six feet tall,
with burning eyes deep set under a classic brow, a man aglow with
the fires of his own enthusiasm. There would be a moment of
dignified silence, then Rea would begin his fascinating discourse.
Unlike Quine, no rhetorical embellishment, no oratorical effort
dimmed the lucidity of Rea's presentations. He had no use for
anecdote and innuendo, neither time nor tolerance for humor. Al-
ways he kept the unadorned subject before his students.
If the didactic method of teaching anatomy has since become
largely obsolete, it was a method, nevertheless, that the older
generation could use with masterly effect. Rea, in the united
opinion of his contemporaries, was one of the most masterly of
his time. "For the sluggish student he was a kindly goad, for the
dishonest and indifferent student a walking terror, for those of
better endowment and studious bent a flaming inspiration." Dan
BAN GOES TO MEDICAL SCHOOL 35
caught fire at once. He made Rea his pattern, even to his dress
and manner of speech, and never relinquished his ideal afterwards.
While Dan had to study physiology without benefit of labora-
tory work, in histology he had the help of a newly enlarged
microscopic laboratory, recently refitted with excellent micro-
scopes. The practical usefulness of that instrument was just be-
ginning to be appreciated. The great Christian Fenger, newly
come to Chicago from Denmark, was making pathology the
fashion, though bacteriology was not yet taught. Men continued
for a long time, however, to pontificate from the naked-eye
appearance of a specimen.
It can be said with some justice that at a time when even a
clinical thermometer was still a curiosity and had to be read be-
fore it was removed from the mouth, men had a certain right to
pride themselves upon a diagnostic judgment empirically acquired.
The Palmers could tell body temperature by dryness or mois-
ture of the skin, by respiration, appearance of the pupils of the
eye, and more particularly by some sixth sense born of long ex-
perience. They learned by close observation the significance of
a change of pulse, an expression of the face, and the movements
of the hands. Observation of the mouth showed them signposts
of diseases of wide variety and location. The limitations of early
science had forced the development of medicine as an art and
there were its gifted exponents who gave their patients something
more than sympathy and moral support after a long cold buggy
ride. Dan and his fellow students were a bit inclined to belittle
this fact as they excitedly embraced the new laboratory and the
new instruments.
After a while a hint of homesickness crept into Dan's letters
to Janesville. "How much company are you going to have Christ-
mas?" he asked. Within a few days he was writing again: "When
Christmas comes, I should like to come home. Are you to have
company Christmas?"
Halfway through December, after a lonely Sunday afternoon,
36 Daniel Hale Williams
Dan again wrote Anderson. Instead of his usual casual pencil,
he took up pen and with it put an extra formality into his open-
ing. "C. H. A., Dear Sir," he wrote, "I was sitting down this after-
noon thinking about the approach of Christmas and matters in
general and concluded that I would write you today as there is
only one more Sunday before I be Home." Gathering his courage
he approached his point. "I want to ask you," he said, "that when
you send me, would you send me a few dollars extra. You know
I do not -spend one dollar foolishly. What I want with it is to
buy a few little trinkets. The folks all give me something and I
want to have a little something to give them. I would rather that
they would not give me anything, but you know I can't control
that. I don't want you to think I am fooling your money away.
I think you will understand me and my situation."
It was not an easy letter for the proud Dan Williams to write,
but it would not have been easy to go home empty-handed either.
Having got it down on paper, he restored his self-respect by
adding: "I have made splendid progress so far this winter and feel
that I am twice the man I was one year ago. ... I have a nibble
of a chance to a position in Cook County Hospital. With Respect
and Gratitude, I am Yours Truly, D. W. H."
Back from Janesville after the holidays, the Cook County Hos-
pital job failed to materialize and Dan's financial situation became
even worse than it had been. Anderson was shorthanded in the
barbershop, his income was cut, and he did not send any money
for a couple of months. The board bill went unpaid and Dan dared
not have any washing done. When finally some money came from
Anderson he admitted that "I have not had but a tencent piece
since I came back. I kept that ten cents and if any one would
say money, I would show it up."
Being able to pay the board bill lifted Dan's spirits enormously
and he could end his letter on an unwontedly lighthearted note:
"I hear you travel," he said, "to Baraboo with 'The Great Light
Guard Quadrille Orchestra Colored Band.' How does Severance
[one of Anderson's competitors] like that? I must go to study.
DAN GOES TO MEDICAL SCHOOL 37
Good night, love and health." After which sudden warm note, he
took his usual formal leave with "Yours Truly, D. H. W."
Late in November one of the internes on his rounds in the
Mercy Home, behind the hospital and connected with it by a
corridor, had discovered a suspicious case of illness. It proved to
be smallpox. Chicago, just over a scourge of 20,000 typhoid fever
cases, was plunged into an epidemic of smallpox that lasted all
winter. Although Jenner had discovered the principles of vaccina-
tion over eighty years before, the practice was still far from es-
tablished. Soon the city pesthouse was crowded beyond capacity.
The Health Department consented to the opening of an extra
quarantine ward in the attic of Mercy Hospital, and even that
overflowed. As the weeks passed, more than a hundred patients
at a time were within the walls where the college students passed
daily. Patients who entered for other ailments contracted the
disease and died.
Dan was forced to take to his bed the middle of March. To
make matters worse, it was final examination week. He stayed
in bed a few days and then sent for Dr. Marcus Hatfield, his
friendly chemistry professor. Hatfield said the case looked sus-
picious; he thought he could tell for certain by the next day.
As he lay waiting the verdict, Dan unburdened himself in a
long letter to Anderson. He owed a month's board, 60 cents at
the college, and $2.80 he had borrowed. He had looked forward
to earning a goodly sum during the vacation months and had
applied for a job in Springfield, Illinois, where he might expect
to earn as much as $75 a month, with passes there and return. But
dared he take such a job in his present state of health? "I am a
little anxious about my condition, though I'm not scared," he
confided to Anderson. Fortunately before he mailed the letter on
Monday he was able to add a postscript saying Hatfield had de-
cided that what he had was varioloid. He was immensely relieved.
He could say now, "I was pretty well scared yesterday, I thought
my time had come. I want to get away for a rest."
Immediately letters came back from both Harry Anderson and
38 Daniel Hale Williams
Traviata warm affectionate letters full of hospitality and eager-
ness to see him. They had missed him every bit as much as he
had missed them, and they would not hear of his going to Spring-
field.
Dan was overcome by this combined tenderness of father and
daughter. He huddled in his room and penned his foster father
a shaking, distorted, blotted letter:
"My dear Friend, Just as was leaving the house your welcome,
kind and fatherly letter was handed to me. Childish as it may seem
to you I had to spend my morning lecture hour in quiet to my self
and gratitude to you. ... I will do as I promised. I will not re-
main the summer in Springfield. ... It seems like a burden for
me to remain with you. It seems like imposing on your good heart
and kindness to me." At the end of the letter he added: "Aunt
Charlotte is dead and bad news comes from the east, which how-
ever does not disturb Yours Most Gratefully and Respectfully,
D. H. Williams."
The bad news from the East was that he would never get any
of his inheritance. The home place was sold, but it was found that
Sarah had mortgaged it to the hilt. Every cent of the sales price
would have to go to pay off the debts she had contracted through
the years. The patrimony of the Prices, built up through the
generations and held intact for the sake of the children, was now
dissipated.
Somehow Dan struggled through his examinations. While he
managed to pass every subject, he did so with no more than a
low average grade, he who had started out neck and neck 'with
the leaders. He found little comfort in the fact that twenty per
cent of his class failed altogether.
As he slowly regained his strength that summer in Janesville,
aided by Ellen Anderson's gentle mothering and Dr. Palmer's
medicines, Dan must have felt discouraged. The six months in
Chicago had cost so much in so many ways, and he had so little
to show for it. Perhaps in dark moments he thought of his
brother Price, stocky, robust, self-assured, so patently successful
in all he attempted. Recently Price had added two newspaper
DAN GOES TO MEDICAL SCHOOL 39
ventures to his legal work, putting out The Pilot in Philadelphia
and, with the future Congressman Louis B. Anderson, The Star
in Washington. But by fall Dan was in better health and more
optimistic. The only indications of his recent illness 'were a
couple of varioloid pockmarks on his handsome nose.
CHAPTER IV
The Barber Becomes a Doctor
DAN had become so much a member of the Jones household he
returned there as a matter of course his second year. Mrs. Jones
saw that he had his favorite milk toast. He repaired her green-
shaded lamp. On the way from classes he would pick up young
Theodora at her school and see that she got home safely.
A second-year man came back with a certain ease born of
familiarity with the college and its ways. Dan had twice as much
vigor to put into his work. His middle-year program included
general pathology and pathological anatomy under the professor-
ship of the scholarly John H. Hollister, one of the original faculty.
Professor Hollister taught a Bible class at Plymouth Church on
Sundays and proved his religion was genuine by showing char-
itableness to all races, creeds and nationalities on weekdays. Dan
liked him, liked his ample figure, pleasant face and hearty voice.
The fact that he wore his hair almost as long as he wore his beard
was an old-fashioned peccadillo you accepted with a tolerance
born of affection.
In therapeutics and hygiene Dan again had William E. Quine;
in nervous and mental diseases, James S. Jewell of the flapping
black coattails; and in medical chemistry and medical jurispru-
dence, his old friend and personal physician, Marcus Hatfield.
Some students did not like Hatfield, but Dan got on well with
him. To complete his program, Dan was concluding anatomy with
THE BARBER BECOMES A DOCTOR 4!
Robert Laughlin Rea, and he was fortunate to do so, for Rea
would leave Chicago Medical the next year.
The great excitement of middle year, however, was launching
into clinical work. "This is the essence of instruction," he wrote
Anderson, ". . . any amount of bedside instruction and practical
teaching." In small groups of a half dozen, the students alternated
between the wards of Mercy Hospital and the South Side Dispen-
sary in the basement of the college building. Altogether they
spent two weeks in each of the eight dispensary departments.
Sometimes a patient mistakenly called a student "Doctor" and
the appellation would be so pleasant the temptation was not to
correct the error.
During the year Chicago Medical acquired additional clinical
privileges at St. Luke's Hospital. St. Luke's was small and
crowded, but its location in Hell's Half Acre brought it numer-
ous accident cases, useful for observation. Clinics for eye and
ear diseases were instituted at the Illinois Charitable Eye and Ear
Infirmary. These were important aids to the program since the
politics-ridden Cook County Hospital had again frivolously closed
its wards to class teaching.
The most engrossing were the surgical clinics held Tuesdays
and Saturdays at two. Edmund Andrews, another of the original
faculty and next to Dean Davis in importance, was in charge.
Andrews discussed problems with his students as simply and
directly as though they were his peers. Dan was tremendously
stimulated by the man, as were they all. When his great hulking
figure shuffled into the amphitheater at Mercy Hospital, the room
burst into applause. Everything about him was big his frame,
his bewhiskered head, his kindly blue eyes, his generous mouth.
Now in his middle fifties, Andrews was insisting upon experi-
menting with the new antiseptic surgery.
Fortunately for Dan, modern surgery came in during his col-
lege days. Before he came to Chicago there had been little variety
in surgery outside of accident cases and drainage of infections.
Superficial tumors and cysts were removed. Sometimes an emer-
gency stomach operation was performed as a last resort when a
42 Daniel Hale Williams
gastric ulcer perforated or the pylorus was obstructed. A strangu-
lated hernia would bring about a similar attempt. Only very rarely
was there a surgical approach to the gall bladder, the liver, spleen
or kidney. Tuberculous glands were sometimes attacked. Liga-
tion of diseased veins and arteries was fairly common. While
Ephraim McDowell had removed an ovarian cyst with success
some decades earlier, few had been bold enough to repeat that
attempt in extremis* And rightly so. Every entry into the abdom-
inal cavity brought almost inevitable infection and the patient's
survival depended upon his ability to throw it off. Students who
were graduated in the year Dan had entered Chicago Medical had
seen six abdominal operations in the course of their three years
and every patient had died.
But in one year's time a revolution had taken place. The theories
of the English Quaker, Joseph Lister, had reached Chicago. Dan
and his classmates never forgot the first operation they attended.
A Mercy Hospital nun sat at a high table at the end of the room
manipulating the new carbolic steam spray and filling the place
with a benumbing, asphyxiating cloud that rendered the occu-
pants and everything else all but invisible. Although the patient
had been anesthetized before she was wheeled in, ether continued
to be freely administered it seemed in almost equal quantities to
the students and patient alike.
Dan was soaked to the skin. His eyes smarted and he breathed
with difficulty. But everyone else was in the same condition; they
must bear it like heroes. This was the only way, Lister said, to
ward off the microbes that filled the air. Dan strained forward
to watch what was going on. He could see disappointingly little.
The mountainous figure of Dr. Andrews and his chief assistant
were moving about enveloped in big oiled-silk aprons over their
frock coats. Everyone else, the anesthetist, the spongers, the order-
lies, the visitors, all wore ordinary street clothes. Small tables held
a basin of sea sponges in carbolic solution, pans of instruments, a
small basin of silk ligatures. No longer were ligatures conven-
iently worn in the operator's buttonhole to be pulled out as
needed.
THE BARBER BECOMES A DOCTOR 43
Andrews used carbolic solution lavishly in preparing the site
of the operation, then consulted freely with his assistants and
visitors as to the best place to make the incision and how deep
to make it. These were responsibilities surgeons were glad to
share when everyone, even the best of them, was just learning.
At long last the wound was closed, more carbolic solution was
administered and dressings soaked in carbolic solution were ap-
plied. The patient was wheeled away. Dan was glad to get out
into the air.
The question was, Would pus develop in the wound? Already
during the past few months Chicago Medical staff had had sev-
eral successes in achieving healing "by first intention," without
any of the usual suppuration. But they could not count on it.
Every operation was an experiment. Elaborate routines were
adopted, only to be dropped for something that might prove
better. All over the city and all over the country, thinking men
were questioning old methods and searching out new ones.
A stumbling block to progress at first was the failure to see
the danger of infection by contact while attempting valiantly
to keep out infection by air. All the time trouble was being invited
by unsterilized hands, instruments and clothing. When the
presence of bacteria on everything was finally recognized, a fran-
tic search began for methods of sterilization by solutions. Car-
bolic solutions and bichloride of mercury were tried and even-
tually given up for the less irritating normal salt and boric acid
solutions.
The difference between esthetic and antiseptic cleanliness was
hard for the old-time operator to grasp. Only slowly was the
marine sponge relinquished for gauze sponges. A surgeon would
dip his hands in an antiseptic solution preparatory to examining
or operating and then touch his face, rub his nose thoughtlessly
or even shake hands with a visiting colleague who of course came
into the room t just as he was. It became the duty of the interne
to remind him after each such dereliction to "please disinfect your
hands, sir."
Nor did the visiting colleague take kindly to being refused
44 Daniel Hale Williams
the customary privilege of poking an exploratory finger, un~
sterilized, into the wound. Old-timers had washed their hands
after the operation, not before. And it was hard not to lift the
dressings and peek at the incision to see how things were going.
Lister had expressly ordered that "as long as there is no fever or
hemorrhage, leave the dressings undisturbed." Most operators
were not certain enough to follow this advice more than part way.
But Andrews stubbornly persisted, trying one technique after
another. Slowly his successes grew more numerous, as did those
of others. Temperatures remained normal, wounds remained dry,
and when, after the proper interval, stitches were removed, even
they were found to be free of any pus whatever. Almost any
operation might be attempted now. Exciting vistas opened to
faculty and students alike. Dan and his fellows walked in an at-
mosphere surcharged with wonder, possibility, and violent diff er-
ences of opinion. Bitter controversy raged in classrooms and cor-
ridors and spilled over into rooming houses.
Dan had returned to college with no better financial arrange-
ment than to call on Harry Anderson from time to time for
amounts of ten and fifteen dollars. Each time the sum was ex-
hausted he had to go through the painful process of asking for
another amount, "You will not think hard of me," he would plead,
"you know I do not wast a penny." Frequently the money was
tardy in arriving. Anderson had invested in a road show, Escaped
from Slavery, and in a touring organization called the Nashville
Colored Church Choir. These were taking all his spare cash. He
became more disposed to question every item.
Dan had to wait to start his precious clinical instruction while
letters passed back and forth and he impatiently tried to explain
what the "hospital ticket" was and why he had to pay six dollars
to get it. Then Anderson felt Dan need not buy medical books,
he could borrow them. Dr. Palmer had provided books for his
apprentices, why should not the Chicago doctors do the same?
Finally Anderson sent the money and Dan was grateful "You
are the only true friend I have," he wrote.
THE BARBER BECOMES A DOCTOR 45
Dan wanted Anderson to come up to Chicago for the spring
festival, but Anderson did not get there. "It was too rich," wrote
the growing sophisticate, "for most of them to understand."
Other Janesville visitors made Dan homesick. "When I went to
the train with Henry Doty friday P.M. I felt as though I'd like to
go home with him, but I knew I could not." Traviata and her
friend, Alice Smith of Oconomowoc, an exotic girl with Indian
tresses, also spent some time in Chicago. Alice had a fascination,
Dan admitted to himself and to Alice's sister years later that
the exuberant 'Viata, for all her warmth, lacked. He invited
his college friends to meet the two and entertained for them at
tea at Mrs. Jones's home. The girls were a great success. " 'Viata is
enjoying her visit very much I imagine," Dan wrote her father,
"she has every attention shown her." Dan felt no pique, only
complacency, at seeing 'Viata surrounded by suitors. He was as
proud of her as any brother would be. Later when the Andersons
did come to Chicago for a visit, Mrs. Jones enjoyed Ellen's gay
Irish wit and remarked how fond Dan was of his little namesake,
Bertie.
When his middle year ended, and it did so with better grades
than his first year, Dan decided to stay on in Chicago for the
spring and summer to gain some experience in Mercy Hospital.
Ordinarily he would have had to wait until his senior year for
any chance at ward duty. But the overburdened senior internes
sometimes relinquished part of their work to students, and Dan
and Frank Pember had been quick to snatch so fruitful an oppor-
tunity.
Dan arranged with Mrs. Jones to care for her horse and buggy
in payment of his board during this time. When he wrote Ander-
son these plans, Anderson, always in need of a barber and feeling
somewhat ill used, did not answer. He did not reply to a second
letter either, and Dan tried a third time to explain why he must
seize upon this opening.
"I have though^ it best," he wrote, with more fluency and bet-
ter spelling than were once his to command, "for me to remain
46 Daniel Hale Williams
here as long as I can. I can learn and see more in one week than
I could in Janesville in six months."
"You know," he added, with growing wisdom, "talk and suc-
cess are widely different. Men may talk what they can and will
do, but it takes knowledge and experience to accomplish much.
I might stay in Janesville in Dr. Palmer's office ten years and
never see a case of childbirth. Here I can see ten to twenty cases
a week and have charge of all in Mercy Hospital if I will attend
them." Honesty compelled him to modify this exaggeration and
he added: "Frank Pember and I attend them between us." His
effort to persuade Anderson made him say: "I have chances in
operative surgery every week, doing some operation." What if
the "operation" were only lancing an abscess? It meant handling
a knife and involved dressings. Dan gave the affair all the glamour
he could.
"We have hospitals," he told Anderson, and "Post Mortem ex-
aminations to keep our attention on our life work. In Janesville,
when they did have post mortem examinations, it was only a few
could come in. Down here we all go to Dead house where there
assemble from fifty to one hundred doctors and everything is
opened before us and understood."
Carried away perhaps by his own eloquence, Dan allowed a
slightly patronizing tone to creep into his letter: "You will not
probably recognize the scope of a physician, but you must know
that where there are more sick and dead there is better field for
investigation and study."
But at heart Dan was deeply loyal to Ms old friends. He added,
"I want to come up some time in June and stay a few days at
least. . . . How is George getting? I shall hope to hear from you
Soon. Regards to all."
The summer was long and hot and the Mercy Hospital obstet-
rics ward always full. Dan and Pember learned to work almost
continuously through the lengthy nights. They did not complain,
for here were the riches of experience, free for.the taking. Some-
times, however, they were embarrassed when a private watchman
THE BARBER BECOMES A DOCTOR 47
from nearby Millionaire Row would appear and object that
through the open windows of the maternity ward their patients
were disturbing the peace of Prairie Avenue with their cries and
groans.
In the fall Dan again needed a weekly sum for room and board.
Unfortunately, when he wrote to Anderson expecting the old
arrangement to continue, Anderson said he had no ready cash to
loan. Couldn't Dan continue to work for Mrs. Jones and get
along? But Dan had already relinquished his stable job in anticipa-
tion of term opening and Mrs. Jones had hired a boy to take his
place. He was panic-stricken. He must not be stopped now, with
his goal so near.
With that same desperation with which as a boy he had
wrenched himself out of shoemaking, and as a youth had flung
off barbering, Dan now clutched at medicine. He wrote Ander-
son with some assertiveness. "I received your letter. I know when
a man is not making money it is hard to spend it. No one realizes
your position more than I do." But there was no real difficulty,
he went on to say. Why could Anderson, with his "unlimited
credit," not borrow the money to loan him? "It is going to take
comparatively little to take me through," he argued, "not more
than $150.00. . . . You can't but see that the current will be in
your direction before many months."
"It is my final struggle for an education," he cried, "and while I
am at work I can't spare the time to go seek here and there for
money to pay my living expenses." It was a tone he should have
used long ago with his mother. Failing that, he used it now with
his foster parent. "It is not pleasant for me," he said, "any more
than it is for you. I hate to ask you for it, but what am I to do?
... If you were giving this money, it would be different. You
are not. You will get your money back and interest thereon. I
shall await to hear from you."
Anderson did not fail him and Dan stayed on in school.
As Dan had progressed in his training, Chicago Medical had
grown. Six professors had been added to the faculty, making the
48 Daniel Hale Williams
total nineteen in Dan's last year. Among them was Oscar DeWolf
for a course in Public Health. DeWolf, Chicago's first health
commissioner, was determined to rid the city of its filth the city
which "has her wash-pot, her chamber-pot and her drinking cup
in the great lake at her feet." E. C. Dudley came that year too and
Dan profited in his course in gynecology then such a fast-
developing field by Dudley's curiosity, his daring and with it
all his careful weighing of evidence.
But Dan's greatest stroke of luck was the acquisition of the
noted Danish scientist Christian Fenger. It was too late for Dan
to take his pathology course, but he attended Fenger's lectures
and sat in his clinics. Looking back, men said it was from the
coming of Fenger that Chicago slowly but surely developed as
an important medical center. There were plenty, however, in
1882 who mocked this apostle from the great European clinics,
carrying his homely green carpetbag with the initials embroidered
by his sister. But there were others, Dan among them, who wor-
shiped him, absorbed his wisdom, and in their turn made medical
history because they had known him.
Shortly before the end of their last term, the seniors went
through the ordeal of competing for the few interneships avail-
able. Frank Pember won a place at Mercy, but Dan, like the ma-
jority, was not successful. Fortunately he had already worked as
a volunteer in the Mercy Hospital wards.
Finally the last week in March, 1883 rolled around and with it
Commencement Day. Exercises had outgrown the Plymouth
Church and this year were held in the Grand Opera House down-
town. Solemnly the three dozen men followed the faculty down
the aisle, Dan among them, sporting a new-grown full beard
trimmed exactly like that of his first-year anatomy professor,
Robert Laughlin Rea. Dan must have wished his father could see
him, that his mother were present.
The program unfolded, pleasantly interspersed with music.
The secretary read a long report of the year's work and then the
prizes were announced, sixteen in all, but neither Dan nor Pem-
ber won one. Mills carried off a prize for general excellence, as
THE BARBER BECOMES A DOCTOR 49
befitted one -who had entered medical college with an A.B. degree.
One of the prize winners read the valedictory and then the presi-
dent of Northwestern University handed out the ribbon-tied di-
plomas, conferring on each man as he did so the proud new
degree.
Doctor Daniel Hale Williams! Daniel Hale Williams, M.D. As
he walked down the aisle, phrases of the Hippocratic Oath per-
haps flashed through Dan's mind: ". . . to reckon him who taught
me this Art equally dear to me as my parents ... by precept,
lecture and every other mode of instruction I will impart a knowl-
edge of the Art to my own sons . . . and to disciples . . . may it
be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the Art, re-
spected by all men, in all times."
CHAPTER V
Operating In a Dining Room
AS soon as Dan's diploma was in his hand, he applied for a license
to practice in the District of Columbia. Apparently his one
thought was to return to his mother, now that his success would
ensure her welcome.
But when the license came, he found that the nebulous, un-
realized ties of family did not pull him half as much as the ties
he had made in Chicago. He was twenty-seven and he had a life
of his own. He made another application, this time for an Illinois
license.
The new-fledged Dr. Daniel Hale Williams began his practice
of medicine in a time of economic depression amounting to panic.
It was tough going, but there was something to be said for start-
ing out in a big place. His friend William E. Morgan, graduate of
the Class of '82, had first set up an office in his home town, Madi-
son, Wisconsin. In three months he saw not one patient. He had
in the end come back to Chicago and opened an office at State
and 32nd Streets. Another good friend, Frank Billings, '81, was at
3 ist and State. Dan found a small suite not far from his colleagues,
at 3ist Street and Michigan Avenue, on the northwest corner,
3034 Michigan Avenue. The neighborhood was well-to-do, as
much white as colored, and white doctors had the adjoining
suites.
When Dan opened his office, there was no Black Belt. The
OPERATING IN A DINING ROOM 5!
Negro population numbered around 10,000 and colored families
were scattered through white areas. White people knew colored
people at first hand, recognized their individual differences and
did not have the common disposition born of separation to re-
gard all Negroes as alike and the likeness one of inferiority, mental
and moral. Since the neighborhood was well-to-do, the colored
people in it were well-to-do too. They were also mostly of mixed
blood, since these were the Negroes who had been the earliest to
attain freedom and to establish themselves. In such a neighbor-
hood Dan from the first drew his patients from both races.
Two colored physicians had practiced in Chicago before the
Civil War and before licensing was required. When Dan started,
there were three colored doctors, two of them with the less
highly regarded Eclectic diploma. All three had their offices in
other neighborhoods and none of them was his competitor.
Dan continued his professional contacts with the men he had
known in his student days. Professor Marcus Hatfield, looking
toward his retirement as staff physician of the Protestant Orphan
Asylum, secured Dan an appointment as attending physician. The
orphanage was only nine blocks north of Dan's office on Michi-
gan Avenue. While the job was unpaid and rather trying, espe-
cially when all 250 children came down at once with measles, still
it offered experience and prestige.
Dan's office hours were 9 to 10 every morning, 3:30 to 5 in the
afternoons, and 7 to 8 in the evenings. Home calls and orphanage
calls had to be sandwiched in between. But he was used to hard
work and he was happy. He had entered upon a distinguished pro-
fession and he had status, though it was only the status of a be-
ginner.
Among his earliest private patients were the personal friends
he had made in Mrs. Jones's home. A young untried man is not
always acceptable in a professional capacity to those who have
long known him, at least not until he has proved himself. But Dan
could have no better sponsor than John Jones's widow, and she
continued to be his sponsor even when he felt he should assume
a more independent position and took a room on Boston Place
52 Daniel Hale Williams
near Halsted. Mrs. Jones was inordinately proud of him. His
parted chin whiskers, she insisted, were just like John Brown's.
And she added, with an old lady's plain-spokenness, "Dan sits on
more brains than other men have in their heads." Everyone knew
that she chose Dan to be Thedy's godfather when the child was
taken to St. Thomas's African Episcopal Church for baptism.
After that event, if for no other reason, Dan's position was
solid.
Julia LeBeau was organist and choir leader of St. Thomas's.
When her mother fell ill, she called Dr. Williams, even though
he was but a few months out of medical school. The diagnosis
was uncomplicated; it was hemorrhoids. But the patient demurred
when Dan told her they must be cut out.
"I won't go to a hospital," she declared flatly. Dan bowed to
her dictum readily enough. Few hospitals in the city had accom-
modations that would appeal to the private patient, and times
were scarcely past when to go to the hospital was to go to the
grave.
"I'll do it right here," Dan assured his patient. "We'll take down
the lace curtains and scrub everything, walls as well as floors.
Julia can help me."
Scrub her home! The proud old lady bristled at the imputation
her house was not already immaculate. Dan had his hands full,
explaining and placating. Finally he won her over and a time was
set.
Dan neglected nothing to make Mrs. LeBeau's dining room as
antiseptic as possible. He scrubbed and fumigated and sprayed
valiantly. The wash boiler on the kitchen stove was his sterilizer,
the kitchen pans his receptacles for sponges and instruments. He
gave the anesthetic himself and then excised the hemorrhoids as
quickly and deftly as could be. The old lady's recovery was
prompt, her new comfort magical. She told all her friends what
a smart fellow her doctor was and they at once took note of his
address.
Those who had known him as Dan could not call him Dr. Wil-
liams. They compromised with "Dr. Dan." This title of aifection
OPERATING IN A DINING ROOM 53
coupled with respect clung as his practice widened and all and
sundry knew him as Dr. Dan. Patients who came to him once sel-
dom left him. He who had suffered so much himself was very
gentle with those who came seeking his aid. Patients felt the
sincerity of his interest in them and they were warmed by it.
They liked his dignity, too, his well-proportioned figure he
was about five feet eight his immaculate grooming, his alert,
handsome face. They liked his air of certainty; they could see at
once that he knew his business. The day came when patients
packed the little waiting room at 3034 Michigan Avenue.
All the time Dan was doing more and more surgery. Surgeons
developed those days as cases were thrust upon them by self-
evident diagnosis. A man either had to shirk a case and decline the
responsibility or accept it. If he accepted it, he then had to nerve
himself to tackle it and do his best, learning his techniques as he
operated; there was no other way.
His friends, Frank Billings and Franklin Martin and others,
were doing as Dan was doing, operating in private homes, in
kitchens and dining rooms. Billings went into the slums and ampu-
tated a tubercular leg. There were so few hospitals in Chicago
and all were as tightly organized as a personal club. Staffs were
small and they did not welcome newcomers. The younger men
usually chose Sunday mornings for their home forays into sur-
gery. Friends served each other as anesthetists and orderlies and
suppliers of moral support.
Dr. Dan was more fortunate than some. He found an oppor-
tunity to perform minor operations regularly by securing an ap-
pointment to the surgical staff of the South Side Dispensary. As
he operated he gave clinical instruction to Chicago Medical stu-
dents. He also served as one of the demonstrators of anatomy.
Teaching was not easy in a day when medical students were
much given to bantering, to stealing fingers, toes and sometimes
even a whole hand from the dissecting table to be dropped into
the pocket of some unsuspecting freshman. Dan's seriousness
would have been an invitation to horseplay, but his enthusiasm
carried students along. They found themselves caught up despite
54 Daniel Hale Williams
themselves. His good judgment and shrewd diagnoses won their
respect and they recognized his ability was above that of the
usual dispensary instructor. He who had found it so hard to ex-
press himself now used an excellent vocabulary, and his voice,
rather penetrating, with an individual timbre, the timbre of a
singer, attracted and held attention. He enjoyed his teaching and
his students enjoyed him among them Charlie Mayo and, later,
Coleman Buf ord and Andy Hall.
Dr. Dan followed every lead. He got a job as surgeon to the
City Railway Company, where E. Wyllys Andrews, son of his
former professor in surgery, served in a similar capacity. Young
Andrews was in the courtroom one day when Dan had to appear
as an expert witness in an accident case. Coming out of the court-
room afterward, Andrews patted his colleague on the back and
told him he certainly had his data well in hand; even the judge
could understand it!
The name of Dr. Daniel H. Williams appeared frequently now
in the Negro newspaper, the Conservator. He was attending this
case or that one, or he was a guest here or a guest there. The
handsome bachelor who was forging ahead so fast was noticed
by thoughtful mothers with marriageable daughters. And the
daughters and the sons and the young married couples flocked
around him whenever his schedule permitted him to appear at a
party.
"Here's Dr. Dan!" they would cry and thrust a guitar into his
hand. Dan, with every vestige of self-consciousness cleared away
in this sunshine of popularity, would put a well-polished shoe up
on whatever was handy, the nickel fender of the parlor stove or a
convenient hassock, rest the guitar on his knee, and sound forth
in an acceptable tenor. Soon the whole room would be rollicking
to his gay rhythms.
During this time Dan kept up his letters to Harry Anderson,
paying him back money as he could. These were sad times for
the Anderson family. Soon after Dan's graduation, frail, loving
Tessie had died at seventeen. A few months later her mother sud-
denly and unaccountably died, too. The double blow left all of
OPERATING IN A DIN ING ROOM 55
them benumbed, Dan included. Tessle had been a beloved younger
sister and Ellen's warmth and gaiety and frequent subtle guidance
had carried him along through the difficult years when the cour-
age often oozed out of him.
With Ellen gone, Harry Anderson could not bear to stay on in
Janesville. His road shows were prospering and he moved his
family to Chicago to an apartment at the corner of State and Van
Buren. Traviata managed the household and mothered Alfred and
Bertie while she continued her study with the internationally fa-
mous organist, Clarence Eddy. One of the young singers in Ander-
son's road show was Charles E. Bentley. He was a fine tenor and
Dan had known him when he was a guest in the Anderson home
in Janesville. Bentley continued to call on the Andersons in Chi-
cago and soon proposed to 'Viata. She accepted him, and when
they were married Bentley moved in with the family. He gave up
singing and on funds supplied by Harry Anderson enrolled in the
Chicago College of Dental Surgery. Anderson still had his heart
set on seeing his Vytie the wife of a professional man.
People asked Traviata why she had not married Dr. Dan.
"Dan?" she replied with the greatest candor, "Why I couldn't
marry Dan! He's just the same as a brother."
As for Dan, he seemed relieved to have matters thus taken out
of his hands. 'Viata would always occupy a big place in his heart,
and he was pleased to see her happy. He liked Charles Bentley
enormously; he was a keen, intelligent fellow, interesting to be
with. Dan visited the Anderson-Bentley home constantly.
Dan had a passion for friendship. Cut off from his family, he
clung to his friends. Though he had spent but a short time in his
boyhood at his grandmother's in Annapolis, he had never com-
pletely lost touch with a friend he made then, and now, with
money in his pocket, began to visit again.
Hutchins Bishop came of a family as old as the Prices and like-
wise of free, mixed blood. The Bishops lived on Church Circle,
just across from the Prices. The two little boys in their brass-
buttoned waist-length jackets and ankle-length baggy pantaloons
had trudged off together to the Freedmen's Bureau school each
56 Daniel Hale Williams
morning, first pulling down hard on the visors of their kepi caps.
There was always a gantlet of white hoodlums before you got
there. But, hand in hand, head ducked down and shielded by a
bent arm, the boys arrived with no more than an occasional
bruise from a thrown rock.
That handclasp had held across the miles and years. While Dan
was learning to save bodies, Hutchins, as fair-skinned as Dan and
equally imbued with a desire to help his race, was studying at the
General Theological Seminary in New York, learning to save
souls. He wanted to go back to Maryland to take a parish, but the
Southern Episcopal Church would not accept a man of African
descent for the Lord's service. Hutchins received ordination
finally in Albany through the help of Dan's cousin, Sadie Wil-
liams Topp, who succeeded in bringing the matter to the atten-
tion of Bishop William Croswell Doane.
At Hutchins's insistence, Dr. Dan made a flying visit to Albany,
saw his chum ordained and then accompanied him to Charleston
and served as best man at his wedding. Six years later Dr. Dan
was appearing as godfather in St. Philip's, now his friend's charge
in New York City, for Hutchins's second child, a son, whom he
named Shelton Hale Bishop to honor the young doctor. This was
Dr. Dan's third godchild and second namesake, Bertie Anderson
being the first. But it was not the last, for soon he was standing
godfather constantly for a stream of little Daniels and Hales who
proudly bore a name that appeared more and more in the Negro
press across the country.
These trips East to see Hutchins turned out to be important to
Dr. Dan. In Albany there was a considerable colored colony of
wealth and culture families who had settled there in earliest
times, intermarried with the Dutch and other white settlers, and
later worked against slavery in those same Negro conventions in
which the Williams clan had labored. Dr. Dan's cousin had
married into the Topp family. Other names equally prominent
were the Benjamins, the Van Vrankens, the Pauls, the Lattimores,
the Blakes, the Olcotts, the Mathewses.
There was a gay winter season in Albany and a gay summer
OPERATING IN A DINING ROOM 57
season at Saratoga Springs. On one of his visits, Dr. Dan was
dancing in a hotel at Saratoga Springs with the fair-skinned but
nevertheless "Negro" Nina Pinchback, when officialdom asked
them to leave the floor. Colored society all over the country was
outraged. Nina Pinchback was the daughter of the honored
P. B. S. Pinchback, lieutenant governor of Louisiana in Recon-
struction days. What did freedom mean if a lieutenant governor's
daughter could not dance where she chose?
The incident probably did not bother Dr. Dan. Slights from
white people were usual. But another blow came to him in Albany
which did shatter him. Against blows from people of color, his
mother's color against these, he showed again and again that
he had no defense.
Dr. Dan inevitably met in Albany Kittle May Blake, lovely
daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Adam Blake. The Blake daughters
were the belles of colored Albany. Bismark Pinchback, Nina's
brother, was in love with one daughter. Dr. Dan fell head over
heels in love with Kittie May. She was not only an exquisite girl
with the fair skin and hair of her Dutch and Yankee ancestors and
the charm and grace of her African forebears, but she had been
most carefully nurtured. From childhood she had attended St.
Agnes Convent School. Year after year she had been awarded the
banner as the most beautiful girl in the white school. Bishop
Doane, people said, "loved her like his own daughter." After a
year's finishing in New York City she had been taken to Europe
for a final round of polishing. These were the exterior things; her
spirit was sweet and gentle, as lovely as the outer body that
clothed it.
Dan was carried headlong into an adoration that made him for-
get himself completely, left him with all his defenses down. He
no longer hesitatpd as he had with other girls, but exposed his
heart in all its tender, quivering honesty. He left himself no loop-
hole, no avenue of escape. He loved her, he told her, with all
his being. Would she marry him?
Kittie May answered with quiet dignity: Yes, she said, she
would marry him. He was the ideal she had dreamed of, the
58 Daniel Hale Williams
Prince Charming she had hoped would come someday hand-
some, tender, serious, gifted. Dr. Dan's heart must have swelled
to the point of bursting.
It was Mrs. Blake, nee Benjamin, who shattered the idyll. She
had no intention of allowing her darling to marry a man identi-
fied with colored people. Kittie May with her beauty and her
wealth could marry anyone she chose and if Kittie May did not
know where to choose, her mother would choose for her.
If Kittie May had not been so gently nurtured, she might
have had more spine; she might have stood up and demanded
the right to live her own life. If Dr. Dan had been charged with
anything but his race, he might have striven to change it. Poverty?
He could win riches. Obscurity? He would win honor. But race?
He could more easily cut off his right hand, his surgeon's hand,
than deny his people. He could not imagine himself for a moment
as anything but Negro, loyal to Negroes everywhere.
If looks had been all, he could have passed to the white side
long before. In his milieu there were those who did so every
year someone whose elderly parents had died and who felt free
to embrace an easier path; someone who was marrying across the
line; someone with little children who wanted an easier life for
them than colored children could hope for. They went to Mexico,
Brazil, France or just to another state. While he sympathized with
their reasons, Dr. Dan had only pity for those who "passed." It
was a possibility he could not for a second entertain, even to win
Kitty May.
He went back to Chicago and threw himself into a passion of
work.
Kittie May dutifully married the white lawyer her parents
selected for her. But from friends in Albany Dr. Dan learned that
her brightness was quenched; she drooped and had little interest
in life.
Dr. Dan grimly worked on. Every hour he could snatch from
his patients he spent in the anatomical laboratory, dissecting ca-
davers. With sharp blade in supple fingers he attacked the inert
flesh cutting, retaliating, reaching those inmost recesses as life
OPERATING IN A DINING ROOM 59
had reached him, at the raw center, at the quick. Unconscious
of the double motive that impelled him, glorying in his natural
manual dexterity, fostered during those years in barbering, he
must have found a release in the use of the knife at the same time
that he found knowledge.
People wondered why the steadily advancing young doctor
whose practice had grown so well, who drove a horse worthy
of Janesville's best traditions, who owned a four-story brick flat
building on Dearborn Street, did not marry. Mothers with mar-
riageable daughters hopefully set their caps for him. But though
he was pleasant, courteous, and charming, he eluded them all.
In September 1887, Dr. Dan decided to go to Washington to
attend the International Medical Congress; he could at the same
time have a short visit with his mother and sisters and look into
their finances which, it seemed, were forever needing his assistance,
although when he had needed theirs it had not been available.
There had been no meeting of the world medical body since
the one in Copenhagen in 1884 and the event was eagerly awaited
by American doctors who would play host for the first time. Dr.
Dan's old preceptor Henry Palmer was going and his former
dean was secretary general of the Congress. Franklin Martin was
to contribute to the gynecological section. Nicholas Senn of
Milwaukee would read an important paper on intestinal surgery.
With the work of these men Dr. Dan was already familiar. It was
the others he especially wanted to hear. Mills had spent a summer
in European hospitals, but Dr. Dan had not been able to go. Now
Europe was coming here and he embraced the opportunity.
The five days were packed with an exchange of ideas, discov-
eries, theories. The strides being made everywhere under anti-
sepsis, asepsis, and the new bacteriology were extremely stimu-
lating sometimes to the point of irritation and bitterness when
the new school lost patience with the old.
Senn, Milwaukee's patient vivisectionist, argued for two hours
that death from hemorrhage or septic peritonitis was not neces-
sary if surgeons would only dare to operate on the abdomen. A
60 Daniel Hale Williams
buzz of excitement followed his paper. The vigorous-minded were
elated. The cautious held back, making virtue of their "conserva-
tism." The volatile John B. Murphy of Chicago was furious. If
you waited as long as the "conservatives" demanded, you were
performing a post mortem, not an operation. Anyone who did
clean surgery could enter the abdomen any time for explora-
tion and diagnosis as much as for any other reason.
It was apparent the old days were not yet entirely gone. The
discussion on the use of the Caesarean section revealed that of 153
cases in the United States to date, only 56 had recovered. This
long-known method of delivering a child when normal birth
proved impossible was still called into use only as a last resort
and usually too late. The representative from Bellevue Hospital
Medical College, no convert to Listerism, felt that "when per-
formed in a 'healthy locality' away from 'infected hospitals/ the
technique had a fair measure of success."
Dr. Dan saw that many old fogy notions still persisted. He was
beginning to raise his head above the sea of textbook detail in
which his timidity had once buried him. He would not be as
cautious as many at the congress. He agreed with Murphy; it
was not caution, it was cowardice. All you needed was knowl-
edge. He returned to his dissecting.
While Dr. Dan plugged away, change went on around him in
the ever-growing city and in his circle of friends. The new "com-
mercial" and "elevator" buildings shot up here and there simple,
almost functional structures, ten stories high, frankly American,
shorn of European pretense. The new plate glass was letting in
light on Victorian stuffiness and many things were no longer
the same.
Nothing was more surprising than that George Anderson
should suddenly throw off his lethargy and at thirty-five enter
dental school. Or that Theodora Lee should appear one day a
young lady of sixteen come to tell her godfather good-by
before going off to Rockford College. Dr. Dan made her promise
not to use face powder until she was at least eighteen. There
would be a gift then, he assured her, if she kept her promise.
OPERATING IN A BIKING ROOM 6l
Somehow Thedy expected at least a diamond ring for such a
sacrifice and when Dr. Dan presented her instead with long-
handled, pearl-inlaid opera glasses, Thedy was outraged. "He's
always trying to improve me," she stormed to her mother.
It did not occur to Dr. Dan that everyone was not as enchanted
with opera as he was. Ever since the old Exposition Building had
been converted into a vast playhouse for the presentation of opera
in Chicago, he had found surcease there during such times of
relaxation as he permitted himself. And when in December 1889
the ambitious new rival Auditorium on Michigan Avenue was
dedicated in the presence of the governor of the state and the
President of the United States, Dr. Dan was among the first to
secure a ticket.
He had a double interest. Of course he wanted to hear Adelina
Patti sing "Home, Sweet Home." And since it was Traviata's
teacher, Clarence Eddy, who would play the organ, he wanted
to hear him too. But piquancy was added to both events because
Eddy, coming to the famed prima donna's rescue when her regular
accompanist fell ill, had brought no one else than ' Viata to accom-
pany the famous soprano on one or two occasions. It had been
a great feather in their beloved Vytie's cap and all the Anderson-
Bentley clan rejoiced, Dr. Dan with them.
To walk down the street with Dr. Dan in the late 3 8os was to
take inventory of the man's riches in popularity. He knew every-
one's name, had a friendly word or question for all in short, he
was the pleasantest person you could ever want to meet. Plain
folk liked him; he isn't stuck up, they said, he's just Dr. Dan every
time you see him.
He was no longer the young man who had to be helped. Thanks
to hard work, simple ways, and that same canny sense for real
estate values of his Grandfather Price, he was now owner of sev-
eral pieces of property and a substantial member of the com-
munity, one to whom others turned for help and advice. Widows
asked him how to invest their money, and young men how to
get ahead. He encouraged men to venture, to learn skills that
would be lifetime assets.
62 Daniel Hale Williams
"If yon don't aim at something," he told young James Gordon,
"you may go hunting, but you'll come back without a thing."
On Dr. Dan's urging, Gordon learned mechanics and later went
into contract hauling of machinery. He stopped at Dr. Dan's
office one day to tell him how he was getting along. The busy
physician dropped everything and patted the tall thin fellow
on the back.
"So you've gone into business for yourself," Dr. Dan cried.
"I told you so!" Gordon went out proud and full of courage.
Dr. Dan was generous in support of all worthy Negro enter-
prises. At a time when a mechanic earned $ i .75 a day and a woman
cleaned floors all week for three dollars, people gasped with
awe and delight to see their Dr. Dan put a five-dollar bill on the
collection plate at Old Bethel. He attended no one church, but
visited and helped to support them all. His own preference, when
he followed it, was to attend All Souls Unitarian Church on Oak-
wood Avenue and Langley Boulevard, where Jenkin Lloyd Jones,
his Janesville friend and mentor, had come to be minister and
where the congregation was forward-looking, and black and
white sat side by side.
When a vacancy occurred in the Illinois State Board of Health
in the spring of 1889, Joseph W. Fifer, then governor and a
Republican, appointed the promising Dr. Daniel Hale Williams
of Chicago. Dr. Dan's membership in the powerful Hamilton
Club, a Republican organization with few Negro members, but
into which he probably came under the aegis of John Jones's
name, undoubtedly helped secure his appointment.
At that time the Illinois Board of Health, in existence but a
dozen years, was making its way more tolerated than favored
by a purse-tight legislature. It had on it, however, some consid-
erable men. One was the patriarchal Newton Bateman, eminent
author and educator, friend of Abraham Lincoln and now presi-
dent of Knox College at Galesburg. Dr. W. A. Haskett of Alton
was the Board's president. Its secretary, guiding spirit and en-
thusiastic dynamo was Dr. John R. Rauch. Rauch envisaged public
health on nothing less than a global scale. These men, leaders
OPERATING IN A DINING ROOM 63
from other cities and some of them from other walks in life, were
stimulating confreres to the rapidly developing Dr. Dan.
Those were the days when devastating epidemics hit the popu-
lation like a scourge of the Lord. Communities bowed helpless
before the blast, buried their dead, and grimly waited for the fatal
visitation to burn itself out. Diphtheria and scarlet fever came and
went with the seasons. Typhoid struck whole families simulta-
neously. Yellow fever broke out periodically in the lower Missis-
sippi Valley, and frightened Illinois. Cholera and smallpox re-
curred with each wave of immigration. Against such holocausts
the only public health measures were to regulate drains, sewage
and plumbing. The Board wrote many "Rules and Regulations"
in Dr. Dan's day. It did not issue diphtheria antitoxin until^ two
years after he left.
Dr. Dan had studied public health under Oscar DeWolf, who,
as Commissioner of Health in Chicago, had instituted the placard-
ing of scarlet fever despite denouncement for "waste of cards
and tacks." Dr. Dan had learned antisepsis, too, under Edmund
Andrews. He had a vision of other means than sanitation to curb
disease. Possibly other men on the Board, too, understood some-
thing of the germ theory of disease. But the Board was limited
as to funds, all members served without pay, and even the travel
fund could not be stretched over more than four meetings a
year, with an occasional special meeting at the time of some
epidemic. The work of the Board, therefore, devolved largely
upon its secretary and as long as Rauch remained in office, which
he did until 1891, his burning ambition was to mop up all wet
spots, to sanitate and to vaccinate the whole state.
One valuable function the overworked, underfinanced State
Board of Health did perform during Dr. Dan's incumbency:
that was the elevation and strict enforcement of medical practice
standards. The first meeting of the Board Dr. Dan attended in
late June 1889 was typical. The secretary asked the Board that
day for authorization to proceed against Blue Mountain Joe of the
Oregon Indian Medicine Company. The concern was operating
wholesale in the towns of northern Illinois, giving free consul-
64 Daniel Hale Williams
tation to the sick, prescribing medicine during the day and at
night lecturing in public halls. While his outfit staged operatic
performances, Blue Mountain Joe sold such "Indian" concoc-
tions as Modoc Oil, Worm Eradicator, and something called
Katouka.
In the previous two years, twenty-two itinerant showmen and
mountebanks, enjoying sales estimated at $2000 daily, had been
run out of the state. But Blue Mountain Joe was inclined to per-
sist in his lucrative business and had appealed to the courts. A
penny-foolish committee of the legislature was casting lingering
glances after the $11,400 formerly collected in license fees from
these itinerants. The Board had all it could do to protect the
Medical Practices Act and at the same time force out the Blue
Mountain Joes. Five suits had to be brought against "Doctor"
Oregon Charley and four against "Colonel" T. A. Edwards be-
fore the Oregon Indian Medicine Company was put out of business.
The matter of diploma mills was constantly before the Board.
At its February 1890 meeting Dr. Dan never failed in attend-
ance the Chicago Correspondence University was investigated.
This self-styled university had been incorporated by a board of
six directors: a printer, a laborer, a teamster, a lawyer, a book-
keeper, and a stove repairman. No doctor whatever brought dull
reality into its affairs. But every time some such flimsy institution
was outlawed, "graduates" would come squealing to the State
Board of Health that their opportunities of earning a living were
being ruined. So individuals not having diplomas from accredited
medical schools were allowed the opportunity of taking exam-
inations given by the unsalaried doctors of the Board.
Reappointed in 1891, Dr. Dan continued to be a faithful attend-
ant at all meetings of the Board, whether held in Chicago or
Springfield. During the four years of his incumbency he re-
ceived none of the plums; he was never, for instance, a delegate
to the various meetings of the American Public Health Asso-
ciation. Frequently he was the man who moved that someone
else be sent. He would not place them in the predicament of not
being able to send a Negro. And it was usually the punctilious,
OPERATING IN A DINING ROOM 65
gracious Dr. Dan who proposed resolutions of appreciation for
some member leaving the Board. If any of the old timidity re-
mained, it was apparently buried past resurrection.
With the defeat of Joseph W. Fifer by the Democrat Altgeld,
in the gubernatorial campaign, the entire Board went out. Dr.
Dan was succeeded by the elderly William E. Quine, once his
professor in materia medica.
Coming back to his bachelor room one evening after a long
day of hard work, Dr. Dan found a letter from the East. Kittie
May had escaped from her unbearable life. Her illness had not
been long, but she had showed no wish to get well. Despite all
efforts made for her, she had just quietly died.
After that Dr. Dan worked harder, if possible, than ever. A
few knew how great a blow had fallen upon him. Years later one
said, "He took it hard," and another added, "His heart was
broken."
CHAPTER VI
First Interracial Hospital, 1891
ONE blustery day In December 1890 Dr. Dan received a note
from the Reverend Louis H. Reynolds, pastor of St. Stephen's
African Methodist Church, asking him to come over that evening
and discuss a problem. It was another of those requests for help
which came to him frequently from local pastors. That evening,
after his last house call, he drove through heavily falling snow to
the parsonage over on the West Side of Chicago. Years later
James Gordon remembered every detail, remembered Dan's cov-
ering his horse with a blanket. The Reverend Mr. Reynolds
greeted him eagerly and introduced him to his sister Emma. Dan
listened intently to the story they unfolded.
Emma Reynolds was educated and ambitious. She had come on
from Kansas City to join her brother, hoping to get into one
of the new nurses' training courses. Every training school in Chi-
cago had turned her down. No Negroes accepted. Her brother
thought perhaps Dr. Dan with his connections might be able
to help.
"Well," said Dr. Dan when they had finished, "here we are,
only twenty-six years since Emancipation!" He frowned and
shook his head, biting at his mustache. As a matter of fact he had
been mulling over an idea for a long time. Perhaps now the mo-
ment had come for action.
The trained nurse was a recent arrival on the Chicago medical
FIRST INTERRACIAL HOSPITAL, 1891 6j
scene. Inevitably antisepsis, asepsis and bacteriology must end
the bedside regime of both the devoted servant and the religious
Samaritan. As doctors adopted the new techniques they required
nurses able to understand and abide by their instructions. The
change came slowly, just as the new surgery came slowly. There
was inertia to be overcome and determined opposition in some
quarters where the spoils system persisted.
Dr. Dan was among those who welcomed the increasing num-
ber of trained nurses. But he went further. As soon as he saw
this new profession taking form, he saw what an opportunity it
was for the energies and capabilities of colored women a means
of self-expression, of earning a living, of raising health standards
among the uneducated of the race. He longed to see them enter
this newly open door abreast of white women. But even before
Emma Reynolds appealed to him, he had realized that the reluc-
tant acceptance, if it could be won, of one colored student here
and another there would not open the door wide enough or soon
enough.
The matter had its daily practical side for Dr. Dan. Old Aunty
Babcock was too sick to be left alone. She must have a nurse.
But where could he find a nurse Aunty would trust, who would
not add to her worries and tensions, however unwittingly? Aunty
would never feel at ease with a white woman around. And here
was another problem: Mrs. Danvers must have an hysterectomy,
but how to get her a private hospital room? That proud, culti-
vated woman must not be shoved into a charity ward, as Negroes
invariably were. Dr. Dan wanted to operate on her himself. But
what hospital would allow him the privilege? That operation
could not be done on a dining room table.
It was hopeless, waiting to get on a hospital staff. If William
Morgan, a full professor now, couldn't get a regular staff appoint-
ment, who could? And these younger colored doctors, colored
doctors of darker hue, one or two more of them coming out of
medical school each year. What of them? Where were they to
get interneships or find a theater for their professional work?
Unless Negroes founded a hospital of their own, the whole
68 Daniel tide Williams
progress of the race in medicine and nursing, in health care and
health education would be slowed down for years to come. You
couldn't wait for white people to see the light. You had to tackle
things yourself.
All these things Dr. Dan had been turning over in his mind for
months before he sat talking with the Reverend Mr. Reynolds
and his sister in their lamplit parlor that stormy December eve-
ning. In his more optimistic moments he told himself a Negro
hospital was not an impossibility. Weren't there now some two
hundred Negro enterprises in Chicago, in twenty-seven different
fields? And enough Negroes to sustain twenty churches, a dozen
or so lodges, three weekly newspapers. Why not a hospital?
But it should not be a hospital for Negroes only. It must be
interracial, open to all, regardless of race or creed owned, oper-
ated and staffed by white and black together. It must be a hos-
pital that would not only solve the medical problems of the Negro,
but point the way to new and better interracial understanding and
interracial co-operation.
While he was working on the Illinois State Board of Health,
Dr. Dan saw the need for more hospitals, not only for the colored,
but for everybody. Hospitals were the only safe place for proper
care of the sick; they were a demonstration of proper hygiene
and diet; they were the necessary teaching laboratory for internes
and nurses alike.
For long months these ideas had kept teasing his mind. Now
at last, here in the Reverend Mr. Reynolds's parlor, he was con-
fronted with an immediate, concrete need. It was no longer a
question of his own plan, but of Emma Reynolds's dilemma
and beyond her all the others: young colored women, colored
doctors, colored patients. With that shift his dream was focused,
his energies were released.
"No," he said to Louis and Emma Reynolds, but he said it
smiling, "I don't think I'll try to get Miss Reynolds into a training
course. We'll do something better. We'll start a hospital of our
own and we'll train dozens and dozens of nurses!"
Like a southern Wisconsin windstorm, Dr. Dan swung into
FIRST INTERRACIAL HOSPITAL, 1891 6$
action. Within a matter of days he had swept dozens of his friends,
black and white, onto committees and put them to work.
He asked his friend Lloyd Wheeler to arrange rallies all over
the West and South sides. This was a master stroke, for Lloyd
Wheeler whom he had once taken with him to spend a Christ-
mas in Janesville had married Mrs. Jones's adopted daughter,
Raynie Petit, and become manager of all the Jones business in-
terests. He was heir, in a way, to John Jones's prestige. Known
as "a good dresser," "an elegant mixer," and a man able to talk
on any subject, the popular Wheeler made every meeting tingle
with enthusiasm.
Another of Dr. Dan's closest friends, James Madden, first col-
ored bookkeeper to work in a Chicago white firm, constituted
himself auditor and "never missed a duty and kept every detail
straight." The preachers of the community gave their moral
support to Dr. Dan's venture as he had given financial support to
theirs. They turned over their churches for meetings and they
served on his boards and committees: two bishops, John M. Brown
and B. F. Arnett, and a half dozen pastors George W. Gaines,
Louis H. Reynolds, of course, J. F. Thomas, R. E. Knight, and
the educated, eloquent John T. Jenifer whose daughter was
another of Dr. Dan's growing list of godchildren. White pastors
helped too: Dr. Dan's old friend, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and the
famous writer, liberal lecturer and minister of Plymouth Congre-
gational Church, F. W. Gunsaulus.
Many other persons whose names are cherished in Chicago
Negro history joined the undertaking. Captain John R. Marshall
of Company A, later to be colonel when Company A was ex-
panded into the Illinois 8th Regiment, and later still to be first
colored deputy sheriff in Chicago, was an ardent supporter. He
brought in the brilliant Franklin A. Denison, valedictorian of his
class at the Union College of Law and recently appointed assistant
city prosecuting attorney. The businessmen came in too: Theo-
dore Wellington Jones, born among the Negro refugees in Canada
and, now nearing forty, the successful owner of a furniture transit
company and soon to be a member of the Board of Commissioners
70 Daniel Hale Williams
of Cook County. Mr. Jones represented South Side business In-
terests. From the West Side colony came R. M. Hancock, colored
foreman of the big Allis Chalmers Machine Shop, who did honor
to his position by always appearing on Sundays in a plug hat,
a Prince Albert coat, and shiny speckless boots. When Mr. Han-
cock presided at one of the rallies for Dr. Dan's Hospital, Ms
very presence gave tone to the proceedings.
Tirelessly Dr. Dan travelled from group to group, putting the
situation before them. Like his father, preferring deeds to words,
he spoke simply, quietly, rapidly, without emotional appeal. He
laid it before them the need among the poor, the great oppor-
tunity for colored young women and colored doctors, the way
it could be worked out. They'd have to start small, of course. But
what Chicago hospital had not started small? Mercy Hospital,
he told them, had had only a dozen beds at first; Wesley, but
six. St. Luke's had begun in a small frame house. He thought the
three-story brick flat building on the southwest corner of Dear-
born and 2 pth Streets would do nicely for a start. There was
room for twelve beds, and they ought not to tackle more at first.
He reported that his friends at Chicago Medical College and
at Mercy Hospital were interested and would help service the
new venture; the new hospital would have the best men in the
city on its staff. Eventually they might open a dispensary and
handle even more cases without much more overhead. Of course
it would take some capital. He himself would give two hundred
dollars and P. D. Armour of F. W. Gunsaulus's congregation
would give an equal amount! At this point pandemonium broke
out and Lloyd Wheeler pounded in vain for silence.
Every meeting some of them were held in the fiat of Mrs.
J. C. Plummer on the southwest corner of Dearborn and 3oth
Streets, some in the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on
the southeast corner, and others elsewhere every meeting ended
more enthusiastically than the last. A hospital where Negroes
would be received on an equal basis, a hospital Negroes would
run! It was thrilling to think of it; it drew the whole neighbor-
hood together in mutual hope and fellowship. At every supper
FIRST INTERRACIAL HOSPITAL, 1891 Jl
table, from the home of the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones to that
of Jesse Binga, the vegetable huckster, Dr. Dan's hospital was
the main subject of conversation.
And then word got around that there were dissenters. At the
next meeting the opposition came out into the open. John G.
Jones, head of the colored Masons, called for the floor. "Mr.
Chairman," he cried, "are we self-respecting people, or aren't we? "
Jones was an able lawyer, would go to the state legislature,
but he was a man of negative turn. "Indignation" Jones they
called him. He was against a great many things, particularly those
in which he had not been consulted from the start. Dr. Dan had
failed to approach the man earlier and now he was against Dr,
Dan's hospital because, according to him, it was going to be a
segregated hospital.
"I'd let colored people die in the streets," he shouted, "and
be eaten up by flies before I'd put them in a separate hospital!"
Murmurs of approval could be heard here and there. The com-
mittee hastened to explain that all sick and suffering would be
admitted to Dr. Dan's hospital, all, no matter what color of skin,
what nationality or what religion.
"What about the nurses?" challenged Jones.
The battle was on then between the theorists and the realists.
It lasted a long time and grew more and more legalistic. Finally
Fannie Barrier Williams, wife of the up-and-coming colored
lawyer, S. Laing Williams, another of Jenkin Lloyd Jones's con-
gregation, rose to her feet. Mrs. Williams was a lecturer and jour-
nalist in her own right; moreover, she was pretty. Years before,
during the Civil War, her father had sat beside Dr. Dan's father
at the National Convention of Free Colored Men in Syracuse.
She was shoulder to shoulder with Dr. Dan now persuasive,
intelligent, a woman ahead of her time.
"But don't you see," she said, with all the appeal of voice and
smile she could bring to bear, "there are other training schools for
white women, but none at all for colored women. Why let white
women take any of the few places we'll have open, at least at
the start?"
J2 Daniel Hale Williams
While this was sinking in, she deftly set them laughing by
pointing to Charles Bentley, "Dr. Bentley has to have teeth to
work on or he can't be a dentist," she said, "and our nurses will
have to have patients to train on or they can't become nurses."
She reminded them that the patients would be white as well as
colored and that the doctors would be colored as well as white.
This was so reasonable that the opposition seemed to be dying
out when Edward H. Morris, another lawyer, arose. Morris,
elected the previous year to the state legislature, had built a three-
story flat building at Dearborn and 27th Streets.
"I'm not against the hospital," he said, "Fm just against the
location."
Mr. Morris wanted to know what a house full of sick and dying
was going to do to property values. "Some of us have heavy in-
vestments in that neighborhood," he said, "and look what hap-
pened when that undertaking place opened up . . ."
Laughter burst forth and Lloyd Wheeler took the opportunity
to point out that after all Dr. Dan would be on the job and every-
one wasn't going to die. If folks would send their sick to the hos-
pital before they got too bad, they'd have a better chance of being
cured. Then he asked, "Dr. Dan, don't you own some property
yourself in that neighborhood?"
The contrary Jones had one more try. He declared it cost
money to run a hospital and challenged anyone to show him
one hospital in the whole country supported by colored people.
Dr. Dan could not stand this defeatism. He jumped up with eyes
blazing.
"It's about rime then!" he cried. "Look at the foreigners in this
country. I don't care how poor they are, how uneducated. They
have the humanitarian spirit to provide for their own sick and
injured. Every single nationality has done so. And they don't
number one tenth of us colored people." Words poured from him.
For once his calm had deserted him; he pounded the table passion-
ately. "A people who don't make provision for their own sick
and suffering," he said, "are not worthy of civilization."
The hall burst into cheers. John G. Jones was completely
FIRST INTERRACIAL HOSPITAL, 1891 73
silenced, and organization now proceeded apace. Two ladies*
auxiliaries were formed one on the West Side under the presi-
dency of Mrs. Mollie Green, another on the South Side headed
by Mrs. Connie Curl The ladies held ice cream socials and potato-
collecting parties to raise funds. Dr. Dan found time to attend
every affair. He was the brains behind every committee, he was
the dynamo that kept them all going. With P. D. Armour's gift
to cite and Jenkin Lloyd Jones to back him up, he approached
others on Millionaire Row. H. H. Kohlsaat gave another $200, as
did Miss Florence Pullman of the sleeping-car interests just now
being defied by Clarence Darrow on behalf of the workers. Dr.
F. C. Greene gave still another $200. Rabbi Emil Hirsch, pleased
with the interracial aspect of the project, influenced the Young
Men's Hebrew Association to contribute $100.
There was one gift of $75 and four of $50 and that was the
extent of the larger contributions. The rest was collected bit by
bit, a task to which Fannie Barrier Williams lent her charm and
her capabilities. Donations came from both white and colored and
mostly in comparable amounts. The Sunday School of the Third
Presbyterian Church gave $41.41; Bethel Church took up a special
collection of $7 and there was a Christmas collection of $11.25.
In such small amounts and even smaller was the total of $2,1 14.03
finally achieved. It would take twice that much to buy a minimum
of equipment and meet current expenses the first year. But most
of the community was now supporting the project and there were
promises to continue contributions throughout the year, month
by month.
On January 23, 1891, articles of incorporation were drawn up
in the name of the Provident Hospital and Training School Asso-
ciation. Dr. Dan himself insisted on the impersonal name, but many
people continued to call it Dr. Dan's Hospital for a long time.
Those who signed the historic document birth certificate of the
institution that was to be a beacon in the wilderness of Negro
medical care and education, progenitor and pattern for a hundred
such institutions today were all colored and all ministers ex-
cept Madden. The top line was left blank and never filled in. The
74 Daniel Hale Williams
busy Dr. Dan, after writing out the document, was called away
before he could sign it.
The endeavor grew by leaps and bounds. An advisory board of
white people was formed. It included the Honorable Walter Q.
Gresham, former Postmaster General, member of the Hamilton
Club and frequently spoken of as Presidential timber; the Rev-
erend F. W. Gunsaulus; and two doctors from Chicago Medical
College, Frank S. Johnson and Ralph N. Isham. This white board,
however, was purely advisory. The trustees, the executive com-
mittee and the finance committee, on whom fell the real burden
of the enterprise, all were colored. The genius of the whole
affair lay in the fact that behind these committees and officers
was a large membership organization, the Provident Hospital
Association, of which every donor was a member. That meant
almost everybody who was anybody in colored Chicago and a
great many white people besides.
There was much to do in the three months that intervened
before the hospital could open. While Dr. Dan secured the equip-
ment, the neighborhood poured in their gifts. Practically every
household donated something. Mrs. Lloyd Wheeler gave a parlor
stove, Mrs. David McGowan a clothes wringer; Mrs. Austin M.
Curtis, six yards of chiffon lace for the nurses' caps. The S. Laing
Williamses presented a portrait in crayon of Herman H. Kohlsaat,
already beloved in the community for his gift of a library to the
colored people. The Williamses sent books too, Half Hours With
Great Authors, Looking Backward^ and some others.
One day as willing hands were scrubbing and painting and
putting the flat building into final shape, a commotion occurred at
the door. On the high stoop stood old Preacher Galloway, waving
his arms and crying; "May the Lord lay His curse on this work of
evil!" Preacher Galloway was as negative about new things as
"Indignation" Jones and much more indignant.
Laughter rang out in answer, yet trailed off a little nervously
when the infuriated man shouted next: "May the whole place burn
to the ground before sunrise! A-men!" The building, however,
still stood intact the next day and the Reverend Mr. Galloway
FIRST INTERRACIAL HOSPITAL, 1891 75
had made the mistake of putting himself on record a little too
explicitly.
At last all was in readiness and Provident Hospital threw wide
its doors. The whole South Side poured in for the grand opening
benefit party on May 4, 1891, only eighteen months after Emma
Reynolds had sought a hospital where she might learn nursing.
Every one was in a happy, expansive mood all Dr. Dan's old
friends, all who had worked so hard on the committees. Among
them was pretty Alice Smith, now Mrs. Jackson, the Indian girl
from Oconomowoc, who had come with Traviata to visit when
Dr. Dan was a struggling student. Mrs. Jackson took charge of
the American booth. Colorfully bedecked booths of all countries
turned the first floor into an international parade ground gay with
streamers, flags and bunting. Countless homemade cakes and
gallons of ice cream sold out as soon as they were placed in
view.
In the crowd wandered ]. M. Johnson. He had once been a
porter in a boot and shoe emporium and had risen to become a
well-to-do boot and shoe merchant. But he had never been able
to throw off the frugality which had enabled him to make that
transition. Suddenly Mr. Johnson was impelled to do a strange
thing. He led two elderly ladies up to a booth and bought them
dishes of ice cream. When James Gordon saw that he rushed over
and told Dr. Dan a new era had indeed started.
After the opening, scores of families kept up month-by-month
contributions from their own stores: sheets, beds, a bundle of
old linen, sugar, soap, blackcurrant jelly, and loaves of bread on
baking day. The ladies' auxiliaries remained faithful. From time
to time, Charles H. Smiley, the fashionable caterer, sent a can
of assorted French ices, remainder of some gala event on the Gold
Coast, Every evening Huckster Binga, one day to be a banker and
contributor of more worldly goods, brought his leftover potatoes
and vegetables and donated them to the hospital larder.
In all the long lists of donors and their gifts, only one
item carried a money valuation: "Hall: Japanese screen, worth
$6.50."
76 Daniel Hale Williams
Whatever Dr. Dan's hospital lacked in the way of space and
equipment was made up for by the galaxy of medical and surgical
names with which he was able to embellish its staff. There were
few higher in Chicago. Busy men lent their names and, when
needed, gave advice. Frank Billings, now full professor of physical
diagnosis and secretary of Chicago Medical College, was chief
consulting physician. The great Christian Fenger was consulting
surgeon. Ralph N. Isham at sixty, so generous with his services
as unpaid professor at Chicago Medical, gave both money and
time to his former student's project. He and Dr. Dan were the
attending surgeons. Then there were W. W. Jaggard and Henry
T. Byford of the Chicago Medical faculty, and Horace Starkey
who taught alongside Dr. Dan in the South Side Dispensary;
these were consulting obstetrician, gynecologist and oculist-
aurist, respectively.
When it came to adding Negroes to the staff, Dr. Dan had
difficulty. His standards were unrelentingly high, like those of
the men with whom he had studied and been associated. It was
important to himself as a serious professional man, to his position
on the Illinois State Board of Health, to those who had consented
to lend their names to his project, and above all, he felt, for the
honor of the Negro race that everyone connected with this ven-
ture should be soundly trained and properly qualified to serve
the sick. All the more so since the Negro in the eyes of many
would be on trial here. He wanted to use Negroes on the staff
as soon as they were ready for it, but not before. And here he ran
into some difficulties.
There was no question about Traviata's husband, Charles
Bentley. He was eminently fitted to be their oral surgeon. He had
been a clinician for three years in the Rush Dispensary, had re-
cently accepted a full professorship in oral surgery at Harvey
Medical College, and was credited with being the first dentist in
Chicago to use cocaine as a local anesthetic. There was ample
recognition of Bentley's ability in the fact he had just served as
president of the city-wide Odontographic Society.
Another highly qualified colored man was Allen A. Wesley, who
FIRST INTERRACIAL HOSPITAL, 1891 77
had been on the faculty of Fisk University before he entered Chi-
cago Medical College. Both before and after taking his M. D., he
had been clinical assistant to Dr. Walter Hay as well as to Isham.
With Byford in consultation, Wesley could be very safely relied
upon for the gynecological cases.
For the one interneship to be filled there was Austin M. Curtis,
just being graduated at Chicago Medical. Curtis was intelligent
and willing, not reluctant to spend the night, if need be, with Dr.
Dan in scrubbing the walls and floor of the small bedroom that
served as operating room in order to be ready for an early morning
operation. And as soon as Curtis could complete his interneship,
Elmer E. Barr would be through Rush and ready to step into his
shoes.
Another Negro applied for a place on the staff. He was George
C. Hall, the man who had given the hospital a screen worth $6.50.
Hall had been practicing medicine about two years, mainly in the
red light district His medical degree came from an Eclectic school.
He was not well trained. From Dr. Dan's point of view he was
not qualified. Others on the Board, more sentimental, eager to
have another Negro on the roster, perhaps liking Hall's affable
ways, urged his appointment. Dr. Dan finally compromised by
allowing Hall to be appointed to the children's department.
He made no compromises about the nurses' school. The training
period was set for eighteen months, as long as any in the city.
The instruction, Dr. Dan insisted, must be "most rigid," in-
cluding all details of antiseptic preparation and nursing for sur-
gery as well as care of serious medical cases. After a year he
could say the advantages to students "are equal to those of any
training school in the Northwest." All applicants had to be "fairly
educated" and exhibit punctuality, personal neatness, general
order, a gentle voice and manner, and a patient temper. "Let the
nurse cultivate these qualities," said Dr. Dan, "together with a
Christian, loving spirit." After the initial weeding-out process
none was encouraged to remain who did not exhibit- real aptitude
for the work. Seven young women enrolled in that historic first
class, including of course Emma Reynolds.
78 Dcnml Hale Williams
Conservative Dr. Dan had thought It best to begin cautiously
with a twelve-bed establishment. But so great was the response
to the new hospital that within a few months it became necessary
to move the student nurses into rented quarters nearby in order
to make room for the influx of patients. At the end of the first
year, Dr. Dan made a public report of the work. Of 1 89 sick and
injured, 23 had improved, he said, 3 had not, 22 died, and 141 re-
covered entirely. It was a ratio of which any hospital could be
proud, especially in a time when only the most desperate cases
were taken to a hospital. While the majority of patients served
were Afro-American the interracial policy was maintained and
12 Irish, 6 Germans and Swedes, and 17 "others" were cared for.
"Although we lacked means and proper equipment," Dr. Dan
said, "through the generosity of friends we have been able to give
perfect care and treatment to such patients as our limited capacity
permitted." As for the nurses' training school, many of the most
influential persons of the city had inspected it and had given
"their unqualified approval for its practical workings." What was
needed now, especially in view of the approaching World's Fair,
was enlarged facilities. "We sincerely trust," Dr. Dan said, "that
before the close of another year a new and more modern building
with most approved appointments will enable us to accomplish
everything required of a modern hospital."
This dream could be brought about, he continued, in many
ways. "You can not only make bequests," he enumerated, "and
help endow beds, but you can subscribe a certain sum monthly
on the cards distributed by the Auxiliary Societies . . . collect
funds among your acquaintances . . . send jellies and fruit from
your tables . . . arnica, Pond's Extract, Brown's Ginger, plasters,
camphor from your medicine chests . . . old rags from your linen
closets."
He made them feel there was nothing they could not do for
their hospital "If you live in the country," he said, "beg from
the farmers potatoes, butter, eggs and vegetables of all kinds."
And then he reminded them, "You can speak a good word for the
hospital when you are among strangers, and you can pray for it."
FIRST INTERRACIAL HOSPITAL, 1891 79
People did pray for Provident Hospital, and they danced for it
too. The Chicago colored group's first full-dress affair was a
charity ball held in the 2nd Regiment Armory on the evening
of February 25, 1892. The event was not only a gala one whose
memory some preserved for fifty years in a creased, yellowed
invitation with flourishing script reading "Yourself and ladies are
invited . . ." but, what was more to the point, it netted the new
hospital $231.15, and reduced the first year's deficit, on outlay
for equipment, to only $795.78. This could easily be absorbed in
the second year's operation.
Three fourths of the cases coming to the new hospital were
surgical. Some were accident cases from the stockyards and the
railways. Others were Dr. Dan's personal patients. His interest
in surgery was growing more and more and he decided to do some
special study in abdominal and pelvic anatomy with F. Byron
Robinson, just back from six months spent in England with the
great experimenter, Lawson Tait.
While Robinson taught in various of the inferior schools and
published in the less fashionable firms, the discerning recognized
his caliber. Christian Fenger said his research on the peritoneum
was a classic. Another gave Robinson credit for changing the
entire aspect of abdominal surgery. A third, while he considered
Robinson the best man in Chicago with whom to study gyne-
cology, added, "Provided you can keep from killing him after
you have endured him for a week."
However much Dr. Dan may have been troubled by Robinson's
rude manners, he admired the man's fever for work and passion
for dissection. Robinson signally helped Dr. Dan to move out of
the confines of internal medicine and into surgery.
About this time Chicago Medical College effected a closer union
with Northwestern University and, dropping the old name en-
tirely, moved to new and larger quarters on Dearborn between
24th and 25th Streets. The move brought about an expansion of
postgraduate opportunities and Dr. Dan, now ten years out of
medical college and determined not to drop behind in the march
of science, promptly enrolled in a course in bacteriology. The
8o Daniel Hale Williams
subject, still so nebulous in his own college days, had by now
assumed a form and stature he felt demanded study. He could
squeeze it in; it was only a quick walk of four blocks from his
hospital to the university.
His small hospital demanded constant attention. Still he found
time in this busy year to prepare his first medical paper. He wrote
it despite lack of encouragement.
Dr. Dan had not been asked to join the exclusive South Side
Medico-Social Society founded by a small group of his college
contemporaries in :he year of his graduation. This circle, secret
at the time, enjoyed making each meeting a white-tie-and-tails
affair. They ate an expensive dinner together in a South Side
hotel and then listened to each other's papers preparatory to get-
ting themselves "suggested" at one of the larger medical societies
where they all duly appeared to "discuss" the paper and enhance
each other's reputations. At least five of these men were Dr.
Dan's personal friends Franklin Martin, Frank Billings, L. L.
McArthur, Otto Schmidt, and E. Wyllys Andrews. But they were
not a majority in the social club and Dr. Dan was not included.
So, with no logrolling, but with Fenger's blessing, Dr. Dan
presented his maiden effort before the Gynecological Society on
a March night in 1893 when a strong lake wind beat upon the
windows and rattled a loose sash. The noise competed unsuc-
cessfully, however, with Dr. Dan's well-schooled voice and man-
ner. He had faced rowdy classrooms and had aroused the interest
of bored indifferent claims courts. He knew how to get and to
hold attention.
His paper was a short one on appendicitis and supplementary
to a longer discussion of that subject which Fenger was to read
the same evening.
Appendicitis was a highly controversial subject just then. Dr.
Reginald Heber Fitz had read his famous paper in 1886 establish-
ing the responsibility of an inflamed appendix for the condition
previously defined vaguely as inflammation of the bowels, cholera
morbus, or, later, perityphlitis, Fitz had urged that procedure in
such cases be radical: if the symptoms did not subside within
FIRST INTERRACIAL HOSPITAL, 1891 8l
twenty-four hours, he declared the surgeon should remove the
offending appendix at once. But Fitz was not immediately con-
vincing.
The conservatives and the progressives drew up in two battle
lines that stretched clear across the country. A bitter contest
waged between them for years and nowhere was the engagement
hotter than in the Middle West. In the spring of 1888 Will Mayo
reported nine cases to the Minnesota State Medical Society and
urged a waiting period before operating. In 1889 Jhn B. Murphy
appeared before the Chicago Medical Society with thirteen case
histories and insisted unequivocally upon early surgical interven-
tion. He was shouted down. Now four years later, the internal
medicine men were still stubborn about yielding the field to the
surgeons. Fenger was among those who held back and Dr. Dan
held back too.
He presented two cases of successful delayed operations, one
case of fatality where operation had been refused by the patient,
and five cases of which four had recovered without operation.
He had employed catharsis, he said, and local heat both of
which have since gone into the discard and he wrongly de-
duced a possible infection of the appendix from the caecum, in-
stead of vice versa.
The members present, who had braved the inclement weather
to come, on the whole agreed with him. Robinson, who was there,
gave it as his opinion that appendicitis occurred oftener in men
than in women another premise since discarded. It would be
fourteen years before Murphy would return to the Chicago Medi-
cal Society with two thousand cases to back up his thesis for im-
mediate operation and no voice would be left to oppose him. Dr.
Dan might shake his head ruefully over this paper in later years,
but he was in excellent company at the time.
What best characterized Dr. Dan's contribution was his minute
and inclusive observation before diagnosis. After he sat down,
Fenger remarked that "Dr. Williams has noted facts of utmost im-
portance." His conservatism did not come from failure to be in-
formed about the new; his brief paper revealed a broad knowledge
8 2 Daniel Hale Williams
of both prevailing schools of thought. It came rather from a tem-
peramental thoroughness and attention to detail. It was not an im-
proper characteristic for a young surgeon. Innovation would
come, and soon, and be just as thoroughly grounded on obser-
vation.
During the first six months of '93, Dr. Dan had to work hard to
keep Provident Hospital on its feet. There was the inevitable
slump in enthusiasm that attends every new venture. It was mag-
nified by the national economic situation. The country was going
through another of its recurring depressions, this time more severe
than ever. At one point it seemed the World's Fair itself must go
on the rocks. But new money was poured in and the magnificent
spectacle stretching along the lake front opened in May, only add-
ing to Dr. Dan's burdens. He was on the Sanitary Board for the
Fair, which meant extra duties. And his sisters, Alice -and Florence,
with young Zellie Ridgley came on from Annapolis to see the pag-
eantry. He had to find rooms for the girls and spend rime taking
them around.
Dr. Dan spent some time, too, with the aging Frederick Doug-
lass. The great Negro leader, a hunted slave in his twenties, an in-
ternationally famous editor and orator in middle life, had now for
years been a trusted government representative. Back from service
as United States Minister to Haiti, Douglass was in Chicago as
Haitian Commissioner to the Fair. Dr. Dan's mother called Doug-
lass "cousin" and there were family traditions linking Dr. Dan's
grandmother, his mother's mother, with the same plantation and
the same white inheritance that produced the great race leader.
Dr. Dan was glad of the opportunity to see more of his famous
kinsman than had been possible in the past.
Douglass, after delivering an oration at the Fair denouncing the
ever-increasing lynching of Negroes in the South an oration,
the Tribune said, that "burned itself into memory" came to the
South Side and lectured in Bethel Church. Then, shaking back his
long white mane and striding along with the Indian erectness that
was his heritage an erectness that belied his seventy-six years
FIRST INTERRACIAL HOSPITAL, 189! 83
Douglass brought the lecture proceeds of $50.25 in his own hands
and presented them to Dr. Dan's little hospital which so badly
needed them. On one side he was escorted by Fannie Barrier Wil-
liams and on the other by the militant race journalist Ida B. Wells.
Dr. Dan came out in his white coat to lead the honored guest up
the high stoop and into the country's first and only interracial hos-
pital while "every Negro in Chicago" stood on the curb. If there
was anyone who did not know before where Provident Hospital
was, he knew now.
Dr. Dan had other worries than money in those first years of
operating Provident Hospital He found it difficult to find the
right young women to train as nurses. The first year 175 applied
for training, but few were of the right sort. A people straining
every nerve to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, to es-
cape from the servant class, saw no difference at first between the
bedside work of the past and this new "trained" nursing. A girl
who had gone to high school, and those were the girls Dr. Dan
wanted, felt she was taking a step backward if she entered nursing.
Dr. Dan had to write betters all over the country, urging friends,
relatives and acquaintances to send him recruits. Isabella Garnett
came from Minnesota; Mabel Williams, his cousin's daughter,
came from Rockford. Others came in strange and devious ways,
hearing of the new opportunity from preachers, teachers or the
few colored doctors. For many it was an upheaval of major mag-
nitude involving a trip from a distance and a break with old ties
and old ways. Dr. Dan's nursing course precipitated a sort of revo-
lution in many a colored home. One of his first and most success-
ful graduates was a young Canadian, Jessie Sleet, who, after her
venturesome training, went on to New York City to become the
first colored woman to do district nursing for the Charity Organ-
ization Society, and trained many other young Negroes in her
field.
They went so far, these first brave pioneers, because Dr. Dan
coached them well. Not only were they drilled to soldierly obedi-
ence and precision in their work and made to feel that anything
less than perfection was not enough. They were carefully In-
4 Daniel Hale Williams
structed as well in how to maintain the dignity of their person
and their profession. Their superintendent must always be ad-
dressed as "Miss," no matter how small and modest the hospital in
which they served. And they themselves must insist upon being
called "Miss"; a practical measure to this end was never to tell
their first names to patient or patient's family. Thoroughgoing Dr.
Dan overlooked nothing.
Times grew worse. Wages were slashed, unemployment in-
creased, and then came bank failures and a currency famine.
Homeless transients crowded the saloons and the indomitable
Frances Willard from Janesville, now a nationally famous temper-
ance advocate, went around trying to mop up the grogshops.
More sick people needed charity and fewer people were ready to
give to charity. It was a trying time for Dr. Dan. One of his young
student nurses, Isabella Garnett, later remembered how old and
worn he looked at this time, though he was only thirty-seven.
More than once she saw him reach into his own pocket and give
the superintendent money for the day's food. Dr. Dan himself
usually ate with the young interne Austin Curtis, whose little
sister Hattie brought him a basket lunch each day from home.
While they ate, they talked, and during those sessions young
Curtis learned much from his chief.
In these hard times contributions from less wealthy persons had
fallen off. True, Armour and Kohlsaat and Miss Pullman contin-
ued to give liberally, but Dr. Dan had to have more money.
Judge Barnes in the Hamilton Club was his good friend. The
judge spoke to his law partner, George H. Webster, about Dr.
Dan's hospital and Webster, with his Puritanism and almost bel-
ligerent sense of racial justice, was easily persuaded to increase his
original small contribution.
So Provident was able to hang on, even in years of financial
ptoic. But Dr. Dan had to abandon for the time being all thought
of a new building. That must wait for better times.
CHAPTER VII
'Sewed Up His Heart!'
EARLY July '93 was desperately hot in Chicago. People sought
relief at the lake shore or rode about on the cable cars. Often the
horses drawing the cars fell in their tracks and had to be replaced.
Men were warned to place a cabbage leaf inside their hats before
venturing on the streets. Despite precautions, many suffered heat
prostrations and doctors were kept busy.
Tempers rose and on July 9 in a saloon not far from Provident
Hospital irascibility flared into a brawl. A man was stabbed. The
victim was a sturdy young Negro expressman, James Cornish. He
was rushed to Provident. He could not say what kind of knife
his assailant had wielded or how long the blade was. Dr. Dan ex-
amined the wound. It appeared to be only about an inch long, sit-
uated about three-quarters of an inch to the left of the breastbone,
between the fourth and fifth ribs. The wound seemed superficial.
The absence of external bleeding or evidence of internal hemor-
rhage gave no hint of deeper injury.
But after a while Cornish began to suffer persistent pain over
the region of the heart and to show pronounced symptoms of
shock. Dr. Dan concluded that one or more of the important
blood vessels must have been injured, perhaps the heart itself. As
he finished his examination and straightened up, he silently re-
viewed the situation. What shduld he do?
The X ray had not yet been invented, so he could not know
86 Daniel Hale Wittiatm
what condition lay within. Most writers on cardiac or thoracic
matters gave warning to leave heart wound cases strictly alone.
Keep the patient as quiet and as cool as possible. Some doctors
said to pack the patient in ice or, if you had no ice, to put him in
a cool cellar. The rest must be left to Providence. But surely, Dr.
Dan thought, a surgeon could do something.
He knew that the heart had been revered by the ancients as the
seat of life "the chief mansion of the Soul, the organ of the vitall
faculty" and any wound in it was regarded as inevitably fatal.
To interfere with destiny would be blasphemous. This attitude
had persisted until the middle of the seventeenth century when
someone noticed that not all cases of heart injury were fatal. After
that records were kept and it was seen that in fact a good many
recovered without, of course, any medical or surgical aid.
To wonder as Dr. Dan was doing whether a surgeon might not
assist recovery in such cases was a much bigger step forward. In
some desperate cases of pericardial effusion, doctors had success-
fully used the aspirating needle to evacuate the fluid in the outer
sac of the heart where it might interfere with heart action and
cause the patient's death. But blood vessels and nerves, so abun-
dant in this vulnerable area, were often injured by these blind at-
tacks. Some patients died and the method was already in disrepute.
Not long before Dr. Dan's graduation from Chicago Medical, a
Dr. Block in Danzig had conducted vivisectional experiments on
rabbits and dogs and from them concluded that death could often
be prevented if there were not so much dread of opening the tho-
racic cavity. A simple incision of the pericardium and suture
would take only a few minutes, he said.
Block's experiments led John B. Roberts of Philadelphia to go
further. Roberts argued that if cardiac distension and pulmonary
engorgement could be relieved successfully by aspiration, then
cutting through a portion of the intercostal cartilege and incising
the pericardium should be a reasonably safe procedure. He ven-
tured to add that "the time may possibly come when wounds of
the heart itself will be treated by pericardial incision to allow ex-
traction of clots and perhaps to suture the heart muscle."
"SEWED UP HIS HEART!" 87
Dr. Dan had read Roberts's article In the Chicago Medical Jour-
nal and Examiner when he was a senior student and he remem-
bered it now, remembering too that Roberts had not fulfilled his
own prophecy, nor had anyone else so far as he had ever read.
The eminent surgeons of the world had not looked favorably on
Block's or Roberts's suggestions. The German, Theodor Billroth,
a man of standing and by no means a timid surgeon Dr. Dan
used his text in college utterly condemned the idea. "Any sur-
geon," Billroth charged, "who would attempt to suture a wound
of the heart is not worthy of the serious consideration of his col-
leagues." That made a man stop and think.
Only two years before, in 1891, C. W. Mansell Mollin's book
on Surgery had reached America. Many regarded it as the a best
in the English language," and yet all that Mollin, Fellow of the
Royal College of Surgeons, could say was that the only treatment
"likely to be of any avail is absolute rest, cold, and opium; vene-
section has been recommended to relieve the heart, but it can very
rarely be necessary. The external wound may be closed in the
hope of arresting hemorrhage; but it must not be forgotten that
accumulation of blood in the pericardium is one of the common
causes of death. On one occasion I attempted to close the wound
with sutures."
It was aggravating that Mollin had broken off abruptly at this
point without saying why he had abandoned his attempt or what
the outcome to his patient had been. And Nicholas Senn who
had just moved from Milwaukee to Chicago daring and astute
as he was, had concluded that "surgical interference with the heart
is impracticable."
There was certainly not much to guide or encourage Dr. Dan.
He would run no professional risks if he gave the man an opiate
and let it go at that. Most doctors would approve. Of course the
man would then probably die. But if he attempted surgical inter-
ference, if he took up Roberts's long-neglected challenge, he
would have to venture into uncharted territory, with unforesee-
able results. If he failed, he could expect nothing but condemna-
tion from most of the profession.
88 Darnel Hale Williams
He watched the dark face on the white pillow for a moment as
he held the man's wrist. Cornish was coughing now short,
sharp, shrill barks. Slowly Dr. Dan laid the man's hand down and
turned to the interne, Elmer Barr.
"I'll operate," he said.
While patient and operating quarters were being prepared, Dr.
Dan sent a hasty word to a few medical friends inviting them to
watch the operation if they wished/Six doctors, four white and
two colored, crowded the small operating room, the converted
bedroom. William E. Morgan came tall, thin, angular, almost
frail-looking, rejoicing over his appointment at last as assistant to
Christian Fenger in the Dane's new clinic at Mercy Hospital.
Morgan brought with him a student, Coleman Buford, who was
living in his home while completing his last year at medical col-
lege. Buford had already come under Dr. Dan's spell in the dis-
pensary classes and was delighted to be in on this exciting event.
Two other white doctors were present: William Fuller, a young
general practitioner with ambitions toward surgery, who came at
every opportunity to watch Dr. Dan operate; and Howard Roy
Chislett, another rising young doctor whom Dr. Dan had taken
into his office as assistant. From the staff of Provident came
George Hall and the interne, Elmer Barr. Among the surgical
nurses, was Mabel Williams, Dr. Dan's cousin. All these crowded
the small room to suffocation. The heat was intense. Buford, exas-
perated and he still was fifty-odd years later was pushed back
into the corner where he stood on tiptoe, craning his neck to see.
Dr. Dan's first great problem of course was what might happen
when ak was admitted to the internal thoracic region. He had
none of the modern adjuncts to fortify his entry into this danger-
ous territory. No X ray, and ony the crudest anesthesia. No
trained anesthetist with his anesthetic machine and its tanks of
gases from which to choose oxygen, cyclopropane, ethyletie,
nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide. Not even a rebreathing bag and
face mask for closed administration of ether under positive pres-
sure, which would have kept Cornish's lung inflated. He had no
artificial airway to keep the windpipe open. None of the new
"SEWED up HIS HEART!" 89
intravenous anesthetics, such as sodium pentothal. No blood trans-
fusions to keep his patient alive and to relieve himself from the
terrific compulsion to make haste. No penicillin or sulf onamide to
correct any infection that might ensue if his aseptic technique
should be the least imperfect. He did not even have intercostal re-
tractors to widen transversely the opening he intended to make.
Thus, without even the minimum equipment that is a matter
of course today, and unaided by his own or anyone else's ex-
perience, Dr. Dan set to work.
Even if Cornish's lung did not collapse, the inrush of air would
certainly cause a shift of the chest organs to the right Some shift
would be good; it would give him more working space. But too
much would cause shock and death. Well, those chances he had
to take.
What worried his watchers were the difficulties Dr. Dan must
face in gaining access to the heart. He would have to thread his
way through an uncertain, highly dangerous network of blood
vessels and nerves. At the same time, he must do nothing to inter-
fere with the continuous beating of the life mechanism. Not a
man there but must have shuddered as Dr. Dan put the point of
his knife to Cornish's inert body.
Swiftly Dr. Dan lengthened the stab wound until he had an
incision between the ribs about six inches in length. This exposed
the breastbone, cartilage and about an inch of the fifth rib. Next
he chose a point two and a half inches from the breastbone and a
quarter inch from its attachment to the rib and quickly severed
the cartilage of the rib from its junction with the sternum, making
a neat little trapdoor two inches long and one and a half inches
wide. He now had an entrance into Cornish's chest, but a very
circumscribed entrance, no bigger than a small knothole. He was
being as conservative as possible and his caution was making his
operation even more difficult.
While everyone stood with bated breath, Dr. Dan lifted his
tiny trap door and, bending down, peered within. He could see
the large internal blood vessels. As he had surmised, one of them,
the important left internal mammary artery, was damaged. If
9 Daniel Hale Williams
there had been continuous bleeding from this vessel, Cornish
would have died before he arrived at the operating table, but the
nature of the wound had contributed to the gradual cessation of
hemorrhage. Even so, such recurrences as had been stimulated by
the respiratory motion of the lungs and chest had been sufficient
to throw the husky expressman into severe shock.
Rapidly Dr. Dan tied the injured vessel to prevent any further
hemorrhage. Then with considerable difficulty, due to the shift
of the lungs and heart and also to the fact the pericardium was
rising and falling with each heartbeat 130 times every minute, he
managed to inspect the quivering sac covering the vital organ.
The assailant's knife had gone in much deeper than outside con-
ditions indicated; there was a wound in the sac fully an inch and
a quarter in length.
And now for the heart itself! Somehow Dr. Dan managed to
hold the throbbing pericardial wound apart and examined the
wildly beating, living dynamo. The weapon had penetrated the
central organ also, but only to the extent of a tenth of an inch. The
wound, Dr. Dan told the watchers, was about half an inch to the
right of the right coronary artery and between two of its lateral
branches. Half an inch either way and Cornish would not have
reached Provident alive.
Dr. Dan found no active hemorrhage from either heart or peri-
cardium now apparent. He considered the situation carefully and
decided the heart muscle itself needed no suture. The pericardium
was a different matter. If he did not suture it, infection might enter
the pericardial sac from the pleural cavity, or, in healing, the peri-
cardium might adhere to the pleural sac and cause Cornish con-
stant pain in the future, if nothing worse. The pericardium, he
concluded, must be sutured.
First he irrigated the wound with normal salt solution of 100
degrees Fahrenheit, which by that rime was about room tempera-
ture. Then he grasped the edges of the pulsating wound with long
smooth forceps. With not a little difficulty, he held the fluttering
edges together and, using a continuous suture of fine catgut, he
managed to close the wound. Next he closed the intercostal and
"SEWED UP HIS HEART!" 91
sub cartilaginous wounds, again using catgut. For the cartilages and
the skin, he changed to silkworm gut and left a few long sutures
in the external stitches. They would permit easy removal in case
infection or hemorrhage should develop, though he prayed it
would not. Then he applied a dry dressing, straightened his aching
back, and mopped his brow. The silent intent circle around him
stirred; someone spoke. The historic operation was over.
No one had thought to keep a record of the time. To young
Buford, who reflected he had never seen an operator proceed
with such speed and self-confidence, it seemed short. But neither
Buford nor many of the others knew how many hours Dr. Dan
had spent acquainting himself with human anatomy.
With no prolonged discussion the little group of busy men
broke up, each hastening off about his own particular business.
Results to the patient were yet to be seen.
During the first twenty-four hours Cornish's pulse was high,
thin and weak, and his temperature rose to 103 degrees. He suf-
fered some pain in the region of the wound, but he did sleep
six hours without drugs. The second day the expressman's tem-
perature fell a degree; however his pulse increased to 134 and
was still weak. He slept only four hours and suffered paroxysms
of coughing, followed by three dreadful hours of hiccoughing.
Dr. Dan scarcely left his side. But the third day, while Cornish's
fever remained high, his pulse went down to 118; on the fourth
day it was 96, with temperature almost normal.
Seven days after the operation, the patient again had some
pain. Gradually the spaces between his lower ribs began to bulge
while at the same time his heartbeats sounded muffled and distant.
"There's fluid in the pleural cavity," Dr. Dan said to the interne
Elmer Barr who stood watchfully beside him. That was not too
serious, Dr. Dan added, unless there was also an accumulation
within the pericardial sac. That he could not determine until he
had emptied the pleural sac. But since Cornish's temperature con-
tinued to stay normal, Dr. Dan gave his patient as much time as
he could to recover his strength before he operated a second time.
On August 2, a little more than three weeks after the first
92 Daniel Hale Williams
operation, Cornish was trundled Into the operating room again.
This time Dr. Dan made a two-inch incision between and parallel
to the seventh and eighth ribs and removed five pints of bloody
serum. There was no pus whatever; his asepsis had been perfect!
The accumulation of bloody serum was the natural result of irri-
tation of the pleural tissues by an extensive operation and, per-
haps, by the original stab wound. Gravity drainage in the direction
of least resistance had carried the fluid to the base of the left pleural
sac, where it did the least harm. This had kept the wound dry and
provided a favorable condition for primary healing. There were
no further complications, and on August 30, just fifty-one days
after he had entered the hospital an apparently dying man, Cornish
was dismissed and his case was checked off: "Termination:
Cured." Twenty years later the man was still alive and well.
The doctors who had watched Dr. Dan make history were not
slow in telling other doctors about the daring venture and its
great success. For weeks surgical conversation dwelt on little else.
Dr. Dan soon found himself a respected man in Chicago's topmost
medical circles. The hospital staff, the Board, and friends of
Provident, passed the exciting news around. Kohlsaat sent a re-
porter from the Inter Ocean, of which he was part owner, to
interview the thirty-seven-year-old surgeon, ten years out of
medical college, who had won this laurel.
Dr. Dan grasped the opportunity to publicize race accomplish-
ments. He filled the report so full of information about the col-
ored hospital, the colored nurses (a second class was about to grad-
uate) and the capable colored doctors on the staff that it was
only halfway through his column-long story that the reporter
remembered he was sent to write about an operation on a man's
heart. But Dr. Dan would not let him go until he added one more
sentence at the end about the nurses. "Their presence," he said,
diffuses an indescribable sense of security and gentleness through-
out the operating room."
The caption writer, however, put on a headline strong enough
to startle any breakfast reader dallying over his coffee before
starting off for a Saturday at the Fair. "SEWED UP HIS HEART!"
"SEWED up HIS HEART!
93
cried the first line and went on for a five-bank heading: "REMARK-
ABLE SURGICAL OPERATION ... DR. WILLIAMS PERFORMS AN ASTON-
ISHING FEAT . . ." Undoubtedly every household on the lists of
the ladies' auxiliaries west and south bought a copy.
Dr. Dan issued no official report of his pioneer undertaking,
because of the pressure of many events, until three and a half
years after he operated on Cornish. He had always meant to study
over the case in detail. He wanted to know why the extent of the
wound was not immediately ascertainable. At work one day
with a group of medical students, his old case occurred to him
and he proceeded to re-enact wound and operation on a cadaver.
He found that the intercostal tissues were so elastic that they
reclosed tightly enough after an incision to prevent the insertion
even of a piece of paper. That was why he had not seen at once
how extensive the wound had been. Also he determined to his
satisfaction that a stab wound in that particular position must
always sever not only the internal mammary artery, but would also
always pierce both layers of the pleura.
His students grew so excited over the review and study of this
dramatic affair that they urged Dr. Dan to publish the case,
and one in particular, J. W. McDowell, assisted in abstracting Dr.
Dan's notes. The report appeared in the Medical Record of New
York on March 27, 1897, a month after that publication had re-
ported a similar but unsuccessful venture made in Norway in
1895 by Cappelen, and a month before it was to report a suc-
cessful suture of the heart muscle made in Germany in 1 896 by
Rehn. Dr. Dan's article contained the statement that neither the
Index Catalogue of the National Medical Library nor the Inter-
national Index Medicus "give a single title descriptive of suture
of the pericardium or heart in the human subject. This being the
fact, this case is the first successful or unsuccessful case of suture
of the pericardium that has ever been recorded."
Immediately Dr. Dan was acclaimed, and has been ever since,
as the first man in the world to "sew up the heart." Occasionally
a writer, especially one Southerner, rejected the "Negro
Williams's" case because he said Dr. Dan had dealt with the en-
94 Daniel Hale Williams
velope of the heart and not with the heart muscle itself. How-
ever most writers have said the great feat was the successful
entrance of the dangerous area of the thorax and the performance
of a surgical exploration of the heart, whether or not sutures
were taken in the heart muscle or only in the pericardial sac
which, after all, jumps about under the operator's fingers almost
as violently as the "seat of the soule" itself. And today the Cyclo-
pedia of Medicine., Surgery and Specialties says "it is good prac-
tice to think of the heart and pericardium together when con-
sidering trauma."
A month after publication of Dr. Dan's report a correspondent
of the Medical Record called attention to a previous successful
pericardial operation performed in St. Louis, September 6, 1891,
by a Dr. H. C. Dalton. Though Dalton's patient remained in the
hospital three months and twelve days, he was discharged appar-
ently well. What caused his long stay in the hospital, twice as long
as Dr. Dan's patient remained in Provident, or how long he lived
thereafter is not known. Benjamin Ricketts, M. D., F. A. C. S.,
an authority on heart surgery, who began vivisectional experi-
ments on dogs in 1874 and published his Surgery of the Thorax
and its Viscera in 1918, knew about both Dalton's and Dr.
Dan's cases and at one time included both in his early writing.
Later he dropped Dalton's case, perhaps because the patient did
not live, and he continued to call Dr. Dan the first, both in writing
and from the lecture platform.
Like Dr. Dan, Dalton did not publish his official report for some
three years. He read an account of his operation ten months after
Dr. Dan operated on Cornish and officially published it in The
Annals of Surgery a year and a half after the unofficial publica-
tion of Dr. Dan's operation in the Inter Ocean. Dr. Dan did not
know about Dalton's operation when he performed his own; in
fact he did not know about it when he wrote up his report. The
Index Medicus was changing editors; issues were delayed and
garbled when they did come out. Dr. Dan was as much a pioneer
and innovator as if a precedent did not exist. It takes away nothing
"SEWED UP HIS HEART!" 95
from his courage, originality and skill, even though first place
may remain in doubt.
More important than official priority is an evaluation of the
technique Dr. Dan displayed in what was to him, at any rate, an
operation without antecedent or authority. In the first place he
worked swiftly. This saved his patient from prolonged hemor-
rhage and exhaustion. In the second place he made no missteps,
as did Cappelen (1895) and Parrozzani (1897); ^ surgery was
correct and he did not add, as they did, to his patient's injuries.
In the third place, his asepsis was perfect and there was no infec-
tion as in the German Rehn's case (1896). And finally, his pro-
cedure is the routine recommended today by Sauerbruch and
others namely, to close the wound in the pericardium and leave
no drainage tubes, only reopening if necessary, as Dr. Dan did, to
relieve any pericardial effusion that may develop.
Dr. Dan's success in operating on Cornish was no chance affair.
He performed at least two later successful operations on stab
wounds of the heart. One patient, George Albert Cotton, wounded
in the early 1900'$, lived for fifty years after the operation.
Dr. Dan's leadership gave authority to other innovators and
his success encouraged surgeons both locally and far from Chi-
cago. William Fuller, who watched Dr. Dan operate on Cornish,
reported to the Chicago Surgical Society twenty-three years
later that he too had sutured a pericardium. He used Dr. Dan's
procedures almost step for step.
Today heart operations are not uncommon. But they are still
hazardous whether of the heart or the pericardium and they
are always dramatic. They still take courage and utmost skill and
the mortality is still more than fifty per cent. The profession con-
tinues to bow to the accomplishment of Dr. Dan three quarters
of a century ago.
Cornish had left the hospital on the 30th of August, completely
sound and well. How sound and well was demonstrated unex-
pectedly a few months later when he reappeared at Provident
Hospital late one night, bawling vociferously, his head covered
96 Daniel Hale Williams
with blood, a gory sight. Cornish, a young man of animal exuber-
ance, had once more got into a fight, and once more had come
off the worse for It.
"Where's Dr. Dan?" he yelled, "I got to see Dr. Dan!"
Attendants tried to silence him, but he had already roused Dr.
Dan asleep in a nearby room. He came out tying his dressing gown
around him.
"So it's you, Cornish," the sleepy doctor said. "How many
policemen are after you this time? "
Cornish could only blubber and beg to be taken care of. "Oh,
Dr. Dan," he moaned, "you can save me. For the Lord's sake,
save me!"
Dr. Dan refused to smile. He said he doubted if Cornish was
worth saving. When the man's howls redoubled and were about
to waken the entire hospital Dr. Dan appeared to relent. "Well,"
he said, "you have got some nice fancy work in you, Cornish. I
guess I can't afford to lose you. You're an important specimen."
A week or so later "when he was removing stitches from Cor-
nish's scalp, Dr. Dan told the young fellow he could be dismissed
the next day. Then he added: "Look here. You've had enough free
care in this hospital. I want you to go out of here and get your-
self a job and stick to it and send Provident some money."
The next morning, Cornish's bed was empty, both of him and
his blanket. But Cornish was not without gratitude. A few days
later a grimy bundle was found at the back door of Provident
Hospital. Upon examination it was found to contain one hospital
bed blanket and a scrap of paper on which was scrawled in pencil:
"Thanks Doc."
CHAPTER VIII
A National Task
WHEN in 1893 Cleveland triumphantly returned to the White
House for his second term after the Republican interlude of four
years, events were set in motion that were to have significance
for Dr. Dan. Cleveland called to his cabinet as Secretary of State
Judge Walter Q. Gresham, who had long been a friend of Dr.
Dan's and a supporter of Provident Hospital. Gresham was now
old and ill, and he did not want to be Secretary of State, but
his sense of duty was strong, and back he went to Washington
where he vhad previously served. When the judge and his wife
returned to their home in Chicago for a brief stay, Dan made a
friendly call. Gresham talked earnestly about Dan's work. He
said he had long felt Dan should be working in a larger field. He
said the new administration planned to make changes at Freed-
man's Hospital, the government hospital in Washington for
Negroes, and he urged Dan to apply for the job of chief surgeon
there. The judge would be happy to recommend Dr. Dan for the
position.
"But what about Provident?" Dan asked.
"If it's service to your race you're thinking of," the Secretary
rejoined, "Freedmen's needs you more than Provident, from all
I hear."
That night Dr. Dan turned the matter over and over in his
mind. Was he really needed in Chicago? Provident had many loyal
98 Daniel Hale Williams
supporters. The hospital was ending its third year in the black,
with a small surplus. Charles Bentley, 'Viata's husband and Dan's
longtime friend, would carry on as secretary with both devotion
and efficiency. The consulting staff was strong and Allen Wesley
was a good man in gynecology. Dr. Dan must have thought
eagerly of the larger opportunities at Freedmen's, of the 2oo-bed
hospital as compared with Provident's twelve beds.
He took up one of his letterheads with the small neat imprint
in the corner and wrote Gresham his answer, still to be seen in
Freedmen's files at the National Archives. Dr. Dan's large irregular
script first sprawls, then contorts, seems to tumble forward with
eager decision and then to draw quickly back. But Dr. Dan had
made his choice.
Dr. Dan was not the only applicant. The news that an opening
of so much prestige was imminent brought in a flock of applica-
tions from over the country, many urging that votes were in
tow. Practically every colored doctor in Washington applied.
Freedmen's Hospital and the affiliated Howard University medical
faculty had been a closed corporation to them all for so long
that they leaped at the chance of breaking in. Various applica-
tions illuminated the situation. Said one: "The large death rate of
this hospital for many years has been so extraordinary that a radi-
cal change looking to better therapeutic methods should have
been instituted therein long ago." Said another, a white applicant:
". . . no colored physician can fill the place properly because
they have less respect for their own race than a good Christian
white man feels."
Dr. Charles B. Purvis had been surgeon in charge of Freedmen's
for a dozen years and had made of it a comfortable berth. Trained
in the pre-Civil War, pre-bacteriological era, whatever contribu-
tion he could make he had completed long ago. Son though he was
of the great Abolitionist, the wealthy, light-skinned, polished
Robert Purvis who had helped nine-thousand slaves escape to the
North and freedom, Charles Purvis was no idol of his people. His
marriage to a white woman had been considered an act of disloy-
alty and his overbearing manner he was a big, ferocious man
A NATIONAL TASK 99
with harsh, barking voice made him none too popular in Wash-
ington or at Freedmen's. Attempts had been made before to oust
him, but without success.
Now Purvis marshaled his forces again to resist this attack upon
his position. He loudly proclaimed his status as a Civil War vet-
eran, claimed to have been among the doctors who had attended
the wounded President Garfield, called on Frederick Douglass,
called on the local clergy, and secured a flood of letters from
Howard graduates protesting any 'change. Finally he persuaded
the Howard trustees to present a lengthy series of "considerations"
to the Secretary of the Interior. These considerations said that
the clinical advantages which University medical students en-
joyed at Freedmen's Hospital, because Purvis also served on the
faculty, would be endangered if a "complete stranger" were
appointed.
Dr. Dan's endorsers were all medical men, white men, from
the topmost rank in Chicago. It was a rank they accorded him
too. His old teacher Isham was quick to write how "earnestly
and actively" his one-time student had been at work in his pro-
fession. Professor Joseph B. Bacon, of the Post Graduate Medical
School, testified to the "skill and energy" that had won a repu-
tation, he said, for Daniel Hale Williams throughout the state of
Illinois as well as in the city of Chicago. His sponsors spoke of
the quality of the man in the same breath with which they spoke
of the surgeon. Byron Robinson noted that he had had an inti-
mate association with Dr. Dan in practical surgical procedure for
several years and he recommended him "as an honorable man
and a skilled surgeon ... of wide experience and good judg-
ment." Wyllys Andrews sent a lengthy communication in answer
to a query put by the Interior Department.
I am personally acquainted with this physician [he
wrote] , and esteem him highly. ... I knew him as a student,
and have kept up my acquaintance since his graduation
some ten years ago. His professional standing is excellent.
... I have often seen him in connection with accident
cases. ... He makes a good expert witness, being well in-
ioo Daniel Hale Williams
formed and ready. His practice among the colored people
here has been very large. It is not confined to the colored
people by any means, however. . . . I arn informed that Dr.
Williams has accumulated considerable property since he
began practicing medicine. He is a man of good address, and
has great influence among the colored people here I am told.
He belongs to various medical societies here and certainly
has many business and social acquaintances outside the col-
ored race. . . . You are correctly informed that he belongs
to the colored people. He has a very small strain of colored
blood about him, but to all appearances is a white man. I
was well acquainted with him for two years before I knew
that he was 'colored' so little does it show in his appearance.
The judgment of Dr. Dan's white associates was summed up by
Franklin Martin, now secretary of the Post Graduate Medical
School and Hospital.
I have known intimately Dr. Daniel H. Williams for more
than ten years [he wrote]. I know him to be a man of honor
and as a member of society a superior gentleman. Profession-
ally he stands at the top of the medical profession of Chi-
cago. He is a surgeon of great scientific ability, and his
executive ability, as demonstrated in the organization and
equipment of Provident Hospital of Chicago, is beyond
question.
Dr. Dan won the appointment, but he came into a difficult
situation. Local resentment of "foreign intrusion" seethed. Howard
University faculty and trustees smarted from being overridden.
Purvis was still there, still secretary of Howard medical faculty.
A man of bulldog tenacity, he was ready to fight for a comeback
at the first opportunity.
Dr. Dan was appointed toward the end of February. He took
the oath of office under President Cleveland and returned to Chi-
cago to wind up his affairs. On the week end he went, as he often
did, for a round of quail shooting in southern Illinois. Somehow
he was shot through the right foot. Whether because the initial
A NATIONAL TASK IOI
care of the wound was not what it should have been, or because
his general health was depleted, inflammation in the veins of his
leg set in. For three weeks he was confined to bed in the hospital
he had founded. Then, fuming with Impatience, he refused to
stay quiet any longer and left the hospital, cleared up his con-
cerns and shipped off his belongings to Washington. As a conse-
quence he suffered a relapse, so serious that amputation of his
leg was suggested. Dr. Dan called for Fenger. The Dane, expert
in endoscopy of gunshot wounds from his experience in the Prus-
sian wars, took charge of his old student and saved his leg.
It was the middle of May before Dr. Dan got to Washington
and still his leg was not completely healed. He had another re-
lapse and had to return to Chicago, The infection that had started
in the foot and spread to the veins of the leg now involved lymph
vessels and glands as well. Fenger decided on the radical pro-
cedure of removing them, It meant long slow healing by granu-
lation. Dr. Dan had little reserve strength. All summer he lay in
the Emergency Hospital on the North Side to be near enough for
Fenger's personal attention.
This long delay, so exasperating to the patient, was made good
use of by some who were jealous of his success. George Hall,
whose appointment several years before on the Provident Hos-
pital staff had not been favored by Dr. Dan, took the opportunity
to try to make matters difficult for him. He wrote the Colored
American in Washington that Freedmen's new chief would never
take his place at the hospital. The newspaper gave the letter no
notice. HalFs friend James Blackever then wrote the Secretary
of the Interior who was responsible for the administration of
Freedmen's. Blackever called the Secretary's attention to HalFs
letter, written, he said, by "an associate of Dr. Williams," and he
added that he himself had been in Chicago "where I left Dr.
Williams following his everyday profession.'* "Everyone knows,"
Blackever asserted, "that he is only baffling with the Department
... at the expense of those he was sent to serve."
A small Negro sheet in Chicago took up the attack by saying
io2 Daniel Hale Williams
that "Freedmen's Hospital is in charge of an invalid who has
drawn eight months' salary without performing a single week of
service. . . . He is a fitter subject for a hospital than the manage-
ment of one . . . and ought not to be a ward of the Government."
The Washington Star joined the fray and brought up again the
issue of local sovereignty:
Believers in the equitable doctrine of home rule are prop-
erly disturbed because the Chicago doctor whom Secretary
Gresham had appointed ... Is still an absentee. . . . Wash-
ington seems fated to suffer from the appointment of incom-
petent or careless or extremely obnoxious non-residents.
... If Dr. Williams is unable or unwilling to assume charge
of affairs at the hospital, it would be quite the proper thing
for the authorities to require his resignation. Then a local
physician should be appointed.
Meanwhile, to add to Dr. Dan's dejection, Traviata lay slowly
dying of tuberculosis. Deprived of the distraction of work, he
must have been tortured with memories of 'Viata, of their evenings
together at the piano in the old home in Janesville, and later on,
in Chicago. Now death would take her. Death had taken too
many of those he had cherished. His father . . . Tessie . . . Ellen
. . . Kittie May . . . and now 'Viata.
August dragged slowly by and the healing moved no faster.
He tried riding out some each day in a carriage, but the heat
oppressed him. A new abscess developed within the wound. A
neglected silk suture had remained imbedded in the tissues. Com-
pletely disheartened, Dr. Dan pinned^ the offending knot to a
letterhead and wrote his friend Gresham.
"From my sister I learn that some one has intimated to Mr.
Sec'y Smith or other officials," he said, "that I have been drawing
salary from the Government and have made no effort to get to
Washington. I have never drawn one dollar from the Govern-
ment," he declared and recounted some of the difficulties of his
convalescence. "Secretary Smith," he added, "has been very, very
kind to me. He fully appretiates the struggle I made for my life.
A NATIONAL TASK 103
... I think he feels my heart is in the work, though he does not
know as you do the sacrifice I made to leave everything here. I
shall be deeply obligated if you will speak to him. I do not wish
to be misrepresented to him in any way."
He sent another indirect answer to his detractors by issuing
a somewhat premature announcement to the Chicago colored
papers:
CARD OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT
To MY MANY FRIENDS: After a siege of nearly six months
illness, during a great part of which time I was unable to be
seen even by most intimate friends and was forbidden the
letters of sympathy contained in every day's mail, I am glad
to be able to announce that I am rapidly recovering.
With the sincerest appreciation and thanks I desire to ac-
knowledge the kind offers of the countless friends who by
personal call, letters of considerate inquiry and other tokens
of high regard, have done much to reconcile me to what at
one time seemed an almost hopeless affliction. Unable to
acknowledge the many favors at the time they were ex-
tended, prompts this general acknowledgment and assurance
that not one word or token txas failed of my most sincere
appreciation and regard.
DANIEL H. WILLIAMS
In mid-September, Dr. Dan was finally able to leave Chicago.
He planned to rest when he got to Washington at the house in
Kingman Place he had already bought for his mother and younger
sisters. Just as he was leaving for Washington, he learned that a
"Board of Incorporators" of Freedmen's Hospital a paper body
set up by Howard University trustees were seeking to gain
control of the hospital. Also, Purvis had filed a request with the
local District government to recognize himself as surgeon-in-chief .
His resignation, he said, had only been given because the federal
government had demanded it. Purvis claimed that an act of Con-
gress in March 1893 actually gave supervision and control of the
hospital to the District Commissioners and removed it altogether
104 Daniel Hale Williams
from the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior. But
thanks to the ruling of the Attorney General, Dr. Dan's position
as head of Freedmen's was confirmed.
The Howard medical faculty gathered in the college building
to meet, if not to welcome, the new surgeon-in-chief. They were
all white men with the exception of Purvis and his assistant, Dr.
Furman L. Shadd. Dr. Dan stood to receive them with the short,
thickset, white-haired Jeremiah Eames Rankin, president of How-
ard University, on one side of him, and on the other, broad-shoul-
dered Thomas B. Hood, dean of the medical school.
Both Hood and Rankin were worthy men and men of good will.
Rankin, author of the popular hymn, "God Be With You 'Til
We Meet Again," had been for years pastor of the First Congre-
gational Church in Washington and had welcomed there both
colored and white. He was beloved by colored people. His very
anxiety to give the Negro his due had led him to listen sympa-
thetically to the grievances of Purvis when he was dismissed from
Freedmen's. Both Rankin and Hood were extremely polite but
noncommittal, to Dr. Dan, who looked more like a member of
their race than of the race Freedmen's was supposed to serve.
On such occasions as this one, Dr. Dan's quality stood out. Hus-
bands and wives, once they had shaken his long thin hand, re-
treated to the far corners of the room to peer over each other's
shoulders and scrutinize the slim erect figure, so faultlessly
groomed, so quietly poised. It was evident to all of them that he
had been seriously ill. Dr. Dan no longer wore a beard and his
thin face, clean shaven except for a heavy burnished mustache
that hung well over his lower lip, was revealed in all its pallor and
bony leanness. A handsome, finely chiseled face, but a little tired-
looking. His hair had darkened until the reddish tinge of his
youth had all but disappeared. The volatility of countenance
that went with that lively color had been replaced by a quieter,
more waiting attitude. Only his dark eyes were as lively, as pene-
trating as ever. When he looked at you he gave you his full
attention.
A NATIONAL TASK 105
Neither of the colored doctors welcomed Dr. Dan, Purvis for
obvious reasons and Shadd because of the disruption to his per-
sonal life. Purvis and his white wife lived in the city. Shadd had
served as house physician and he and his family had occupied an
apartment on the second floor of the medical building. Now he
had to move out of these quarters to make way for Dr. Dan. He
was obliged to find another home just as his wife and small son and
daughter were returning from a year abroad.
When Shadd had cleaned out his belongings, Dr. Dan unpacked
his books, filled the shelves and piled the overflow wherever he
could. He hooked up the long green gas tube of his reading lamp,
stood a demonstration skeleton in the corner, plunked down a
gruesome skull on the brocaded cover of his study table beside
inkwell, daily calendar, and a bowl of late zinnias from the
grounds. The beflowered Brussels carpet was cheerful, there was
a rocking chair in the corner if he would ever use it, and under
the table he threw a pair of knitted slippers. Then he sat down to
study the records.
Freedmen's Hospital and Asylum was more asylum than hos-
pital when Dr. Dan took it over. Its Civil War past still over-
shadowed it, and all but the indigent of both races shunned it.
Its name revealed its origin. The government had had no choice
but to care for the ill and aged, the helpless and destitute "contra-
bands" who had flocked into the capital before the advancing
armies. Various temporary expedients had been tried and finally
the hospital had become one unit and adjoining Howard Univer-
sity another in a settled government program of relief and of
guidance for both whites and blacks in what was hoped would
be a planned transition from feudal agrarianism to modern farming
and industry.
That magnificent program, however, had soon been abandoned
to selfish interests North and South. The Freedmen's Bureau was
closed in June 1872 with its work barely begun. Within two years
fifty-six hospitals and forty-eight dispensaries had to be turned
back to varying forms of local administration. Richmond and
Washington complained with some justice that the large num-
*o6 Daniel Hale Williams
bers of sick, lame, insane and blind left on their doorsteps were
too great a burden. Richmond's patients were accordingly shipped
to Freedmen's Hospital in Washington and the federal govern-
ment continued to be responsible for the institution.
For a brief time the hospital was under the War Department,
but soon was transferred to the Department of the Interior. The
custom of having the head of the hospital also serve on the medical
faculty of Howard University ensured the availability of hospital
facilities for the use of medical faculty and students. There were
also other interlocking arrangements.
The four two-story frame pavilions built a quarter century
before were still in use. They sprawled over three acres and com-
prised four wards for men and four for women. Temporary
barracklike structures to start with and since deteriorated through
age, constant use, and insufficient repair, everything about the
pavilions suggested the makeshift arrangements of an emergency
period. Each ward, 25 feet wide and 115 feet long, was heated
by a single stove. Patients near the stove baked and those far away
froze. There was constant danger of fire. You could get ventila-
tion only by opening the windows; temperature regulation was
impossible. Water closet arrangements were primitive and unsan-
itary. Furnishings were poor and depressing.
The operating room was in the "Brick," the one solidly con-
structed building which housed classrooms of the medical de-
partment of Howard University, the administrative offices of the
hospital, and the apartment of the surgeon-in-chief . A sixth build-
ing contained a chapel, dining room, kitchen, provision room,
icehouse, washroom and engine rooms. Surgical patients had to
be carried on stretchers from the wards into the open, regardless
of weather or their condition, and carried back to the wards again
after operation. Convalescent patients had likewise to expose them-
selves to the weather in going to their meals. Bed patients received
trays which had been carried across the yard from the kitchen,
and the food was cold.
Purvis's reports showed his long tenure had dulled his percep-
tion of inadequacies in the institution he served. Without modern
A NATIONAL TASK 107
hospital experience, he had accepted things as they had long
been and had not sought to change them.
Dr. Dan picked up one of Purvis's last reports and no doubt a
smile, quivered under his long mustache as he read: "Considering
that the patients are admitted from every phase of society, the
order and decorum has been all that could be expected. . . . Mrs.
Ada Spurgeon continues her missionary labors among the sick.
. . . The rule requiring from the patients who are able some serv-
ice has been continued. The following articles have been made by
the women: bedsacks 16, pillow cases 140, sheets 162, towels 103,
drawers 12, chemises 50, dresses 60, aprons 165, handkerchiefs 6,
shirts 25, nightgowns 60."
Purvis seemed to feel no chagrin that out of 2605 patients 270
had died a death rate of over 10 per cent. Dr. Dan must have
wondered why it had not been even higher. There was no depart-
mental organization within the hospital aside from the fact that
men were separated from women and Ward 4 was set aside for
"confinement" cases. Nursing was in the hands of old bandannaed
mammies, untrained, many of them illiterate, unable even to tell
time. That morning Dr. Dan had seen a ward mammy receive
word from the office that the hour had struck, whereupon the
old woman had waddled to a commanding position between the
long rows of beds, clapped her hands and shouted:
"All you 'leven-o'clockers, take yo' medicine!"
What they took, or how much, or whether they took any at
all, was known only to the patient and his guardian angel.
After some hours with reports and statutes Dr. Dan found that
besides an almost hopelessly inadequate plant, he had inherited an
historical melange of government regulations and divided author-
ity. He was responsible to the Interior Department for administra-
tion of the institution, to the District Board of Commissioners
for the finances. He had no power over the admission or dis-
missal of patients and inmates. These came in on order from the
Interior Department where no medical examination was made.
Some were recommended to the Interior Department by the Phy-
sicians of the Poor, others by the Associated Charities, and by
io8 Daniel Hale Williams
far the largest number by the police. Reports showed that as many
as eighty to ninety inebriates could be found in the asylum at
a time. In addition, the Commissioner of Pensions and the Board
of Managers of the National Soldiers' Home were accustomed
to ask that ex-soldiers be cared for if they were desirous of re-
cuperating while waiting for their pensions, often a matter of three
or four weeks. That year, Dr. Dan saw, 129 such "patients" had
been received and supported for varying lengths of time.
Hospital grounds and buildings were situated near 6th and
Bryant Streets, beyond the boundary and regulations of the
District of Columbia. To the east, over the hospital's neat white
picket fence, lay Cow Town, a miserable aggregation of squatters'
shacks, cows, pigs, chickens and hapless humanity. Occupied by
whites before the Civil War, after Emancipation these mean abodes
had fallen to homeless black refugees from the South. Left to
sink or swim as best they might, here they still were thirty years
later. If Cow Town was an unsanitary neighbor for a hospital,
LeDroit Park to the southeast was an unfriendly one. Apparently
fearful of defilement by both Cow Town and Freedmen's, that
fashionable area had withdrawn behind its high board fence and
posted a watchman at its locked gate.
The hospital yard itself was neatly kept. There was plenty
of help, of course, from the ambulatory male patients. They were
free wards of the government and required to give their services.
There were grass and trees, some flowers even.
The shambling plant was the worst. Somehow it must be trans-
formed into a modern hospital.
Within three weeks after his arrival, Dr. Dan was able to report
to the Secretary of the Interior that Freedmen's Hospital had
been systemized into seven departments: medical, surgical, gyne-
cological, obstetrical, dermatological, genito-urinary, and throat
and chest. He had also set up those two modern adjuncts, a patho-
logical department and a bacteriological department, though his
equipment scarcely justified the terms.
Coincident with this departmental organization Dr. Dan estab-
lished a nonsalaried medical staff of twenty "gentlemen who have
A NATIONAL TASK 109
achieved eminent success as practitioners in their respective lines
of professional work." This was the system he had used at Prov-
ident. It was the system of the modern hospitals. Some of the men
were doctors on the Howard medical faculty, but others were
prominent in Washington medical circles. No longer should
Freedmen's remain a secret festering place unknown to the medical
profession of the capital city. If it had evils they must now know
about them, and to know was to share the responsibility and help
bring about a change.
And while he was opening Freedmeu's doors to white doctors,
he opened them also to colored doctors. He made his staff inter-
racial and gave the few struggling Negro doctors of Washington
an unprecedented enlargement of opportunity. He kept on Dr.
Shadd as one of the attending gynecologists and Dr. John R.
Francis as one of the obstetricians. Dr. Francis was an able local
colored doctor who had been called in to manage Freedmen's
during Dr. Dan's long illness. With it all, Freedmen's patients
were no longer at the mercy of a few entrenched appointees of
uncertain ability.
Immediately, too, Dr. Dan set up a system of intemeships to
supplement the staff of twenty doctors. He was prompted, he
explained to his superior Hoke Smith, Secretary of the Interior,
by the economy of such a move it did away with the need for
two former paid assistants and also because it was the best pos-
sible way to place within the reach of young colored medical
graduates an opportunity for advancement which, so far as he
knew, he said, was unfortunately not accorded them in any other
hospital in the United States, except in the Provident Hospital
in Chicago.
Over the world hospitals were becoming the real educators of
medical men, whether medical schools grew out of hospitals
as in France and England, or hospitals were established as labora-
tories to medical schools in university settings, as in Germany.
Though Freedmen's had had a connection with Howard Univer-
sity from the beginning, it had offered students but little. As Dr.
Dan saw it, Freedmen's ought to have a vital relationship to the
no
Daniel Hale Williams
colored race and its higher development. Waxing eloquent in his
proposals to Hoke Smith, he declared that Freedrnen's could be
the national public training school for the colored physician; it
could send him out into communities all over the country "richly
endowed with practical experience and fully prepared to meet
the intricate requirements of his profession."
The Secretary of the Interior was more interested in purging
the pension list of fraud and in conserving the natural resources of
the West than he was in conserving or aiding the colored race.
As a Georgian he was committed to maintaining white supremacy
in the South. He did, however, give Dr. Dan permission to
accomplish what he could as long as he stayed within his budget
and the legal network thrown over Freedmen's.
To meet the immediate situation, Dr. Dan chose four colored
internes. At Freedmen's as in other hospitals, internes were given
room and board at the hospital in return for their services.
The living, plus the experience then gained, was generally con-
sidered a fair recompense for the work they did in the various
departments. But Dr. Dan thought otherwise. "These men are
poor," he pointed out to the Secretary of the Interior. "I feel
they should be encouraged." He suggested they be given ten dol-
lars a month compensation, but Smith said seven would have
to do.
Dr. Dan had to pay his internes and finance his projected nurses'
training program out of an ironclad budget. Since the two paid
assistants to the chief surgeon were mainly interested in the
clinical advantages they received at the hospital and since both had
outside practices, he proposed to Hoke Smith that their salaries
and working hours be reduced to a minimum. He would have pre-
ferred to dispense with them altogether, since under the new
system of interneships they were not needed. But the Secretary
feared more upheaval in an already tumultuous situation; he urged
"the retention of united interests." However, in the end, in order
to save the nurses' training program so important to the whole
project, Smith agreed that $900 might be taken out of the $3000
stipulated for the two assistants. Some money had been saved
A NATIONAL TASK III
already out of Dr. Dan's salary while he was ill. Thus the funds
for the new nursing program were assured.
So thoroughly had Dr. Dan worked out the course for student
nurses at Provident that he could lift that plan intact and put
it into operation at Freedmen's without a change. But he had
another problem. His big difficulty lay in the prior existence of a
so-called Training School for Nurses a project undertaken by
Howard University at the suggestion of Purvis less than a year
and a half before. The Howard plan offered nothing but out-
moded didactic instruction two evenings a week, with a promise
of "some" practical experience in Freedmen's Hospital, and it
admitted both girls and older women of varying or no back-
ground to the same classes.
If he was to do anything to reduce the high mortality rate at
Freedmen's, Dr. Dan knew he must first of all get rid of unfit
attendants. Even if properly trained nurses were available, he had
no money to pay their salaries. But carefully selected student
nurses could, when supervised by a qualified superintendent and
her assistants, give the bulk of the service in the hospital at the
same time they were learning. Other hospitals in the country were
finding this possible and it was Dr. Dan's plan for Freedmen's as
it had been his plan at Provident. He advised Howard University
of his views and a working compromise was arrived at. Both
schools would be carried on side by side, one administered by
Purvis, the ousted surgeon-in-chief, the other by Dr. Dan, the
new surgeon-in-chief.
After this dubious solution, Dr. Dan appointed his superintend-
ent of nurses, Sarah C. Ebersole. He had known Miss Ebersole in
Chicago where she had been night superintendent of the Presby-
terian Hospital. She was of course white, since the only colored
nurses in the country were Provident's few graduates and none
as yet had had sufficient experience to handle a 2oo-bed hospital.
His next step was to send a circular letter to all Negro centers
churches, schools and newspapers inviting qualified young
women to come to the capital and enroll at Freedmen's Hospital
for training as nurses. Young women were more willing now to
112
Daniel Hale Williams
undertake nursing than when he started Provident. From the
five-hundred applications which came in from all over the
country, he accepted fifty-nine. He asked these applicants to come
to Washington, bringing with them certificates of health as well
as of moral character. For a month they were on probation, and
during that time they had to pass examinations in reading, pen-
manship, simple arithmetic and English dictation. At the end of
the month forty-six had met Dr. Dan's standards. These forty-six
were now fully accepted as student nurses for the eighteen-months
training course.
In addition to board and lodging they would be provided with
caps, textbooks and notebooks, and five dollars a month.
The schedule of lectures, recitations and examinations for the
student nurses was a stiff one. Miss Ebersole supervised their prac-
tical work in the wards, teaching them both observation and re-
cording of the patient's condition. She fitted up a diet kitchen
and taught the girls invalid cookery. She taught them ventilation,
disinfection and antisepsis, and brought in a professional masseur
for demonstrations of massage. The program was on a par with
the best training anywhere; it was revolutionary for Freedmen's.
The student nurses were on duty for twelve hours each day,
but this included an hour off for dinner and additional time off
for exercise and rest. A free afternoon a week and a half day
on Sunday, with a two-weeks vacation each year, made a program
comparable to standards fifty years later. No one went on night
duty until she had been in the school three months.
Dr. Dan was a severe taskmaster. He insisted that everything
should be done in an orderly and proper manner. No nurse should
appear on the grounds without her cap. One day he stopped Kate
Gibson and said, "Daughter, you'd look better with your cap
on." Kate never left it off again. And she remembered the incident
all her life.
He called them all "Daughter" and treated them with a father's
confidence and trust. "Daughter," he said to Elizabeth Tyler as
she stood by a very sick patient waiting for his instructions,
"Daughter, this woman's got to live." Miss Tyler was full of the
A NATIONAL TASK 113
sense of responsibility he put upon her and never forgot his words
or the compelling tone of his voice, and was as thrilled as he was
when the patient did live.
There was a passion in all Dr. Dan said and did the passion
of faith, the invincibility of boundless courage, the conviction of
perfectibility. In his lectures to the medical students he hammered
away as well he might after his own experience on the neces-
sity for saving arms and legs, of always avoiding amputations ex-
cept as a very last resort. "Amputation," he told them with ve-
hemence, "is too often the easy course of laziness, impatience and
incompetence." If they practiced modern asepsis intelligently,
they could save limbs that in the old days had to be abandoned.
"We must have continuity of the parts," he would repeat, "better
a crippled leg than no leg."
He talked the subject so much that the students fell to calling
him "Mr. Continuity-of-the-Parts." But they never forgot that
legs and arms were precious possessions, not to be lightly dis-
pensed with.
Dr. Dan was as rigorous with the internes as with the nurses.
He said many times that an anesthetist must never take his eyes
oS the patient, no matter what was going on in the operating
room. One day a scatterbrained young doctor allowed his eyes
to roam and Dr. Dan called another to take his place and sent the
offender packing from the room.
Dr. Dan was forgiven because he was as relentless with himself
as with others. Not one but could testify out of his or her own
observation that Dr. Dan had earned the awesome reputation he
held. One or two sulked, but almost everyone recognized that he
demanded perfection because he was determined to break down
the prevailing belief that Negroes could not learn as well as whites.
He loved his race, he wanted them to have their rightful place
in life, and he demanded a performance from them that could
not be criticized.
But he did not bear down on subordinates just because they
were subordinates, they told each other. There was the time Eliza-
beth Tyler passed Dr. Dan out on the grounds as he was talking to
1 14 Dmiel Hale Williams
Old Boston. Old Boston had been a slave and he could not get
over his slave ways. Though a drizzling rain was coming down,
Old Boston held his hat in his hand while he bowed and scraped
to the doctor. "Put on your hat, Boston," Elizabeth Tyler heard
Dr. Dan say, "put on your hat, man, or you'll catch cold."
And he was as lavish with praise as blame, whenever it was
earned.
All that first year Dr. Dan had trouble with the Howard Uni-
versity medical faculty about the two nursing programs. When
Purvis saw people being won over to Dr. Dan's progressive pro-
gram, he cried out that if the university abandoned "its nursing
school" as he euphemistically styled his twice-a-week evening
class, it would prove the initial step toward inevitable curtailment
and eventual abandonment of the remaining departments of medi-
cine, dentistry, and pharmacy. This was nonsense, but Purvis made
the most of it.
At one point Dr. Dan agreed to let the university take over the
course if Miss Ebersole remained in charge, but by fall he decided
this was untenable and gave notice that he was going to keep
jurisdiction himself. One by one members of the medical faculty
came to realize the change was inevitable and, with Purvis still
dissenting, they agreed to drop their competing class.
There were difficulties, too, over division of space in the one
brick building occupied jointly by hospital and university. When
Dr. Dan asked for a reallotment of rooms between the Dental
College and the hospital, his proposal brought forth cries that
the change would mean the "destruction" of the student division!
However, after some months, the Dental College accepted
rooms on the first and third floors and turned over the second
floor to the hospital.
Funds or no funds, Dr. Dan somehow managed to get an in-
closed passage built between the operating room in the Brick and
the nearest ward, which he then made the surgical ward.
By January, Dr. Dan felt no further delay must prevent instal-
lation of an ambulance system. The vehicle he was able to get
A NATIONAL TASK
was not up to his standards. It looked much like a covered delivery
wagon. But a lantern was hung at the back step and a horse held
in readiness for the ambulance's use at any hour of the day or
night. Its value was apparent when calls averaged thirty a month
that first winter and spring. Smartly painted, with FREEDMEN'S
HOSPITAL and the square cross of succor plain to be seen on either
side, and attended by uniformed internes with the same cross
on their arm brassards, it was a distinctive equipage as it sped
through Washington streets.
A profound change had taken place. Freedmen's was trans-
formed. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams might have been a long time
getting to Washington, but the electric effect of his coming was
manifest. A new order was everywhere apparent, and with the
installation of system had come efficiency. No more loose ways.
The dawdlers found him stern, but everyone thanked him for
the improved meals and the nurses were grateful for new blankets
and decent linens in their dormitory. Out in the Yard he had
rosebushes set out. No one was allowed to touch them, but great
bowls full were picked, by his orders, daily and placed in the
barren wards and in the dining room and in the nurses' quarters.
Everybody had to admit that the new boss who walked so fast
was businesslike. All saw it, including the hospital barber, a medical
student working his way. Dr. Dan had little time to linger and
chat after a haircut or shave, but he had not forgotten that he
had been a barber once himself. When Duvall Colley ventured
to ask him for his photograph one day after cutting his hair, Dr.
Dan gave it readily enough and added that anyone who could
cut his stubborn hair satisfactorily was an excellent barber and
no mistake about it.
By the end of the year, the disgraceful mortality rate had
tumbled to an unprecedented low. It was all due, Dr. Dan assured
the Secretary of the Interior, to the quick intelligence, eager am-
bition and faithfulness to duty of the student nurses who flitted
busily about the wards in their long voluminous starched skirts,
big aprons, and bigger leg o'mutton sleeves.
Dr. Dan took opportunity at this point to remind Hoke Smith
n6 Daniel Hale Williams
that only a few of the many capable young colored women being
graduated each year from the public schools could find jobs.
Teaching and civil service did not offer enough opportunities, and
prejudice kept them from entering the new field of stenography
and typewriting, or from being clerks in stores or offices. So
nurses' training, he said, was broadening the area of usefulness for
a large number of hitherto unemployed girls.
At the risk of boring his superior, Dr. Dan tried to give Smith
his own enthusiastic view of the new trained nurse. Just as the
modern medicoscientist has advanced beyond the rural quack, he
said, the modern nurse has advanced beyond the old mammy
whose ministrations have done quite as much as disease to popu-
late the other world. The physician, he insisted, must depend
almost as much upon the nurse as upon his prescriptions, and the
nurse best fitted for the work is one who knows about the human
system, its friends and its foes, its dangers and its blessings. Dr.
Dan warmed up to a great pitch when he undertook to show how
an informed, comprehensive knowledge must be combined with a
woman's tender sympathy to give a physician the indispensable
aide he must have.
By the end of Dr. Dan's first year he might have crowed his
victory from the housetops and no one would have contradicted
him. But he continued to manifest a painstaking regard for the
feelings of all individuals concerned. More particularly he sought
to maintain an unbroken racial front before the whites. In his
first annual report, while he set forth the changes and improve-
ments in Freedmen's Hospital, he generously insisted that no
account of the new condition would be true which did not prop-
erly emphasize the valuable services contributed through the pro-
fessional skill and executive ability of his predecessors, one and
all He called especial attention to the efficiency and fidelity with
which Dr. Francis had managed the hospital during his illness. He
pointed out that the president of Howard University had taken
a deep interest in the welfare of the hospital and added that the
location of the medical department of Howard University within
the hospital grounds had been of benefit.
A NATIONAL TASK IIJ
In short he attempted to draw- all into a position to receive
credit while he played down his own role. "I can speak all the
more freely," he said, "since my own management has been of
such short duration as to render it unlikely that any one will be
disposed to account for the improvements in the hospital service
by attaching any undue credit to the present management." His
purpose, he stated with charity and cheerful inaccuracy, 'was only
that of carrying out and extending "the policy of progress and
improvement pursued by my predecessor."
With endless patience and persistent demonstration, Dr. Dan
had won Howard medical faculty away from the self-focused
Purvis. The white president Jeremiah Rankin asked Dr. Dan to
give medical service to his family, and colored Dr. Shadd found
he could be a delightful dinner guest.
CHAPTER IX
'Snatched from the Womb J
FREEDMEN'S new ambulance filled an important and immediate
need. Late one afternoon a call came in from Garfield Hospital
to pick up an unconscious colored woman, a dwarf. Garfield said
they had no room for her. When the interne arrived with the
ambulance he found a note accompanying the woman saying she
had been having convulsions for twelve hours and that she had
been treated for "dropsy." She had another convulsion in the
ambulance on the way back to Freedmen's. The frightened in-
terne was glad to get her into the receiving room and turn her
over to the assistant surgeon.
"You know they had room," he said to the surgeon. "They just
didn't take her because she was colored."
"Just as well," replied the surgeon. "Now Dr. Dan can take
care of her. But get him quick," he cried. "This isn't dropsy, it's
childbirth!"
Dr. Dan came running. He saw on the bed before him, breath-
ing stertorously, still comatose, the distorted, disproportionate
figure of a young woman only three feet nine inches tall. Her
arms were fourteen inches long; her legs seventeen and bowed.
She weighed, even in pregnancy, only seventy-two pounds. Blood
was drooling from the side of her mouth; she had bitten her
tongue during the convulsions. Her face was puffy, the muscles
"SNATCHED FROM THE WOMB" 119
twitched. While her temperature was normal, her pulse was down
to 60.
Swiftly Dr. Dan took measurements. They indicated that a
normal delivery could not be expected.
Convulsions at childbirth, the editor of Obstetrics wrote not
long after Dr. Dan was confronted with this case, are a "supreme
test in concentrated crisis form of obstetrical judgment as well as
resource ... we see death threatening from three directions:
toxemia, convulsions and shock. We are so anxious in the short
time available ere death may come, to advance our entire rescuing
force anesthesia, toxic elimination, and delivery all at once,
the result is often, in the struggle to apply each first, a therapeutic
and surgical cross fire. Eclampsia is not an opponent for a novice."
Fortunately Dr. Dan was no novice. However, he had here not
only convulsions which had been going on for twelve hours, but
a woman who could not by her very structure give birth. His as-
sistant had already taken a catheterized specimen of urine and sent
it for analysis; that was Dr. Dan's rule. Now, with the report be-
fore him, Dr. Dan unfolded the situation to his assistants and in-
ternes rapidly but methodically.
"The specimen shows numerous pus cells," he said and ex-
plained that this meant inflammation in the kidneys and for that
reason he could not undertake a Caesarean section at once as he
would prefer to do. At the word Caesarean several started with
surprise, but he calmly assured them that he always preferred the
abdominal route to the vaginal one if surgery had to be resorted
to. It saves valuable time, he explained, and consequently lessens
shock. Moreover the operator has direct control of the seat of
hemorrhage and infection and also, Dr. Dan pointed out, he avoids
the possibility of rupture of the uterus, perforations, lacerating
wounds or other serious lesions.
Dr. Dan's hearers were startled, with reason. He was voicing
not the usual view of the day, but the advanced, progressive view.
A dozen years before, when he was finishing medical school, the
Caesarean operation as practiced in the United States was almost
always fatal. When he attended the International Medical Con-
no Daniel Hale Williams
gress in. 1887, the conservatives were still against its use. Since
that time, however, proper uterine sutures and wound closure had
been developed. These, together with asepsis and more courage
about tackling the operations earlier, before the mother became
exhausted in prolonged and ineffective labor, were slowly turning
the tide. Howard Kelly of Johns Hopkins was one of the earliest
to achieve success and Dr. Dan had taken every opportunity since
his arrival in Washington to go over to Johns Hopkins and watch
Kelly operate.
So he was prepared to meet this desperate case by performing
a Caesarean section, in spite of the kidney condition, because, as
he pointed out, the poor condition of the pelvic tissues, the size of
the child, and the almost hopeless condition of the mother allowed
no hope that she could be safely delivered without surgery.
"I'll have to do a Caesarean," he said, "despite the infection."
While he scrubbed his hands with laundry soap, he continued to
discuss the case.
"But why not enlarge the birth canal?" an interne^ asked.
Dr. Dan lifted his hands from the soapsuds and immersed them
in a hot strong solution of potassium permanganate. "I wouldn't
even consider it," he said. He described how he had once assisted
the late Dr. W. W. Jaggard in such an operation. Jaggard had
separated the pubic bones by knife and chain saw. "I never have
forgotten it," Dr. Dan said. "Women never recover from such an
operation. They're invalids the rest of their lives."
Another interne wanted to know if it would not be justifiable
to crush the baby's skull or otherwise reduce the child's bulk by
surgery in order to save the mother. "No, no," Dr. Dan replied,
lifting his now purpled hands and turning to the pan of saturated
solution of oxalic acid which would remove the exotic stain. "The
child is in a bad position for that sort of thing," he said, "and be-
sides I think it is morally and surgically wrong to kill a living
child in a living mother. We must save both."
Of course, he added, putting his now thoroughly punished
hands into the waiting basin of bichloride of mercury solution, it
was true Michaelis had managed to extract a child from a dwarf
"SNATCHED FROM THE WOMB" 121
with a pelvis in the conjugate diameter of but an inch and a half.
Barnes had done likewise. And Osborne performed the miracle
through a pelvis but three quarters of an inch in the narrowest
portion. But the babies were sacrificed. Those were desperate
cases, performed before aseptic surgery was known. They would
be universally condemned now, and should be. No, he said, the
Caesarean in anything like a fair condition has taken the place of
those mutilating and forced deliveries through the vagina. You
could not call this a fair condition. Still he had no choice.
Quickly he dipped his almost raw hands into a basin of sterile
water and slipped them into his new Halsted rubber gloves. The
patient was going into another convulsion. "We can't wait to fin-
ish," Dr. Dan said to the assistant who was shaving and sterilizing
the patient's skin at the site of operation. "We'd better risk infec-
tion," he said, "than let her die before we start."
As night closed in, the comatose woman was wheeled into the
amphitheater before a few hastily assembled doctors, students and
nurses, all agog with an excitement that was half fear and half awe.
With lightning quickness Dr. Dan made an incision along the cen-
ter of the patient's abdomen, beginning two inches above the pu-
bis and ending two inches below the breastbone cartilage. As he
worked, he talked in a quiet voice, master of the situation, steady-
ing everyone around him.
"I'm not putting clamps on the bleeding points in the abdomi-
nal wall," he explained. "I want to encourage hemorrhage; it will
lessen her blood pressure."
He lifted the uterus containing the baby through the incision
he had made and set it down on the abdomen, quickly surround-
ing it with hot towels. Then he took three hasty stitches through
the abdominal wall, closing it up snugly about the uterine neck.
"These are only temporary silk sutures," he explained. Then he
threw a rubber ligature around the uterus just above the abdomi-
nal incision, leaving it ready to be tightened, he said, if emer-
gency should arise. Now he could turn his attention to the baby.
Swiftly he made an incision in the uterus. There was a sudden
spurt. Dr. Dan's hands moved like darts of lightning. The hem-
122 Daniel Hale Williams
orrhage ceased. He grasped the baby by the feet and lifted out
into the world an infant of full normal size and perfect anatomi-
cal proportions. It weighed seven pounds twelve ounces and its
head measured from 3^ to 4^ inches in its various diameters. A de-
lighted murmur ran through the room and was quickly stilled.
The emergency rubber ligature was never used. An assistant
controlled the uterine arteries on either side with thumb and in-
dex finger while Dr. Dan took the precaution of running a large
glass tube through the cervix into the vagina and irrigated through
the uterus from above downward with salt solution. He explained
to the students that he was doing this to protect the patient from
infection from below since there had not been time for proper
antiseptic preparation. He then closed the uterine incision with
three layers of sutures, the technique he had learned from Kelly.
In forty minutes Freedmen's first Caesarean operation was over.
The patient suffered no more convulsions after the operation.
In sixteen hours she opened her eyes and began to talk and from
that time her recovery was, in the words of the record, "unevent-
ful." But not to the small dwarf mother. Proudly she tossed her
baby over her shoulder and walked the wards showing it to ev-
eryone an offspring almost as large as herself.
Dr. Dan was constantly demonstrating now his ability to tackle
a variety of complex cases. A young German farmer came from
Maryland. He was encumbered by a izi-pound tumorous mass
attached to the small of his back. It hung down a full fifteen inches
a soft, pendulous, branching affair that caused its unhappy
owner to suffer constant tension and fatigue. For eighteen years
the hateful thing had been growing, starting as a small flat mole
when the farmer had been a boy of seven. Dr. Dan kept the
farmer in the hospital ten days, observing the tumor. Finally he
operated, and the farmer walked out of the hospital a free man.
About this time Dr. Dan removed a growth from the wrist of
a young colored violinist, Daniel Murray, whose parents were
prominent in Washington colored circles. The sixteen-year-old
youth was afraid an operation might damage his bow arm, but
Dr. Dan removed the growth and left the wrist unimpaired. The
SNATCHED FROM THE WOMB" 123
operation made Dr. Dan a lifelong friend of the Murrays and
added to his ever-growing reputation.
Physicians in Washington began to bring Dr. Dan their com-
plicated cases. Even members of the Howard medical faculty swal-
lowed their pride and asked for the master hand. Drs. Robert
Reyburn and J. R. Wilder brought in a woman of thirty-seven
who was to have a child. They had correctly diagnosed that a tu-
mor was complicating her pregnancy. The woman had noticed a
nodular swelling in the lower right abdomen some two years be-
fore she became pregnant, but she had done nothing about it.
With pregnancy and its subsequent displacement from the pelvis
by the enlarged uterus, the tumor had increased steadily in size.
By the time she was admitted to Freedmen's, her abdomen was so
enormously distended and painful she was unable to stand on her
feet. Her every breath was drawn with difficulty and her face
looked pitifully anemic and haggard.
Dr. Dan examined her and found there was no free fluid in the
abdominal cavity. The tumor, huge and solid, filled the entire up-
per half of the cavity, pushed up her diaphragm, and was respon-
sible for her labored breathing. A urine test showed no untoward
kidney condition. The patient had already borne several children
without complications and the pelvic measurements were ade-
quate. All this was to the good and Dr. Dan concluded to operate
and remove the tumor and then to allow the pregnancy to con-
tinue its full term. About six weeks remained before birth was
due.
The morning that Dr. Dan had set for the operation, Edith
Carter, a student nurse, was coming off night duty. She recalled
the occasion vividly, and years later told how she watched the
crowd filing into the amphitheater. Tired and hungry "as she was,
she decided to go in and watch with the rest. She was glad ever
after that she did, for it turned out to be an operation historic not
only in Freedmen's and in Washington but in the medical annals
of the country.
Edith Carter said she had never seen so many white doctors in
Freedmen's before. She recognized James Tabor Johnson and
124 Daniel Hale Williams
swelled with pride that Washington's first white gynecologist had
come to watch her race's hero. Dr. Dan, looking almost boyish in
his short-sleeved white jacket and white trousers, was as cool and
collected as ever, not turning a hair. She did not see how he did it.
First he tried a conservative incision from the lower end of the
breastbone to the umbilicus, but the tumor was too large for that
opening. He extended his incision down to the pubis. Still he could
not move the growth. The tumor, he told his watchers, was still
connected by a muscular pedicle with the uterus where it had
originated, but it was also now attached firmly and extensively
both to the abdominal viscera and to the abdominal membranes.
Large arteries and veins, he explained, were radiating over the
surface of the growth, throughout its pedicle, and throughout all
its attachments.
It was a challenge such as Dr. Dan loved. Speedily, methodi-
cally, he tied off one artery, one vein, after another, close to the
greater curvature of the stomach and along the adhesions to the
intestines. When all were tied off, he incised them at the expense
of the growth. Finally he made the crucial incision into the thin-
walled uterus that called for the nicest blade imaginable. Perspira-
tion poured from every pore in his body so taut did he hold him-
self, but his hand was steady. As he lifted his knife and everyone
saw that the womb was still intact and the baby safe, a long re-
leasing sigh filled the amphitheater. Dr. Dan placed both hands on
the freed tumor, lifted the eighteen-pound mass and plopped it
into the waiting basin. It filled the basin to the brim.
But he was not finished. With the huge overlying growth out of
the way, Dr. Dan discovered two more tumors of considerable
size embedded in the lateral walls of the uterus. These growths
wedged the uterus in tightly between the bony walls of the pelvis
and extended through the uterine body into the cavity. With
such obstructions in the lower uterine segment and the segment
flattened by seven months' constant pressure, Dr. Dan saw at once
that he would have to abandon his plan to allow the pregnancy
to proceed to its full-term conclusion. Normal delivery was out
of the question.
"SNATCHED FROM THE WOMB" 125
"Gentlemen," he said, "I've no alternative, I'll have to do a
Caesarean."
Already drenched with sweat, he raced on, made an interior me-
dian incision and "snatched the child from the womb." He handed
it to the waiting nurse without lifting his eyes from the mother.
And again he had to change his procedures. The uterine walls
now exposed were, he saw, infiltrated with several additional
growths. He informed his audience, who felt they would never
see anything like this again, that he was going on to complete re-
moval of the uterus. With no letup, he finally finished the triple
operation and proceeded with the lengthy suturing of layer after
layer of tissues, taking the last stitch as carefully as the first.
As luck would have it, Edith Carter had to continue on duty
again that night, but she did not complain for Miss Ebersole put
her on with the new patient. All night Dr. Dan kept coming in,
feeling the woman's pulse, watching over her, trusting nothing to
the internes. "I never saw the patient again/' Edith Carter said
later, "but she made a wonderful recovery and the baby was fine.
Everybody talked about it."
Other cases came to Freedmen's of pregnant women with tu-
mors. One day an interne examined an incoming patient and said
he felt the foetal heart. A staff doctor then examined her and ex-
claimed, "Nonsense, it's only a tumor." But when Dr. Dan's judg-
ment was appealed to, he said at once, "It's both, a baby and a tu-
mor." And he was right.
He seemed to have a miraculous ability to diagnose these cases
of hidden complexity ~ complex still today when the press re-
ports a suit brought against a surgeon who in operating to remove
a supposed tumor made a mistake and inadvertently destroyed
both the foetus and any future opportunity for the woman to
have a child. But Dr. Dan told his students there was nothing un-
canny about his diagnostic powers. You learn the human body, he
said, and all will be plain to you. It just takes work.
Dr. T. C. Smith, a white physician of Washington, who had
witnessed both of Dr. Dan's complicated Caesarean operations,
1 26 Daniel Hale Williams
brought them to the attention of the Medical Society of the Dis-
trict of Columbia. Dr. Smith said he felt very fortunate to have
witnessed these operations and pointed out the unusual feature in
both cases, that mother and child too were saved. Just two years
previously, this same group had discussed the possibility of saving
the mother as late as the third month of pregnancy, but without
any hope of doing as much for the child. Dr. James Tabor John-
son had said on that occasion that Dr. Murphy of Chicago had
done It at the fifth month. "It's too bad," Dr. Johnson said, "we
cannot always go on to viability of the child." Now Dr. Dan had
done just that, saved the child as well as the mother in one case
at the end of the full term of pregnancy and, in the other, within
a month and a half of the end.
Freedmen's Hospital enjoyed an almost 200 per cent increase in
operative cases the first full year of Dr. Dan's incumbency. He
performed all sorts of operations known only to the specialist to-
day abdominal, brain and thoracic operations. Howard students
had never seen the like. "Now," old Dr. Reyburn exclaimed with
joy, and some ambiguity, "now, we can enter the abdomen with-
out fear!" It was the joke of the campus, repeated on every hand.
Out of 533 operations, only eight cases died -an amazingly
low mortality rate. Only one case failed to improve. Dr. Dan made
no secret of what happened to cases brought to his care. It had
been Purvis's habit to excuse his high death rates. He always
pointed out just how many deaths occurred within ten days after
patients entered, as though to say these were so poor, so ill-cared
for, and so near death when they arrived that, of course, many
died; they were not his responsibility. Dr. Dan scorned such tac-
tics. He published a plain balance sheet first, a classified alpha-
betized list, then the exact result obtained with each case: cured,
improved, unimproved, not treated, or died. Everybody now
knew exactly what was going on. And they saw not only the
numbers of difficult cases being handled, but the astounding drop
in mortality figures.
While Dr. Dan's great surgical victories were discussed by the
District Medical Society, he himself was not invited to be present
"SNATCHED FROM THE WOMB J> 127
and join in the discussion. That exclusive body never entertained
a doctor of any Negro blood, no matter how white his appear-
ance or how high his attainments. At various times in the past,
capable colored doctors, Shadd and Francis among them, had at-
tempted for principle's sake to breach the wall; they had always
failed.
Dr. Dan missed the professional give and take he had enjoyed
in the medical societies of Chicago. He felt, too, that the colored
physicians of the District of Columbia needed mutual conference,
interchange of thought, and the presentation of the results of ex-
perience. He well knew how important it was for the health and
preservation of lives of the community that no doctors be ex-
cluded from the consideration of public health matters. He reacted
to the problem the same way he reacted to the need for a hospital
that would train colored nurses and internes.
"Why don't we start a medical society of our own?" he asked
Dean Hood one day. "I mean a society that will open its member-
ship to any doctor who wants to come in."
Hood explained that actually some of them had tried to start
such a society, about a dozen years before, but Purvis had held off
and the whole thing had died. "But I'll go along with you, if you
want to start up again," the dean said. "It's a good idea."
So in January 1895 the Medico-Chirurgical Society of the Dis-
trict of Columbia was revived by eight incorporators, three white
and five colored. The colored doctors included Dr. Dan, Sam-
uel R. Watts, Arthur W. Tancil, Robert W. Brown and James R.
Wilder. The white men, all members of Howard medical faculty,
were Dr. Robert Reyburn, Dr. Neil F. Graham and Dean
Thomas B. Hood. If some of the lily-white doctors of the District
would rather maintain their isolation than exchange ideas with a
Negro, there were others who leaped at the opportunity to learn
from one of the greatest surgeons the country had ever known.
But Purvis still held aloof, as he had in 1884.
In December of that same year, Dr. Dan helped with the for-
mation of a national organization of colored doctors. Like its
predecessor in the District of Columbia, the National Medical As-
1 28 Daniel Hale Williams
sociation which is still the only medical association in this coun-
try open to many Negro physicians was made necessary by race
prejudice.
The organization took form in Atlanta. Dr. Dan declined the
presidency, but agreed to be vice-president. He gave what time,
thought and energy he could to the new society. Also he talked
it up among white doctors and won the support of some of them
for the infant body, including his old preceptor, Henry Palmer.
But Freedmen's kept him so busy that he had time for little else.
More than improved training and medical societies was needed
for the success of the colored doctor. There were still few col-
ored physicians in the country. The Negro surgeon was almost
never heard of. Howard Medical School was only an evening
school attempting to train men who had to work all day long at
any sort of job they could get to support themselves and pay for
their education. Little wonder that Negroes themselves lacked
confidence in medical men of their own color.
If the Negro physician was to earn a livelihood after he had
gained his hard-won training, if he was not to remain just a sun-
down doctor, working at a manual job by day, practicing medi-
cine in the evening, he must, Dr. Dan knew, have more patients.
And he must get them by and large from among the colored peo-
ple. Dr. Dan pondered how the darker-skinned population of
Washington might come to know they had doctors of their own
color and that they could trust them.
Taking a leaf out of medical history, he did a daring thing. Like
Andreas Vesalius, Belgian anatomist of the sixteenth century, he
opened his Sunday surgical clinics to the public. Only the few
seats in the last two or three rows were thus made available, too
far away for the spectator to have much of a view. But it was
possible for a person to sit in the scientific atmosphere and prove
to himself that a colored man could operate. They could see col-
ored assistants and colored nurses in attendance.
Dr. Dan was unprepared for the flood of abuse poured upon his
open clinics. They were un-Christian, it was claimed, they were
held on Sundays. They were unprofessional, they admitted the
SNATCHED FROM THE WOMB 129
public. They were indecent, men saw women operated on. With
the distance and the enveloping sheets no one really saw much of
anything, but these were the arguments of trouble-makers. The
press took up the affair and shouted back and forth, pro and con.
Some busybodies went to Howard's President Rankin, but he re-
fused to interfere.
Dr. Dan continued the clinics; the students had to have them
and on Sunday, the one day they were not working. However he
did put the student barber Colley at the door of the clinic and
instructed him to turn visitors away. But the public was now well
aware that at Freedmen's there was surgical service equal to any
in the country and that a colored person could go there and be
treated both skillfully and considerately. White people, too, heard
of the daring deeds successfully carried out in Freedmen's amphi-
theater. Some of them swallowed their prejudices and brought
their difficulties to the famed Negro surgeon.
As the months went by, Dr. Dan was able to report to the Sec-
retary of the Interior that changes in method seemed to have
wiped out the distinction existing in people's minds between
Freedmen's Hospital and others in the District. The idea of being
cared for at Freedmen's Hospital, he said, had lost some of its re-
pulsiveness with the better class of people. In fact, he told Hoke
Smith, there had been a large demand for admission from those
willing and able to pay. As much as $8000 could have been col-
lected had not an antiquated law prevented the admission of any-
one not penniless. Could they have been admitted, the expenses
of conducting the hospital would not have been increased, while
the added income would have been a great help, either toward his
budget, which was only $54,000, or to form the nucleus of a
building fund. Very soon after his arrival he had put plans and
estimates before the Secretary of the Interior for a new building.
He pleaded that since the institution was the only one of its kind
under control of the government, managed by colored physicians,
where colored people were received without restriction and with-
out embarrassment, it was in a distinct sense a national institution,
located in the national capital, and should, therefore, "be made
130 Daniel Hale Williams
typical of all that is best and highest in the public mind toward
this particular class of our fellow citizens."
It was only fair, Dr. Dan continued, that Freedmen's should of-
fer the three thousand people who came there annually, many of
them from homes that afforded no comfort, no opposition to dis-
ease, the best means for recovery. Freedmen's should be up to date
in every feature of its construction, have the most approved ap-
pliances, the best facilities for treating disease. The hospital ought
to have a real pathological laboratory and a second operating
room. It was much hampered for lack of telephone communica-
tions between wards, ofHce, ambulance and police. It badly needed
a sterilizer; he was using a wash boiler to sterilize his instruments,
placing them on a tin tray perforated with holes and held above
the steam by piles of bricks. Yet without these facilities they were
obtaining results, he said, that were bringing bright young gradu-
ates from some of the foremost medical colleges of the country,
both white and black, to enter Freedmen's as internes.
Dr. Dan told Hoke Smith that it was his belief the government
could build, equip and maintain substantial brick structures at a
cost but little in excess of the amount being expended to maintain
the old, ill-adapted frame buildings in use. And when thus
equipped with a proper plant, he wound up, Freedmen's should
make no apologies nor offer any excuses for any defects or short-
comings in its management. The government and the people, he
said, had a right to expect practical results. There should be no
exception to the general rule because the institution was managed
by colored people.
The Georgian must have -wondered where this man got all his
faith and enthusiasm for Negroes. Aloud he merely said to Dr.
Dan that such matters could not be rushed; he would see what he
could do. But he never did. Other things pressed the Secretary
more.
CHAPTER X
Dr. Dan's Job in Jeopardy
WHATEVER Dr. Dan accomplished at Freedmen's Hospital was
achieved despite the crosscurrents of intrigue and the uncertain-
ties of government action, not because things quieted down. He
was beset constantly by a million plagues. One day he went out
to Cedar Hill and told his troubles to Frederick Douglass.
"My boy," the venerable Negro leader said when he had fin-
ished his recital of frustration and discouragement, "you say you
see what ought to be done. Well, hoping will do no good, now or
any time." Douglass flung back his long white locks and looked
quizzically into the downcast face of his young kinsman. "There
is only one way you can succeed, Dan," he said, "and that is to
override the obstacles in your way. By the power that is within
you, my boy," he said, "do what you hope to do."
Within a matter of months Douglass went to his grave. All too
shortly the good Judge Gresham, long ill, succumbed to pneu-
monia. Dr. Dan had lost two good friends and strong supporters.
It seemed a time of death and change, with more and more re-
sponsibility for Dr. Dan. His older brother Price died suddenly.
Now Dan was head of the family. He brought Price back from
New York to be buried beside their father in the family lot in
St. Anne's Churchyard in Annapolis two Williamses among
many Prices. As Dr. Dan stood beside the new-made grave with
his mother on his arm and looked at the tombstones on that plot,
132 Daniel Hale Williams
he could not but think of the proud heritage that was his and de-
termine to show no less courage than his forebears had shown.
His new determination was soon called upon. Another struggle
lay ahead of him. In June 1896 a joint Congressional committee
was authorized to investigate the management of all charitable
and reformatory institutions in the District, Freedmen's Hospital
among them. The committee was not organized, however, until
the following February and before that date came one of the most
vituperative presidential campaigns the country had ever known.
Cleveland split with his party over the free silver issue and Hoke
Smith split with Cleveland. Smith resigned from the cabinet in
August. This meant a new appointment to the Interior Depart-
ment, but Dr. Dan had barely begun to feel out a new working
relationship with Smith's successor when the November elections
with their defeat of the Democrats made it clear that he could
only look forward to still another change in March.
The Republican victory encouraged the still smarting Purvis to
undertake an energetic campaign for reinstatement more ener-
getic than consistent. In one breath he claimed the recent place-
ment of Freedmen's staff under civil service was a device of the
outgoing Cleveland to protect his appointees. In the next he in-
voked civil service status himself through the "old soldier" clause
and applied to Cornelius Bliss, the new Republican Secretary of
the Interior, for reappointment to the position from which, he
said, he had been removed because of his well-known Republican
principles.
Purvis's Republicanism was sounder than his ethics. Late in Feb-
ruary 1897 the Washington Bee reported that a medical student
had been discovered going round to the class due to be grad-
uated in March requesting them to "sign a paper against Dr. Wil-
liams" and saying that if they did not they would not get their
diplomas.
No sooner was Purvis's plot nipped than another difficulty
arose. Dr. Dan was anxious to ensure the permanency of his re-
forms. So far he had had only Hoke Smith's verbal say-so and,
with Hoke Smith gone, he asked for legislative confirmation of
DR. DAN'S JOB IN JEOPARDY 133
his reorganization of Freedmen's and his substitution of a non-
salaried attending staff and internes for the former paid assistants.
In this connection he asked that his own title be changed from the
outmoded military appellation of surgeon-in-chief to the modern
one of superintendent; he assumed that the position would remain
a civil service one and that a satisfactory incumbent would not be
removed except for cause. But the colored press, both Democrat
and Republican, feared that civil service competition might even-
tually lead to appointment of a white man. They attacked Dr.
Dan for trying to "abolish" his own job when, they said, there
were few enough desirable offices open to colored men and this
was one of the best.
Many a mouth was watering for the plum at Freedmen's; Pur-
vis's was not the only one. Dr. Dan's first interne at Provident,
Austin M. Curtis, who had often helped Dr. Dan scrub the oper-
ating room and with whom he had shared those basket lunches
delivered by his young sister Curtis let it be known he would
accept the appointment if it were offered him. Inspired press com-
ment said Dr. Curtis was "one of the most popular colored physi-
cians in Chicago" and should not be kept from the job just
because his wife had made herself useful to Mark Hanna, Republi-
can chairman. Curtis may have excused his grab for his old chiefs
job by telling himself Dr. Dan was bound to be let out anyhow,
but he did not wait for the event or his wife did not let him
wait.
Bliss may have felt that for a Republican Dr. Dan had been
keeping bad company and should be punished, or, being a con-
servative party man, he may have resented Gresham's apostasy in
leaving the Republicans to support Cleveland, and passed the re-
sentment on to Gresham's protege. At any rate he ordered a civil
service examination held for the position of surgeon-in-chief of
Freedmen's Hospital.
The announcement was a bolt out of the blue to Dr. Dan for
Bliss had assured him he was not going to ask for the resignation
of any of the chiefs of units under his control. Dr. Dan went
around to Bliss's office immediately, but was unable to see the
134 Daniel Hale Williams
Secretary. Instead he was told that Bliss understood he had re-
signed and had accordingly ordered the examination to fill the
vacancy. Dr. Dan hastened to see Senator James McMillan of
Michigan, Republican chairman of the joint Congressional com-
mittee appointed to investigate the District institutions. McMil-
lan, nearing seventy, was not only wealthy and a respected force
in the party, but he was a man of integrity and sound judgment.
He listened carefully to Dr. Dan's predicament. Already he had
been looking into matters at Freedmen's, preparatory to his com-
mittee hearings, and had been impressed with the wonders re-
cently accomplished there. When Dr. Dan had finished, he said,
"Let me drop Bliss a note. No one will dare tamper with a letter
from me."
In a few days Senator McMillan reported to Dr. Dan that he
had had an acknowledgment from Bliss, and the Secretary of the
Interior had assured him he would make no change in Freedmen's
management without consulting him. "There is no vacancy there
now," Bliss had added, "Dr. Williams not having resigned." The
civil service examinations, however, were held as ordered. Bliss
had asked for an examination only in Chicago where Curtis lived,
but the Civil Service Commission had added Newark and Wash-
ington. Results were not immediately forthcoming and the gossip
and innuendo, attack and counterattack went on in the colored
press. Dr. Dan proceeded with his work as best he could on the
meager assurance McMillan had secured for him.
Dr. Dan's medical and surgical schedule was heavy, and he had
to allot time for his many administrative duties. Nevertheless he
did find time for some recreation.
Once a week he ate dinner with his mother and sisters in King-
man Place. Florence, so much like himself in looks and tempera-
ment, was studying to be a kindergarten teacher on funds he sup-
plied. He could not do much for Alice. She had outgrown the
emotional disturbances that bothered her youth and was now well
and strong, but she was not interested in books or studying. He
got her a small job in the sewing room at the hospital and there
she was content enough.
DR. DAN ? S JOB IN JEOPARDY 135
Dr. Dan liked a tennis game, when he could get it, with Henry
Furniss, his Uncle Peter Williams's step-grandson who had entered
Freedmen's as an interne. Young Furniss was a personable, intelli-
gent young fellow. One day during an unaccountable lull they
managed several sets running, to the delight of their audience,
Charles Smiley, the prosperous caterer, and his wife, who had
come on from Chicago for a visit to the capital. Mr. Smiley said
he thought Dr. Dan looked thin, and urged him to come back to
Provident Hospital and take life a little easier. "Sometimes I wish
I could," Dr. Dan answered.
There were many persons in colored circles in the District who
invited Dr. Dan to parties. They sought him out as much for his
father's sake as for his own. These were men who had fought with
the other Daniel Williams that bitter losing fight for civil rights
after the war. Among these was well-to-do, consequential John F,
Cooke on i6th Street. Dr. Dan went to the Cookes as often as he
could, and sometimes to the Masons. C. M. C. Mason had long
since forgiven his ex-apprentice for running away from shoemak-
ing. In fact he had himself thrown over the family business for the
church and was making a reputation as a preacher of the Gospel.
Dr. Dan would tease pretty young Edith Mason and tell her he
went for the doctor the night she was born, and Edith would toss
her fair curls and blush. If he had had the time for it, and the in-
clination, Dr. Dan probably could have dined out every night in
the week. His would-be hosts were from all walks of life and
from both races, and many were of mixed blood like his own. A
good many evenings he spent with out-of-town visitors; his ac-
quaintanceship was nationwide and everyone seemed to visit the
capital at one time or another.
Sometimes Dr. Dan's program was interrupted by the reappear-
ance in the alcoholic ward of Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Ever since
young Dunbar had come to the World's Fair to read his poem,
"The Colored American," Dr. Dan had taken a warm interest in
the shy, troubled youth who hid so much bitterness under his
courtliness. Dunbar came frequently to wander through Cow
Town, until, his heart breaking with the misery he found there,
Daniel Hale Williams
he would take to drinking and end up once more under Dr. Dan's
care.
Very occasionally Dr. Dan got clear away to New York City
to see his boyhood chum, the Reverend Hutchins Bishop, and his
namesake, young Shelton Hale Bishop. Reverend Bishop was mak-
ing St. Philip's Church his life work, but had removed his wife
and children to the purer country air at Armonk.
Dr. Dan missed his week-end hunting. About the most strenu-
ous exercise he got now was when he put on the natty cycling out-
fit that set his nurses chattering and went off on his high wheel
with William Warfield of the first class of internes. Warfield was
another blue-eyed "Negro/' more Caucasian than African in ap-
pearance. He was publicly credited with being a scion of the so-
cially and politically prominent Maryland white family of that
name. At the end of his year of interneship Dr. Dan had pro-
moted him to a staff position as second assistant surgeon and later
made him first assistant surgeon. In this position he was next in
authority to Dr. Dan himself, and in Dr. Dan's absence from the
city Warfield served as executive. Dr. Dan was giving him every
opportunity for training and experience, took him to clinics at
Johns Hopkins Hospital, and used him as assistant in operations
performed outside as well as within Freedmen's. Many people
criticized Warfield some of the student nurses were wary of
him, called him a "heartbreaker" and a "backbiter," said he had a
bad tongue, and some of the doctors thought him a pretty fool
and mediocre medical man. Certainly he had twice failed to pass
the Maryland licensing examination. But for once Dr. Dan seemed
to have relaxed his rigid standards, for he continued to give War-
field every chance to get ahead.
Sometimes the two men would take Dr. Dan's surrey and in-
vite Caroline Parke and Alice Johnson to go on a camera expedi-
tion to the country. Henry Baker of the Patent Office had intro-
duced Dr. Dan to the two schoolteachers. Miss Parke had merry
blue eyes and Miss Johnson had handsome aloof brown ones. Both
were light-complexioned like himself and Warfield. The quartet
could go anywhere and pass unremarked as far as skin color went,
DR. DAN S JOB IN JEOPARDY 137
and since they were all congenial their parties would probably
have been more frequent had Dr. Dan's schedule permitted.
Sometimes Dr. Dan would get to a social gathering only as it
was breaking up. He would escort Miss Parke and Miss Johnson,
who were neighbors, home under Washington's whispering elms,
cool black tunnels on a spring evening and doubtless wished as he
listened to the women's quiet, well-bred voices and their soft
laughter, that he had more time for feminine company.
Finally McMillan's committee began its long-belated hearings.
Freedmen's Hospital was not called until near the end of the ses-
sions, after most of the charitable and reformatory institutions of
the District had been heard.
It was a sharply contrasted, sharply opposed group of men who
gathered in the stale hearing chamber late in April, and from the
Senate documents we can reconstruct the scene that took place.
Outdoors Washington was abloom with spring; inside the bright
sun ferreted out the dust and cobwebs of forgotten corners.
Of the committee of six, constituted equally from both houses and
both parties, all were present except Congressman Alexander M.
Dockery, Democrat from Missouri. With the exception of the Re-
publican Congressman Mahlon Pitney, who was Dan's age and not
to sit on the Supreme Court bench until years later, all were con-
siderably older than Freedmen's forty-one-year-old surgeon. Most
of the men were full-bearded and imposing in their stiff collars
and frock coats. The elderly chairman McMillan reduced the ten-
sion considerably by his quiet, unassuming manner, Senator
Thomas S. Martin was a Virginia Democrat and Confederate vet-
eran, about fifty. Senator Charles J. Faulkner, of the same age and
party, was a West Virginian. Congressman Stephen Northway of
Ohio was almost as old as McMillan and like him a Republican,
but without McMillan's cool, intelligent objectivity.
To the group Dr. Dan might seem like a young man, a young
man called up on the carpet. But Dr. Dan was used to such pro-
ceedihgs. His poise as a trial witness for the City Railway of Chi-
cago had been notable and his personal contacts for a dozen years
138 Daniel Hale Williams
had included men of caliber equal to or greater than any of these.
Besides, he welcomed this hearing. He had definite ideas about the
position Freedmen's should occupy in the country at large and for
the benefit of the colored people. He had laid them before the
Secretary of the Interior more than once, but without securing the
action he desired. The hearing would give him an opportunity to
reach other ears.
While the hearing was not directly related to his incumbency
in office, practically speaking his job 'was at stake. But Dr. Dan
was confident of his record. He had nothing to fear but con-
spiracy. However conspiracy, he saw as he entered the hearing
chamber, was there to be contended with. Purvis was present, and
with him his close friend John R. Lynch, a trustee of Howard
University. Also present were the editor of the friendly Bee, Cal-
vin B. Chase, and the ministerial, white-bearded President Rankin.
The air was vibrant, but the hearing began routinely. Senator
McMillan turned the chair over to Senator Martin and contented
himself with listening. The older man's intelligent eyes darted
from one to another as he pulled occasionally at his long gray
mustache. Dr. Dan took the stand and started to read a prepared
statement answering the questions set forth in the agenda: Should
Freedmen's remain under the Interior Department or be super-
vised by the District? Should it continue its training school for
nurses? Should there be a salaried hospital staff?
He had scarcely started before he was interrupted by North-
way. Like a gadfly the Ohio Democrat flew from accusing Dr.
Dan of turning away a colored infant whose working mother
could not care for the ill child to implying next that he was some-
how personally at fault because Freedmen's cared for numbers of
unmarried mothers from outside Washington and illegitimate ba-
bies were abandoned in the District to become a burden on
District charity. Northway charged Dr. Dan with carelessness
in allowing those foreign cases to come to a hospital which he,
Northway, said was set up to serve the indigent ill of the District.
Dr. Dan flung back his head. "I don't know about that, sir," he
said. "Freedmen's was originated to care for the poor that came
DR. DAN'S JOB IN JEOPARDY 139
from any place in the United States and it has cared for them for
years. It was not a hospital originally, it was a camp."
^ His voice grew deep and vibrant as he gave Northway a little
history: "The poor refugee slaves were not asked where they
came from. They came from all over the country and I think pa-
tients should continue to do so. There are so few hospitals that
will care for the colored. It will work a great hardship on poor
people dying for want of competent medical and surgical care if
they are compelled to pay on the outside for services equivalent
to those given in this hospital."
Dr. Dan went on and detailed the views he had so often set
forth to the Secretary of the Interior. He minced no words and
his straightforward presentation soon lifted the discussion out of
the petty bickering of Northway to a level of human justice and
compassion. When he had ceased there was a moment of silence,
then Senator Faulkner leaned forward. The West Virginia Demo-
crat's six-inch white beard and walrus whiskers jutted forward,
too, his thumb and forefinger grasped the heavy gold watch
chain that festooned his vest and escaped into view, thanks to his
habit of buttoning only the top button of his coat. Faulkner was
a friend of the Negro he had filibustered to prevent a vote
aimed at abolishing legislation which protected the Negro voter
in the South and he was impressed with this quiet, steady, white-
skinned man who spoke up thus ably for "his people."
"I think the training of colored nurses should certainly go on,"
Faulkner said, and asked, "Are you training colored doctors, too?"
"Yes," Dr, Dan answered, "I am," and explained how with no
increase in appropriation he now trained nurses and doctors,
maintained an ambulance service, and conducted clinics open to
both Howard University students and physicians of the city. The
system, he explained, was the system used by Johns Hopkins, the
Roosevelt, and all modern institutions. It was a system he was fa-
miliar with before coming to Freedmen's. "I knew it would work,"
he said, "and it has. We pay no salaries for assistant doctors. It is
not necessary."
He wound up by saying, "I would especially like to ask the
140 Daniel Hale Williams
committee to examine into my methods and the work of the hos-
pital and then from their examination to judge of the possibilities
of the future."
"But why," Faulkner wanted to know, "do you think the insti-
tution could not be run the same way if it were placed under Dis-
trict authority?"
Here was the moment to speak frankly, and Dr. Dan did. "Be-
cause," he answered, "I am afraid District control would result in
the hospital's being thought of as a District institution and the
care limited to District residents. Because I am afraid there would
be a change in the national character of the educational services
offered to nurses and internes."
This was a service, he told them and he did not mince matters,
that colored young people were deprived of elsewhere by cruel
prejudice. Moreover, he added, there were already indications
that under District control Freedmen's would become the object
of interminable political scrambles. Already there had been an at-
tempt to place the hospital under District control in order to put
it into the hands of a local group who called themselves a Board
of Incorporators. "I would be very glad, gentlemen," he said, "if
you would see fit to look into this scheme."
Purvis was almost apoplectic with restraint. Twice he had in-
terrupted Dr. Dan and had been silenced. When he was finally
called to the stand, his frustration and resentment burst their dam.
"That staff Williams has is an imitation," he blustered, "just an
imitation of other hospitals." There was no reason under the sun,
he shouted, why the government should not pay the doctors at
Freedmen's the same as it paid those at the Insane Asylum and he
promised that if a Board of Incorporators was given power they
would not take young men and put them in attendance upon pa-
tients without an hour's experience.
"If there is anybody on God's earth," Purvis cried, lachrymose
with his own argument, "that should be experienced, it is a physi-
cian who has to attend upon poor unfortunate sick people!"
Purvis said he believed in training nurses, indeed he had been
training them since 1876. The only difference he saw between his
DR. DAN S JOB IN JEOPARDY 141
old mammies and this young upstart's nurses was that he had not
hired a superintendent of nurses because the law allowed no
money for that purpose and so he had drilled them himself per-
sonally.
Purvis was scarcely his own best witness. Finally he ceased
shouting and sat down and Jeremiah Rankin was called to the
stand. As the venerable old man took his seat, the committee
looked with interest at the white president of the colored univer-
sity. What would he say, to which of Freedmen's chiefs, past or
present, would he cast his support? They sat there waiting and
every one present knew that Jeremiah Rankin's word would have
powerful weight upon the issue. His integrity as a churchman, his
long incumbency of the pastorate of a distinguished congregation
that had included many public men and government officials, his
two decades as a trustee of Howard University before he became
its president and the decade that had ensued since all insured
that whatever his judgment upon these two doctors, both, after
all, on his faculty, it was very likely apt to be the final judgment
of this committee. The four colored men were taut; the white
men gave close attention.
Dr. Rankin began by explaining the fears the university trustees
had had when it was rumored that Hoke Smith would make a
change at Freedmen's. They had begged the Secretary of the In-
terior, he said, not to appoint a man just because he was a Demo-
crat. The old man stopped, embarrassed. "Excuse me, gentlemen,"
he said, "I should perhaps not use that word. But anyhow Mr.
Smith assured us he would appoint a man who would never be
removed for political reasons. I think he kept his promise."
He had been very anxious, Dr. Rankin said, about his medical
department and he had consequently been very observant of the
changes made there. "Gentlemen," he said, "I heartily approve of
them all." The room buzzed. The chairman pounded his gavel.
Dr. Rankin continued steadily.
"I am a minister, gentlemen," he said, "and I speak right out."
And he told them that as he now saw it the idea for a Board of
Incorporates had originated with the previous surgeon-in-chief
142 Darnel Hale Williams
who wanted to retain his place, understandably so, he had been
there some fifteen to twenty years. And he, Rankin, had agreed
to be one of the Incorporators because he felt kindly toward Pur-
vis then, as he still did. The Incorporators had met once or twice
and agreed that if they got control they would retain Purvis. But
so far as Dr. Rankin knew, he said, no meeting of the Incorpora-
tors had been called for some three years and he did not know by
what authority Purvis was present to represent the Incorporators.
He knew the change had been very trying to Dr. Purvis, very
legitimately so. And it had been trying to himself too. And he
could also see now that it had been trying to the new man coming
to Freedmen's. Dr. Williams had had uphill work there at first, at-
tempting to get along without friction. But Mr. Smith, had put a
choice man in the job, a first-class surgeon, and he, Rankin, be-
lieved that every change Dr. Williams had made had been justi-
fied.
"And it no longer seems wise to me," the old president ended,
"that the University should have any official control over the
hospital."
The questioning continued. Did the students of the university
have the benefit of the hospital? They did. Suddenly Faulkner
turned to Dr. Dan. "Have you any politics? " he asked.
Dr. Dan was not to be caught. "No more," he answered, "than
any other American. I have my own ideas about things."
"Do you take part in politics?" Faulkner persisted. Dr. Dan re-
plied that he had never been a pronounced politician, whereupon
the Senator demanded to know how he had got to Washington.
"Well," answered Dr. Dan, "I'll tell you. I was connected with
a hospital in Chicago, the Provident Hospital, and on the board of
trustees was that good man, Judge Gresham . . ." And he told
them of the judge's suggestion that he apply for the job at Freed-
men's and his subsequent follow-up of it. No sooner had Dr. Dan
ceased speaking than Lynch was on his feet.
John R. Lynch had long been a Republican wheel horse. He had
lost his job as Fourth Auditor of the Treasury when Cleveland
came in. His private fortunes had suffered too; his wife, a beau-
DR. DAN'S JOB IN JEOPARDY 143
tiful New Orleans Creole, had left him for a white man. In both
misfortunes, Purvis had been Lynch's sympathetic friend and now
Lynch was present to return the service. He was a formidable op-
ponent and appeared with the more aplomb on the present occa-
sion because he still had hopes that his recent "pleasant talk," as
the press had put it, with McKinley would bear some tangible
fruit.
"As one of the trustees of Howard University," Lynch said, "I
should like to make one remark. I favor any plan that will take
this hospital out of politics. It is in politics now, that is how Dr.
Williams got it."
"Is Dr. Williams a Democrat?" asked Faulkner.
"The fact is," Lynch replied with relish, "there has been a good
deal of doubt during the last four years as to just what consti-
tutes a Democrat." But Faulkner would not be twitted by a dou-
bly black Republican. "I have not known of any doubt," he de-
clared. "Do you know of this young man's ever having voted the
Democratic ticket?"
"I only know what I was told," Lynch said.
"Who told you?" asked the Senator.
"Judge Gresham," was the reply.
"What did he tell you?" persisted Faulkner.
Lynch got to his point in his own way. "As Dr. Purvis's per-
sonal friend," he said, "I did not want him turned out. So I ap-
proached Judge Gresham myself and Judge Gresham told me
that he did not know Dr. Purvis, had no interest in him and had
not recommended that a change be made, but that the Secretary of
the Interior had informed him he was going to make a change be-
cause Dr. Purvis had made a political speech the Secretary did not
like and since a change is going to be made, said Judge Gresham,
1 took the liberty of recommending Dr. Williams not only be-
cause he is competent and qualified' all of which may be true
* but because he is in harmony with the Administration. He fol-
lowed me in voting for Cleveland.' " With this thrust, Lynch
again declared that Freedmen's was a continual source of political
contention. "We ought to remove that temptation," he said with
*44 Darnel Hale Williams
great righteousness, "and place the appointing power either with
the Incorporators or the District Commissioners."
As soon as Lynch finished, Dr. Rankin asked for the stand
again. He deprecated the turn the discussion had taken. "This is
a kind of confessional, Mr. Chairman," he said. "Now Brother
Lynch will excuse me for talking frankly here. This Brother who
is so adverse to having things go into politics waited on me and
spent the evening going over the matter. When I told him my
conclusions, that I did not think it would be wise to reappoint
Dr. Purvis, or to appoint Incorporators, he then threatened to
bring this charge of politics and said, moreover, that he himself
was a politician and he would have a change made on political
grounds. That's what he said."
"Now Dr. Rankin," cried Lynch, "let me interrupt you " Be-
fore the Negro politican could go any further, the chairman
brought his gavel down.
"Gentlemen," Martin said, "our time is up. We have nothing to
do with your misunderstandings. We want to get at the facts and
I think we have done so. ... The committee is adjourned."
Perhaps in the end Dr. Dan would win out with the commit-
tee. Certainly President Rankin had stood by him magnificently.
But it would be months before the issue would be settled. He
needed a rest and he wanted to get as far away as possible. His
good friend Charles Bentley, Traviata's husband, four years a
widower, came on from Chicago and the two men went off for a
quick trip to Europe. By June they were back.
Dr. Dan was soon filling as heavy an operating schedule as ever.
The matter of his tenure seemed no longer a matter of conjecture,
at least between himself and Bliss. Bliss assured McMillan he would
await the report of his committee, expected in December, and
when the Civil Service Commission reported a list of eligibles was
now ready, he informed them there was no vacancy to be filled.
Dr. Dan had won out against the attacks of both Purvis and Cur-
tis and could now continue his w-ork in peace.
Then suddenly on the first of February, a year after the Repub-
lican administration began and with it the sniping for his job, Dr.
DR. DAN'S JOB IN JEOPARDY 145
Dan resigned. McMillan's report was still not ready and there
seemed no reason, with his victory won, why he should do so.
But he wrote Bliss that the work he had come to do "my ardent
desire to give the patients the benefit of modern methods . . .
young colored men and women the opportunity to become
trained in medicine, surgery and nursing ... to conduct Freed-
men's on strictly business principles" these things were finished
as far as they could be finished in the ill-adapted, dangerous build-
ings in use. Until Freedrnen's had a modern plant, wholly satis-
factory results could never be accomplished, he said. And so he
was resigning to resume his professional and business interests in
Chicago. He thanked the Interior Department for its "generous,
valuable and prompt assistance in the transaction of public busi-
ness" and now stood ready, he said, to give his successor all the
information he could in regard to the work.
Bliss was taken by surprise. It -was six weeks before he ap-
pointed a successor and two months before Dr. Dan -was released.
Bliss asked the Civil Service Commission to certify their eligibles.
The Commission submitted its list: Dr. Charles I. West, Washing-
ton, with a grade of 91.50; Dr. Austin M. Curtis, Chicago, 79.10;
and Dr. James A. Wormley, Newark, 76.05. All were colored
men. Bliss appointed, not West of the remarkably high standing,
but Curtis whose wife had made herself useful to Mark Hanna,
chairman of the Republican National Committee. In accepting his
appointment, Curtis acknowledged the political character of his
appointment. "I assure you," he wrote Bliss, "I appreciate this rec-
ognition; it is a compliment paid the Colored people of Chicago
who are always identified with that party which champions and
administers a noble patriotism . . ."
Now Freedrnen's was indeed a political football.
CHAPTER XI
Alice Johnson
FOR months the Washington colored newspapers had covered the
Freedmen's Hospital controversy in detail. Dr. Dan's name ap-
peared in almost every issue. Whatever he did was news
whether he went off for a week end, performed a spectacular op-
eration, or appeared before a Congressional committee.
On April 2, 1898, two days after Dr. Dan left Freedmen's Hos-
pital, the Colored American reported that the redoubtable race
protagonist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, would address the mothers of
the 1 9th Street Baptist Church on the moral training of the
young. . . . Daniel Murray, of the Library of Congress staff, had
entertained a distinguished delegation of Scottish Rite Masons at
his home on S Street where salads, oysters, creams, jellies, wines,
etc., were bountifully served. . . . Professor Booker T. Washing-
ton of Tuskegee Institute had spent a few hours in the city en
route elsewhere. . . . But the item that made every reader gasp
was the laconic three-word heading:
DR. WILLIAMS WEDS
And when startled readers saw the picture of the proud, re-
served beauty, Alice Johnson, their astonishment was magnified.
So those carriage rides and camera expeditions and those walks
home from social gatherings with the two schoolteachers had
meant something! But not many people had guessed it.
If looks were everything, few could question the forty-two-
ALICE JOHNSON 147
year-old surgeon's choice of the exquisite Miss Johnson, though it
had long been common consent that her seclusion from society
and her immersion in her school teaching meant she had decided
never to marry. At thirty-nine, her beauty had become a tradition.
As much as fifteen years before, children had stood entranced
when Miss Alice descended from the horse cars at the corner of
4i and E Streets, S. W., and mutely watched her walk to the
home she shared with her mother on the canal-surrounded Island
at the foot of the Capitol. Even now, on the few occasions when
she still appeared at gatherings, people saw no dulling of her
beauty.
Alice Johnson was small and dainty, only five feet three, but,
Caroline Parke said, "matchlessly formed." The Victorian mode
seemed calculated to demonstrate her charms and her old friend
remembered just how she looked. Her close-fitting red princess
coat disclosed to consummate advantage her perfectly propor-
tioned figure. Her long slim neck carried her large black velvet
hat proudly and her modish willow plumes waved graciously to
and fro as she daintily picked her way over the uneven mossy
brick sidewalks, lifting sweeping skirts to reveal the smallest foot
and the prettiest ankle in the District. Her photographs show an
oval face, its rather high brow softened by loosely curling dark
bangs over beautifully arched long eyebrows. Her eyes were
dark, too, large and slightly somber; her nose was daintily pointed;
while a long upper lip tried to hold firm a tremulous, tenderly
bowed mouth. But this delightful face, in which the high color
came and went in delicate olive cheeks, was always heavily veiled,
according to Sally Fisher who had the story from her mother
Cora Fisher. Only so protected could she escape unwelcome com-
ment as she passed through the unsavory neighborhood of Mott
School where she taught.
When Dr. Dan married Alice Johnson people had almost
ceased to talk of her past. But her mother's death six months be-
fore and now this surprising marriage set every tongue wagging.
Alice Johnson did not bear the distinguished name of her white
father and to very few even of her most intimate friends did she
148 Daniel Hale Williams
ever mention his name. When words of the scandalmongers
reached her ears the charge that she did not even know the
name of her father she pulled her long upper lip down hard and
remained proudly silent. If she wore his gifts, a gold French
locket, an Italian brooch, or long dangling earrings from London,
she always said she had bought them herself. The world-famous
sculptor, Chevalier Moses Jacob Ezekiel, however, was neither
knighted nor otherwise distinguished when his daughter was born.
Son of a wealthy Richmond merchant, young Ezekiel had
grown up in an orthodox Jewish household. His father let no oc-
casion pass by when he might protect or advance Jewish interests.
Once when President Tyler referred to the American nation as a
"Christian people," Jacob Ezekiel upbraided the country's chief
executive for the impropriety of naming the whole by a part, and
John Tyler in a lengthy letter apologized as best he could. When
Virginia passed Sunday closing laws, Jacob protested the infringe-
ment of his freedom so vigorously that the law was amended. He
was a stern father for a sensitive boy.
Perhaps Jacob Ezekiel's passion for justice to one minority
group did not extend to another. More probably he never knew
his young son had fathered a baby by the beautiful mulatto house-
maid. Isabella Johnson's Spanish-like beauty and her sweet docil-
ity won the boy's heart. But what could he do a youth writing
poetry, trying to paint, rebelling against the dull trade of his fa-
ther and uncles? He had no money of his own, no way to support
a family even if the law would permit a marriage between white
and mulatto, which it would not. He went off to his military
training in turbulent '61 no doubt with a heavy heart.
When the Civil War was over, Moses Ezekiel's daughter Alice
was already six years old. With her child, Isabella probably was
swept on the great tide of hapless refugees out of burning Rich-
mond and into the national capital. At any rate she was living in
Washington by the time Alice entered grade school, earning a liv-
ing for the two of them with her fine needlework. The Ezekiel
fortune had fallen with Richmond. Young Moses returned with
the defeated Greys to try again to be a merchant, but he hated
Alice D. Johnson as a young girl
about 1875
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, 1883
Alice Johnson as a teacher at Mott School about 1890
ALICE JOHNSON 149
trade as much as ever, and soon he turned, willy-nilly, to paint-
ing, and a little later to sculpture. Robert E. Lee and his wife en-
couraged him, as did others. Shortly he was off for Europe. For
several years he studied and lived on next to nothing. Finally he
won a prize that gave him two years in Rome.
In '74, when Alice was fifteen, Ezekiel returned to America and
secured his first big commission. It was an order from the Jewish
organization, Sons of the Covenant, for a marble group to depict
Religious Liberty and was to be ready for the Centennial Expo-
sition in two years. He returned to his studio in Europe to execute
his sketch and that same autumn Alice entered the normal school
department of Howard University.
Two years later the Sons of the Covenant had their marble
group and Ezekiel had his money. Almost immediately these
words appeared on Alice Johnson's record at Howard University:
"Excused three weeks before close of term to go to England."
At last EzekiePs feet were on the path to success. He could af-
ford a home now with the woman he loved and their child, and
in Europe nothing would stand in the way of his marriage.
According to Caroline Parke, Isabella took Alice and went to
Europe, expecting never to come back. But somehow things were
not right. For seventeen years she had made her own life in Wash-
ington's unfashionable southwest quarter, unfashionable even for
colored people. Moses Ezekiel, despite his letters and occasional
visits, was a stranger now. The sophisticated circle in which the
artist moved, the alien race, the alien country all left her insup-
portably lonely. She took her daughter and returned to America.
Ezekiel persisted with his sculpture and won innumerable
prizes, gold medals, ribbons of merit, and titles. His art followed
the choicest classical lines and an age that cared greatly about fin-
ish and smooth surface delighted in his skill. His works were wel-
comed in the Sans Souci palace, Berlin, in Westminster Abbey, in
Rome and Tivoli, and in a dozen schools and cities in his native
country. Among the portrait busts for which he became famous
was one of his friend, Franz Liszt. He spent summers with Liszt
and the Cardinal Gustave von Hohenlohe in the Villa d'Este at
150 Daniel Hale Williams
Tivoli. Winters, in Rome, the Queen Mother, the royal house-
hold and all the rest of the haut monde were his frequent guests
in the unusual studio he made for himself in the gigantic walls of
Diocletian's Bath. Here he lived on after Victor Emmanuel
knighted him Chevalier and Humbert made him Officer of the
Crown of Italy.
His Friday open house drew artists, literary men and women,
and eminent strangers from all parts of the world. His guests
found him a rare personality. They called him a gifted, noble-
hearted gentleman. They spoke of his simplicity and greatness, a
man who welcomed all alike, famed and lowly, young students,
people unknown but valued for some gift of character and heart.
They talked of his helpfulness and generosity to the poor. Strange,
they said, that a man of such depth of feeling should never marry.
Back in their Washington home, then at 3 1 3 F Street, S. W., the
mother and daughter resumed their quiet life together. Isabella
Johnson seldom went out. Her position was anomalous and she
preferred to devote herself to her daughter. With almost animal
fierceness she warded away harm from this beautiful, adored girl,
so much like herself as to figure, so much like her father as to face
and feature and soft dark locks. Alice Darling she had called her.
The girl wrote Alice D. Johnson on her school papers and red-
dened when she was asked her middle name.
From the time she was small, Alice had to bear the taunt of be-
ing nameless. Her only retort was to hold her back straight, her
chin up, and to look scornfully at her tormentors.
Silence was her weapon. She answered no questions, offered no
explanations. She went off to Europe and came back and never
discussed that glamorous trip, even to so good a friend as Anna
Evans.
Alice was not a particularly good student. Her highest marks
were in history, moral philosophy, geography and Latin. But she
earned sadly low grades in arithmetic, geometry and algebra. In
astronomy, botany and rhetoricals she did somewhat better. In
June of '77 she was graduated. The next fall she began to teach in
ALICE JOHNSON 151
the first grade of Mott School, out beyond the District boundary,
on Trumbull and 6th Streets, only a few squares from Freedmen's
Hospital. Mott School was fairly new then, and well equipped. Its
teachers were all normal school or college graduates. Alice's
beauty, her taste in clothes and books, in music and art, won her
good friends among intellectual young women of her own sort,
mostly young women of mixed blood like her own Nettie
Langston, daughter of the Reconstruction Congressman, John M.
Langston, of Virginia; Betty Cox, who soon married Dr. John R.
Francis; Anna Evans, who married the scholar Daniel Murray;
and blue-eyed Caroline Parke Caddie, Alice called her whose
white blood had come from the Parke Custis manor house, but
who, like Alice, preferred not to speak of painful subjects.
Even when Alice was grown up and earning her living, her
mother supervised her carefully. When Alice had to come home
after dark from her night school classes, her mother insisted she
must have an escort. Alice was devoted to her mother and passion-
ately resented any slight directed at her. Once when she was in-
vited to a fashionable wedding and her mother was not, Alice re-
fused to go. Loyal, silent, proud, she held her head high and
brooked no action that might reflect on the only person in the
world she had to love. When suitors flocked to her door, as they
did, she expected the same loyalty from them.
Many sought Alice Johnson's hand. She had her pick of the
Howard University campus, the Freedmen's staff, and the many
ambitious young Negroes who poured into the capital eager for
opportunities in government civil service. Rejected by Alice, her
suitors married other girls, and the girls found they had no alterna-
tive but to forgive a first love so fabulously beautiful.
Finally, however, Alice made her choice. She settled upon
Garnett Baltimore, a young engineer, son of one of the old mulatto
families of Albany. He was handsome, well off, and altogether
just right for the reigning beauty. But shortly after their engage-
ment had been announced, Mr. Baltimore accepted an invitation
to a party where Alice was not invited. He may have been softened
up for this defection by the gibes of the hostess. Alice Parke's
152 Daniel Hale Williams
tongue was sharper and her heart harder than those of her cousin,
Caddie. Alice Parke gloried that her white blood had come to her
legitimately, if somewhat circuitously. "It's a shame," she cried,
"that so distinguished a man as Garnett Baltimore should bestow
his fine old name on that nameless Alice Johnson."
The day after the party, Caddie went to see Alice Johnson.
Caddie found her friend with set face packing up Mr. Baltimore's
gifts. No matter who came courting after that, she turned a deaf
ear. She had gone to dancing class with Caddie at Marini's Hall.
But now she was no longer seen at the winter assemblies and the
germans nor on the summer boat trips down the Potomac nor
at the euchre parties she had loved. Her pleasures became the
Chautauqua Circle, the Ingersoll lectures, the appearance in the
city of Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, Sir Henry Irving. At home
she did needlework with her mother and took lessons from Shera-
ton in china painting. She had excellent taste and not a little
talent, as the daughter of Chevalier Ezekiel should have had. Vaca-
tions she went to Annapolis to visit the Bishop girls, sisters of
Dr. Dan's boyhood friend Hutchins Bishop. Occasionally she
took a trip to Atlantic City with Mary Robinson Meriwether, an
Oberlin graduate who had interests congenial to Alice's. In time
most of Alice's friends married. When Christmas came around,
she sent them some prettily bound volume, like Pastels in Prose,
and inscribed it in her restrained, perfect Spencerian hand.
Twenty years after her graduation from Howard University,
Alice Johnson was still teaching at Mott School. But Mott had
grown old and shabby and out of date; the Commissioner's re-
ports admitted the ventilation was not proper, the water closets
only fair, and the light poor. Two decades in the slowly deterio-
rating structure, located in an unsavory district, would have dis-
couraged anyone with less force of character than Alice. She was
now teaching the seventh grade and serving as assistant to the
principal. When any of the other teachers fell ill, she was quick
to offer her help in catching up with grading of papers. She tried
to inspire her pupils to better things. One morning after she
had heard a concert by Edward Remenyi, she took occasion to
ALICE JOHNSON 153
try to recreate for a twelve-year-old boy the spell of the evening
before.
"I was skeptical of the musicianship of any white man," Clar-
ence Cameron White recalled years later when he had become
a noted composer and violinist in his own right. "I asked Miss
Alice if Rernenyi could play as well as Will Marion Cook and I
can still hear her laughing." Miss Alice finally was able to persuade
Clarence White to go hear the famous Hungarian artist and the
boy had an unforgettable experience, one from which he later
dated the beginning of his own serious study of music.
By the middle '905 the young internes at Freedmen's Hospital,
a stone's throw from Mott School, regarded Miss Johnson as a
confirmed man-hater. They never approached her, though they
admired her beauty.
One interne, more bookish than the rest, the same Henry Fur-
niss who played tennis with Dr. Dan, discovered that Miss Johnson
was a good companion with whom to read and discuss the latest
books. She might be a little prim, he admitted, tied up in herself,
serious but he was serious too. His interneship was just begin-
ning, and it would be years before he could think of marrying.
Harry Furniss left romance out of his plans for the time being
and found in the older Alice Johnson a safe comrade. He approved
of the way she hated people who gossiped. He approved of the
strait-laced life she led with her mother.
Isabella Johnson was aging now; her hair was growing white
where it lay in soft waves on her brow. She would bring in the
cake and wine when she thought the evening was getting on and
that young men callers should soon be going home. Harry Furniss
knew the signal.
Alice Johnson seldom went out now, but when she did Dr.
Dan always seemed to turn up in time to escort her and Caddie
Parke home. She asked Harry Furniss about him. He seemed dig-
nified and reserved, but could he be trusted? Harry Furniss per-
suaded her that Dr. Dan, his kinsman, was entirely honorable.
So Alice went riding in Dr. Dan's surrey, with Caddie and the
assistant surgeon, William Warfield.
154 Daniel Hale Williams
When Alice's mother fell ill, she consulted Dr. Dan. It was
cancer. He would operate, he told her, and do his very best. Alice
could not bear the thought of the hospital, and he reassured her
on that point. Alice and her mother were living then in the new
home she had bought at 1944 pth Street, just a block from Cad-
die. It was to the 9th Street house that Dr. Dan came with his
young assistants, Mitchell and Warfield, and operated. He did
not tell Alice it was hopeless, and at least it was temporary
relief.
Soon after the operation, in May of '97, Dr. Dan had gone to
Europe. After his marriage people wondered if that quick, hurried
trip had not been to see Alice's father, but neither Dr. Dan nor
Alice ever told. By late summer Isabella's condition worsened
rapidly. On her deathbed, said Caroline Parke, she begged Dr.
Dan to care faithfully for her daughter always, and Dr. Dan gave
his ready promise.
The day of Isabella Johnson's funeral, a letter came to the 9th
Street home. As Caddie Parke carried it upstairs to Alice's room,
she saw it bore foreign postage. She handed it to her friend and
considerately turned away. Alice read the letter, then threw her-
self in Caddie's arms. Broken with grief, her defenses down, for
the first time in her life she mentioned her father to her friend.
a Oh, Caddie," she wept, "he says he hopes Mother will recover."
Life had taken one parent from her. Now death had taken
the other. She went into deepest mourning and would not con-
sider marriage under six months. Meantime Dr. Dan's sister Sally
came to stay with her.
The house on 9th Street was sold. When Alice Johnson walked
out of it a bride, she would be leaving it forever. The wedding was
to be a quiet affair. Because of her mother's recent death, Alice
wanted to wear black. But her dressmaker, a fashionable modiste
from Boston, put her foot down and would not hear of gowning
a bride in black. The two women compromised on a navy blue
suit, with figure-fitting three-quarter-length coat, a navy blue
hat, and white gloves for the ceremony, dark ones to change to
for traveling.
ALICE JOHN SON 155
Caddie played Mendelssohn's Wedding March for her friend.
Mrs. Fannie Middleton was matron of honor. Milton M. Holland,
member of the school board and uncle of Betty Cox Francis,
stood in her absent father's place and gave her away. Dr. Rankin
read the marriage service, assisted by Bishop W. B. Derrick of the
African Methodist Church.
There were not more than a dozen guests. "Please tell them
not to throw rice at us," Alice pleaded. But little Sarah Meri-
wether remembered that they did, and it seemed the only gay
note in a solemn affair. Sarah stood goggle-eyed on the curb
watching the ex-chief of Freedmen's hand his bride into the car-
riage and then step briskly up after her. Dr. and Mrs. Daniel Hale
Williams were off for Chicago.
The new Mrs. Williams, said the Colored American that eve-
ning, is a lady of sterling worth, well equipped for the responsible
duties she has now assumed. But privately, here and there over
Washington, others said the former schoolteacher would never
make a doctor's wife. Her freezing manner, they said, will drive
all his patients clean away. Others, perhaps the disappointed, were
sure Alice was not in love. Some even said Dr. Dan was not in
love either; he really loved Edith Mason, they said. That fair-
skinned disdainful butterfly tossed her head and cried, "She can
have him and his money too."
Dr. Dan's friend Paul Lawrence Dunbar heard the news. He
himself had recently married. Taking up his pen, the poet wrote:
TO DAN
Step me now a bridal measure,
Work give way to love and leisure,
Hearts be free and hearts be gay
Doctor Dan doth wed to.day.
Diagnosis, cease your squalling
Check that scalpel's senseless bawling,
Put that ugly knife away
Doctor Dan doth wed today.
156 Daniel Hale Williams
'Tis no time for things unsightly,
Life's the day and life goes lightly;
Science lays aside her sway
Love rules Dr. Dan today.
Gather, gentlemen and ladies,
For the nuptial feast now made is,
Swing your garlands, chant your lay
For the pair who wed today.
Wish them happy days and many,
Troubles few and griefs not any.
Lift your brimming cups and say
God bless them who wed today.
Then a cup to Cupid daring
Who for conquest ever faring,
With his arrows dares assail
E'en a doctor's coat of mail.
So with blithe and happy hymning
And with harmless goblets brimming,
Dance a step musicians play
Doctor Dan doth wed today.
Whatever reservations and doubts a few Washington acquaint-
ances might have about the marriage, everything started off well
in Chicago. Old friends were overjoyed to welcome back their
beloved Dr. Dan. That he brought with him a beautiful bride
only added a happy thrill to the occasion. The disappointed
mothers with marriageable daughters swallowed their chagrin
and joined with the rest in paying tribute to their hero who had,
said the press, "achieved national political and medical distinction."
Charles Smiley, delighted to have his old friend back, turned
his expert catering hand to the homecoming reception. The pth
Battalion Armory at 3yth Street and Wabash Avenue was chosen
for the event. In but a very few days war with Spain would be
declared. Almost every night the Armory resounded to marching
ALICE JOHNSON
feet. But for the occasion of Dr. Dan's welcome home It was
transformed by fragrant flowers, said a newspaper, "into a temple
of peace."
The reception [according to the reporter] was one of
the most successful functions of the season. Music, dancing
and refreshments contributed to the enjoyment of the
evening. . . . Melodies from sweet-voiced mandolins ema-
nated from behind a row of palms. Conventional attire was
imperative for the men. The gowns worn by the women
were elaborate. Many were Parisian creations. It was easily
one of the most exclusive events ever given by the leading
colored people of Chicago. The welcome extended to Dr.
and Mrs. Williams was one which both appreciated. They
received congratulations from 8:30 to 10:30 when a collation
was served. Mrs. Williams wore a rich white brocade
trimmed with pearls and liberty silk. She had diamond
ornaments and carried a bouquet of bridal roses. Mrs. C.
H. Smiley, the hostess, wore a novelty silk with tulle bodice
and diamonds. Mrs. Lewis Warren, who assisted Mrs. Smiley
in receiving the guests, wore black silk with red silk bodice.
On the reception committee was James Madden, who had so
faithfully aided in the founding of Provident Hospital; the chair-
man was that long-time social arbiter of Chicago colored society,
Julius N. Avendorph. Harry Anderson did not come. Perhaps
he was feeling too old for parties. But young Bertie, a tall, broad-
shouldered youth, planning to enter Northwestern University
Medical School in the fall, was there to honor the man whose name
he bore.
The list of the fifty favored guests who participated in the
pleasures of the evening was duly set forth so that the envious
might read and the program of the twenty-piece mandolin orches-
tra was given, number by number. Not a detail escaped mention.
When the society reporter ran out of adjectives he wound up
with the information that Dr. Williams and his accomplished bride
would reside at 3301 Forest Avenue.
Forest Avenue, later renamed Giles Avenue, was a half century
158 Daniel Hale Williams
ago a pleasant, tree-shaded street, though a modest one. The
joined frame houses with their high stoops were small, narrow
and only two stories high. But Alice Williams made a pleasant,
tasteful home there and settled down to being called upon and
going calling.
Her husband plunged into his old activities Provident Hos-
pital, his private practice, community affairs.
CHAPTER XII
Betrayal
SCARCELY had Dr. Dan and Alice settled into their Chicago
home when their busy, happy days were interrupted by rever-
berations from Washington. Senator McMillan's investigating
committee had published an interim report stating that the Interior
Department was giving Freedmen's Hospital no real management.
They recommended that the hospital be turned over to a District
board of charities.
If the Department of the Interior was not to lose a large insti-
tution from its purview, it must justify its right to continue its
former prerogatives. Secretary Bliss appointed three employees
of his own department members of a long inactive Board of
Visitors to the hospital. On Tuesday, June 28, their report was
ready and he gave it to the press at once. That same evening the
Washington Star devoted two columns to the more sensational
aspects of the document.
"The Secretary of the Interior," said the Star, "has ordered a
complete reorganization of the Freedmen's Hospital. . . . Re-
port of the Board of Visitors . . . shows a condition of affairs
not only loose in method but in execution . . . strong intimations
of looseness that are characterized as criminal. . . . When Con-
gress appointed a special committee to investigate the subject
of charities and correction in the District of Columbia, Secretary
Bliss decided to have an investigation on his own account . . ."
160 Daniel Hale Williams
The next morning the Post repeated the story under the
heading: "GREAT ABUSES FOUND, UGLY CONDITION OF AFFAIRS AT
FREEDMEN'S HOSPITAL." Immediately the Senate requested the
Secretary of the Interior to transmit to it any information he had
concerning abuses at Freedmen's as well as his suggestions for
more effective management of the hospital. Bliss transmitted his
Visitors' report in toto. Proposals for legislative action he begged
to defer until the next session of Congress.
The report was voluminous. It rehearsed, though without credit,
matters that Dr. Dan had sent the Secretary year after year and
which only now were transmitted to the Senate. The report also
recommended that payment to internes be stopped, that drastic
cuts be made in the amount allowed student nurses; that both
internes and nurses, as well as all other employees except five top-
ranking persons, be removed from civil service classification.
Worst of all, Secretary Bliss recommended a return to the old
closed system of a small paid staff, with Warfield as execu-
tive officer under Curtis. There were to be no cuts in pay for
Curtis, Warfield, Miss Ebersole and the clerk, but the matron
was cut from fifty dollars a month to thirty, and the engineer
was cut.
As if to silence forever the Lynch-Purvis crowd who had been
by-passed in the appointment of Curtis, the report criticized the
constant encroachment, so called, of Howard University upon
Freedmen's Hospital. Dr. Dan's efforts to compromise and keep
peace with the university to have each benefit by co-operation
with the other were derogated. Instead Secretary Bliss recom-
mended that Howard be completely dissociated from the hospital
and that its medical students be admitted only at stated times
and upon presentation of credentials.
The report was suspect on several counts. It largely avoided
crediting Dr. Dan with its most important recommendations. And
it attacked him for anything that was wrong or could be made
to seem so. While necessarily admitting that "Dr. Williams en-
joyed a considerable distinction in the field of operative surgery,"
this achievement was spoken of slightingly as his "hobby." Dr.
BETRAYAL l6l
Williams, it was blandly stated, "evidently lacked . . . adminis-
trative ability ... no adequate records were kept and no suffi-
cient guard existed to insure a capable and economical admin-
istration of the hospital . . . formerly the hospital rendered
quarterly reports of property to the Secretary of the Interior, but
for several years now such a thing has been practically unheard
of."
Before Dr. Curtis took over, the report continued, the hospital
was without any written code or definite rules. Custom and tra-
dition appeared to have been the chief if not the only sources,
said Bliss's Visitors, from which the staff acquired any under-
standing of their duties, responsibilities and limitations. Where-
with the Secretary presented a list of rules and regulations in
whose preparation he had been, he said, assisted by the "extensive
experience" of Dr. Curtis.
Finally, said the Secretary, "no inventory of hospital property
could be found. . . . The clerk, who appears to be a capable and
bright gentleman, frankly admitted to us his own surprise at the
loose methods employed. . . . The auditor's office . . . shows that
large sums of money, amounting to hundreds of dollars, have been
expended for surgical instruments and medical literature of which
very few if any ... are now in the possession of the hospital. . . .
we will later submit a supplemental report covering the matter."
The Senate referred this astounding document to the Senate
Committee on the District of Columbia, of which McMillan was
a member as he was of the joint investigating committee. This was
on Saturday, July 2, the first day that the colored newspapers,
being weeklies, could mention the matter. The dignified, con-
servative Colored American ignored the insinuations of the report,
in fact ignored the report altogether. Instead the newspaper
carried a prominent story commending the state of Illinois for ap-
pointing Dr. Dan with rank of colonel to a board of notable sur-
geons to examine those applying to be medical officers in the regi-
ments forming for service in the war with Spain. The Colored
American added that Dr. Williams, who had so ably demonstrated
his talent at Freedmen's Hospital and won favor among all classes
1 62 Daniel Hale Williams
by his "winning presence, becoming modesty and perfect fr&^dom
from self-assertion," would give again an "eminently satisfactory
account of his stewardship."
The volatile Bee, however, was not satisfied to show its faith
in such indirect fashion. The Bee pulled out an editorial already
set on the Negro's role in the war in its haste leaving two lines
standing and published an impassioned defense of the colored
world's idol: The "smelling committee, otherwise known as the
Board of Visitors," said the Bee, might have saved time and space
in the Evening Star had it devoted itself to a decent investigation
rather than a personal and cowardly attack on Dr. Daniel H. Wil-
liams. In the opinion of the Bee there had never been anyone
appointed to Freedmen's who demonstrated his ability better as
a surgeon or as an executive, and his honesty could not be ques-
tioned. "The Bee often warned Dr. Williams,'* that newspaper
said, "of the treachery and infidelity of certain associates he had
around him ... he has been treacherously betrayed in the home
of his pretended friends."
The Bee was only too correct. William Warfield, who had
been Dr. Dan's companion on those happy excursions with Caddie
Parke and Alice, who had received his special tutelage, and who
had been promoted by Dr. Dan to the position of first assistant
surgeon, now attacked his former chief. When Dr. Dan had left
for Chicago he had invited Warfield to come on later and act
as his assistant. The younger man had been glad enough to be
offered a job in Chicago, should the new regime at Freedmen's
bring in their favorites and sweep him out. But he knew Dr. Dan
for a hard taskmaster and when he saw an opportunity to ingra-
tiate himself with the new powers and thus entrench himself in
his job, he did not hesitate. He made a lengthy sworn statement
to the Board of Visitors charging his former chief with theft
of medical books and instruments.
Warfield stated that instruments left by Purvis in February 1894
were in May 1 898, four years later, no longer in the hospital; that
others purchased on government accounts during Dr. Dan's in-
cumbency never had got into the hospital stores, or were no longer
BETRAYAL 163
there; and that vouchers had been paid for which no official requi-
sition could be found.
Most of the items Warfield enumerated were picayune, of the
sort that are bought in quantity and damaged rather quickly
artery forceps, Halsted forceps, curettes, scissors. Out of the
twenty-seven scissors purchased, straight and curved, said War-
field, only fifteen were found in the hospital after Dr. Dan left.
That a dozen pairs of scissors should have disappeared in three
and a half years was taken with great seriousness by the Visitors.
A list of medical books was itemized. "None of these," said
Warfield, "are in the hospital, nor ever had been as property of
the hospital." He named five books and said he had seen them in
Dr. Dan's room, had been lent them to read and been told by
Dr. Dan they were his private property.
And so on, through twenty-six pages of testimony. Cameras,
a lens, shutters, plateholders, were mentioned. Such items ap-
peared on vouchers, Warfield stated, but there were no official
requisitions. The requisition book for the period in question had
mysteriously disappeared.
It also seemed Dr. Dan had sold to Warfield for fifty dollars a
camera, tripod, diaphragm shutter, six plateholders, and one rec-
tilinear lens, and that he had made a gift of another camera to
Dr. Curtis. The implication was that these were government
property.
Warfield's testimony was an indictment of himself, if of any-
body. Of the three storerooms at the hospital, one small one had
been used by Dr. Dan personally and no one had keys to it but
the matron and Dr. Dan himself. Once in the chief surgeon's
absence, said Warfield, he had asked the matron for the keys. His
purpose, he explained, was to get a pair of trousers for a patient,
though why such an article should be in Dr. Dan's personal closet
was not clear. The matron had refused the key, and Warfield
had had the engineer make him one. This key he had kept un-
known to the chief surgeon and on several future occasions, when
Dr. Dan himself had refused him access, Warfield had entered
with his secret key. Thus he had convinced himself, he told the
164 Daniel Hale Williams
Board of Visitors, that large stores of red flannel and white duck
had been kept there which "looked like" hospital stores. These
had disappeared, Warfield said, coincident with Dr. Dan's de-
parture. Warfield's clandestine methods of obtaining his testi-
mony seemed not to have damaged that testimony in the slightest
in the eyes of Bliss's committee.
Warfield went still further and claimed that Dr. Dan had sug-
gested he sell the unclaimed bodies of paupers who died in the
hospital to Dr. Walter A. Reed of the Medical Museum and keep
the money. This illegal suggestion, Warfield said, he had indig-
nantly refused to consider. Eager as the Visitors were to hear evi-
dence that could be used to blacken the former administration,
they could not forbear asking their informer if he had reason to
believe his chief would prostitute his position for private gain.
"Yes," said Warfield piously, he had reluctantly come to just
that conclusion. Why? Well, once when the Interior Department
had asked for back reports on old soldiers staying at the hospital,
Dr. Dan had said no reports had been kept previous to his own
administration, but Warfield had found some old reports, and
while they did not definitely classify patients they did have indi-
cations like "P. O." or "Int." after names and these, Warfield
thought, meant Police Officer or Interior, and so names without
such indications were probably old soldiers.
It seemed curious evidence on which to base a charge of law-
breaking, and evidently the /Visitors or Warfield himself feared
this choice bit had better be withdrawn. At any rate all the testi-
mony about the cadavers was scored out before Warfield put his
name to the twenty-six pages of testimony. But he allowed the
charge of stealing instruments, stores and books to stand. And he
also recounted Dr. Dan's offer to take him to Chicago with him,
thereby implying that Dr. Dan was trying to undermine the new
Curtis administration.
The day after the Board of Visitors had heard Warfield, they
called in Miss Ebersole. The superintendent of nurses stated she
was in charge of the operating room where the hospital instru-
ments were kept and had made a list of the instruments. How-
BETRAYAL 165
ever, she said, Warfield and the internes, as well as Dr. Dan, had
access to the instrument case at will. This was not backing War-
field's testimony very well. The Visitors pressed her for details
as to quantities and kinds of instruments bought, but Miss Eber-
sole was not able to remember with the unusual definiteness War-
field had exhibited. She did have a feeling that there was never
as large a supply of small items like thermometers, artery forceps,
scissors, curettes, or tongue depressors on hand as vouchers indi-
cated had been bought. With this vague support the Visitors had
to be satisfied.
Miss Ebersole did say she felt material for shirts, gowns, towels
and table linen disappeared out of the general storeroom and
must have be i put in Dr. Dan's small private storeroom because
"there was no other place to put it." No one sought to check up
on what had been sewed up into garments, nor to take testimony
from the matron who had a key to Dn Dan's storeroom and who
had refused it to Warfield. The matron was dismissed for insubor-
dination; no one wanted to hear what she had to say.
Further questioning of Miss Ebersole attempted to show Dr.
Dan had a sharp tongue. She said she had once threatened to re-
sign because of it, but she had received a handsome apology and
so she had stayed. She said that Dr. Dan had offered her a job
in Chicago, too. She said she resented his assuming she would
accept it. She added she had had one letter from him "the
nurses had given him a present the night before he went away, and
he was telling me how he felt about it. ... I never answered the
letter." There was more than a hint that Miss Ebersole had suf-
fered a reversal of hopes in Dr. Dan's marriage and was now
reacting in classic fashion with the fury of a woman who felt
herself spurned.
Harry Cordoza, the clerk, was not a very good witness. He
admitted he did not know the names of instruments very well,
so he could not recall ordering a calibrator, a cystoscope or a
Reverdin needle. He said the requisition book that should have
covered these items was lost. He had seen it in the storeroom the
day after Dr. Dan left, but later it disappeared. With some prod-
1 66 Daniel Hale Williams
ding he was led to change his statement and say that It was "maybe
earlier" that he last saw it. Warfield had claimed the book had
gone "three or four months" before Dr. Dan left.
Asked who had access to the storeroom, Cordoza first said he
didn't know, but added, embarrassingly enough, "I found out
afterwards some people went in there I didn't know of." He was
pointedly not asked who these were. It took nine pages of ques-
tioning to tie Cordoza into the implications of Warfield and Miss
Ebersole that because Dr. Dan had assured them all he would
give them jobs if they were dismissed in the political turnover,
he was therefore seeking to embarrass the Curtis regime. Again
and again Cordoza would fail to rise to the baited questions, or,
led into implicating Dr. Dan, would quickly turn around and
absolve him.
The Visitors protected the witnesses. Their testimony was not
included in the published report. To get to the bottom of the
matter, Dr. Dan hastened back to Washington and went to see
Secretary Bliss. He was referred to the Board of Visitors. Fortu-
nately he took with him an attorney, his friend Judge Jerry
Wilson.
As the charges the witnesses had made were unfolded, Dr. Dan
sat as if turned to concrete. When the last word was read, Judge
Wilson snapped, "So my client is charged with felonious theft?"
At that moment Dr. Dan crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.
Someone grabbed a newspaper and fanned him, Judge Wilson
forced some whiskey between his teeth, and he was soon revived.
The blow must have been almost too great for him to bear. Curtis
and Warfield, his students and his friends, both men he had trained
to serve their race, had betrayed him. Dr. Dan had forgiven
Curtis for reaching out for his job before he left it, but now this
was too much. And Warfield with whom he had bicycled and
picnicked, whom he had instructed and encouraged and even
invited into his Chicago office Warfield, a Negro and a man
of his own blood, had invented this calumny and taken it to
'whites to use against him!
BETRAYAL 167
Judge Wilson repeated his question. Was Dr. Williams being
charged with a felony? The chairman answered cautiously. The
printed report, he said, stated that a comparison of the list of
instruments and books bought for the hospital with the inven-
tory taken by Dr. Curtis upon assuming control showed very few
of either were in the possession of the hospital. "We have not
learned," said the chairman, "what disposition has been made of
this property."
Dr. Dan began to speak. With regard to the books, he said, 90
per cent of purchases were for the nurses, elementary works on
nursing and physiology, Hampton's Nursing, Kimber's Anatomy
and Physiology. "No medical man has any use for them in the
least," he said. There were perhaps a hundred of such books
bought in three and a half years and they were used up, lost, or
stolen. "As they always are in such places," he pointed out. He
mentioned that on two separate occasions the bookcases had been
broken into. As for books of medical character he supposed that
not more than fifteen had been bought during his incumbency,
perhaps twenty at the outside. "When I was leaving," Dr. Dan
stated, "I left twelve or fifteen medical books, I cannot tell how
many, upstairs in my room and in the storeroom."
The Board of Visitors made no comment and he went on to
explain to them what any medical man would have known. Every
hospital, he said, of more than a hundred beds uses up in the
wear and tear and loss of instruments from one hundred to three
hundred every year. "We can't help it," he explained, "they are
lost, or they are worn out. Very often, instruments break. I have
destroyed twenty-five instruments in one day."
Dr. Dan explained that certain operations required valuable
needles costing from eight to twenty dollars. If the eye of the
needle was broken, he said, the instrument was useless. There were
instruments for reaching into the pelvis; if they were broken
on the ends they could not be repaired and they were unfit for
further use. A pair of forceps for instance was often broken. For-
ceps cost five to eight dollars, more often ten. What was plainer,
Dr. Dan said, than that several hundred dollars' worth of instru-
1 68 Daniel Hale Williams
ments, a thousand dollars' worth, should be used up and disappear
in three and a half years, especially when a man was performing
three hundred to five hundred major surgical operations annually?
"I think you will find it amounted to more than five hundred,"
Dr. Dan said wearily, "if you look over the reports."
When he came to Freedmen's, he explained, the hospital owned
practically no instruments. His predecessor Dr. Purvis had done
no surgery. So Dr. Dan had used his own instruments. He had
had $2500 worth of instruments. "I remember," he said, "I bought
$70 worth at the World's Fair." And all the time he was at
Freedmen's he had continued to use his own instruments, and
when he went away he went away short, with only $2000 or
$2100 worth. Any surgeon who had a full complement of instru-
ments found, he explained, that he had a shrinkage of from $200
to $300 a year in his instruments from loss, wearing out, or
from theft. At Freedmen's a great many instruments were lost.
"I lost some of my most valuable instruments," Dr. Dan stated.
There would be an emergency case brought in, staff and students
would gather to watch, he would be engrossed with the patient,
and when the excitement was over he would be short several
more instruments. "No one could help it," he said, "but since I
was using my own instruments in the service of the hospital I
had permission from the District Property Clerk, Mr. Beckett,
to replace such losses and breakage from hospital purchases. Even
so, I went away $300 to $400 short."
The chairman was set back. Beckett would undoubtedly verify
Dr. Dan's statement. He tried another tack. "Why didn't you
make an inventory report to the Interior office?" he demanded.
"Because my instructions were to make my quarterly reports
to Mr. Lewis," rejoined Dr. Dan.
"Who was Mr. Lewis?" peppered the chairman.
"Mr. Lewis," patiently replied Dr. Dan, "is Superintendent of
Charities for the District of Columbia." The Visitors could not
have remained ignorant of this fact, but they had chosen to ignore
the yawning gaps of divided jurisdiction when they complained
in the public press and to the Senate that "for several years such
BETRAYAL 169
a thing as a quarterly report to the Secretary of the Interior has
been practically unheard of. n
Warfield's charges were shot full of holes, but the examiner
angrily kept on, trying to find at least one item he could pin on
Dr. Dan. He pulled out random vouchers, some two and three
years old, and barked his questions. Did Dr. Williams ever pur-
chase such and such and on what date? Dr. Dan answered with
but partial attention. He seemed almost not to care whether he
made a proper defense or not. "I really don't know," he answered,
"I think so. ... No, I don't remember."
The chairman picked up another voucher. "I see that on April
2, 1897," k e read, "one Kelly's cystoscope, one calibrator and one
Reverdin needle were purchased. Do you remember anything
about them?"
Dr. Dan apparently tried to collect himself. "I remember the
Reverdin needle," he said. "Don't remember the cystoscope. I
have so many in my own stock."
"Did you ever see any cystoscopes in the hospital?" was the
next question.
"I left several in the hospital," Dr. Dan answered.
The examiner wanted to know whether any cystoscopes had
ever been bought by the government for the hospital and Dr.
Dan said he could not tell him. "Then," argued the questioner,
"the cystoscopes left in the hospital were your property?" Dr.
Dan replied dully that he could not tell, they might be, but he
did not think so.
"Please try to reflect, doctor," prodded the chairman. "Do you
know whether any calibrators were bought for the hospital?"
But Dr. Dan could not remember. "I know I had one or two cali-
brators," he said, "I brought them with me when I came."
"And did you buy any of these instruments for your private
use while you were in charge of Freedmen's?" the chairman
persisted.
"Yes," Dr. Dan finally said, "yes, I remember now, I bought
Kelly's cystoscope from Truax in Chicago."
"But did you ever buy one from Gilman here?" the chairman
170 Daniel Hale Williams
wanted to know. Dr. Dan did not remember. "Or a calibrator?"
Still he did not remember.
"Well, you do remember a Reverdin needle," the chairman
said. "Was it bought for the hospital?"
Here was something in all this tangle that he could hold on to.
"When I bought my collection at the World's Fair," said Dr.
Dan, "I bought a very valuable Reverdin needle. I broke it in
Freedmen's Hospital and when I reported the matter to Mr. Beck-
ett, he told me to replace it."
The chairman wanted to know if he bought it from Gilman
and Dr. Dan answered that he didn't remember. Then the chair-
man asked whether he took a Reverdin needle from the hospital
when he left and again he said he didn't remember.
Warfield had sworn that he had never seen a cystoscope or a
calibrator in the hospital at any time and that he first saw a Rever-
din needle in the hospital after Dr. Dan's return from Europe
in June 1897. But Dr. Dan remembered he had brought both
cystoscopes and calibrators with him and had bought a Reverdin
needle at the Fair, broken it in Freedmen's, and replaced it. The
voucher was dated April 2, 1897, he had appeared before the joint
investigating committee on April 22, and had not gone to Europe
until afterward. Despite his state of shock, his memory agreed with
the records; Warfield's statement did not.
And so on, and on. Did Dr. Williams remember that six tongue
depressors had been bought on July 19, 1897? No, he did not.
The procedure was absurd to the point of being nonsensical.
Warfield had made much of a voucher showing that a Zeiss
lens and a diaphragm shutter worth $72 were ordered from a
local dealer, later returned as unsatisfactory and other items taken
in exchange including a 5 x 7 Montauk camera worth $23 and
a 5 x 8 rapid Universal lens worth $36 and a diaphragm shutter
costing $15, plateholders and miscellaneous items to total $72.
Warfield's implication was that Dr. Dan had kept these items and
sold them to him, while at the same time he had made a gift to
Curtis of another camera purchased by government money.
Dr. Dan admitted freely enough that he had sold a camera
BETRAYAL
and accessories to Warfield, but insisted it was his own private
property he had sold, though he could not remember exactly
when he had bought it. He denied he had ever given a camera
to Curtis; he had left one in his room because it was hospital
property, but he had not made a gift of it to anyone.
At this point Judge Wilson evidently sought to cut short the
nonsense. He asked to insert a statement in the record and was
granted the request. He turned to Dr. Dan and asked: "Dr. Wil-
liams, did you ever purchase any property of any kind whatever
and pay for it out of government money and then convert the
property to your own use?"
"No," Dr. Dan answered, "I did not. I went away $300 to $500
short on my own property."
And with that flat statement the two men left. The matter of
the bolts of material was not brought up and the cadavers were
not even mentioned.
Fortunately Dr. Dan was able to find in his papers receipts from
Bausch & Lomb showing payment by his personal check in May
1895 for the lens and shutter sold to Warfield, The next day these
were identified to the Visitors by their serial numbers. He could
not find his receipt for the camera, which was about five years
old, but the Visitors did not press the subject further. Bliss never
forwarded their report to McMillan. McMillan was only con-
firmed in his conviction that Freedmen's Hospital should be
taken away from the Secretary of the Interior and placed under
a District board of charities and he so recommended to the
Senate.
On Saturday, July 23, three days after Dr. Dan had his inter-
view with the Visitors, the irrepressible Bee devoted its entire
front page to the surgeon. His picture appeared heavily garlanded
with ornate borders and underneath was this paragraph:
COL. DANIEL H. WILLIAMS
This distinguished surgeon, formerly surgeon-in-chief of
the Freedmen's Hospital, arrived in this city this week. He
received a great ovation. He called upon Commissioner
1 72 Daniel Hale Williams
J. W. Ross, Secretary Bliss and others who assured him that
he had their confidence and respect. Several receptions and
dinners were tendered him by admiring surgeons, physicians
and friends. Col. Williams is the first colored man in the
United States to be appointed surgeon for the army.
Dr. Dan had successfully defended his honor, but when he
boarded the train for Chicago, he must have felt bewildered and
disgusted. What had happened to the colored people? he might
well ask himself as he was carried westward across the state w r here
the Williams clan had fought so valiantly for the common dig-
nity. Where was the mutual concern and loyalty he had been
taught from boyhood? To be sure, this was a new generation,
a generation not refined by the fires of common suffering, but
rather corroded and poisoned by repression. If whites continued
to prevent colored people from making the most of themselves,
what recourse had they but to turn and rend somebody each
other, if not their oppressors? So he might try to excuse Curtis
and Warfield, but again this had been the kind of blow he appar-
ently had little power to withstand a blow from his own people.
In Chicago he told his wife he would not take any assistant
into his office. He would not even have a girl to answer his tele-
phone or keep track of his appointments. Some thought he was
frugal to the point of penuriousness. More likely the truth was
that he dared permit no one in close proximity to his affairs again.
CHAPTER XIII
Destroying Myths
THOUGH he had been away four years in Washington. Dr.
Dan had kept in close touch with Chicago so it was easy to pick
up the reins again. He had left young Howard Chislett, his white
assistant, in charge of his old office at 3ist Street and Michigan
Avenue. Now Chislett relinquished the two small rooms and went
elsewhere to become a surgeon of standing and a credit to his
colored teacher.
Dr. Dan must have moved back into the familiar quarters with
a sigh of satisfaction. Here he could be his own man again, a
surgeon and nothing else, free of sordid politics, ready for work
and professional give and take among his peers and color lines
seldom drawn.
"Dr. Dan's back" quick as lightning the word went around.
He had never been absent from their thoughts. When he had per-
formed a spectacular operation at Freedmen's, the news was on
the wires and in Chicago's Negro press the next day, down to
the smallest detail. Now patients, both black and white, crammed
his reception room and even swarmed on the stairs. Soon he
had cases, his wife wrote a friend, in five hospitals at once.
He had remained on the board of trustees of Provident and had
been active in Provident affairs all during his stay in Washington.
On the spot, Dr. Dan's close friends Lloyd Wheeler, James Mad-
den and Charles Bentley had never slackened their work for the
174 Daniel Hale Williams
institution they had all built together. Bentley, as secretary, took
over all correspondence. Clarence Darrow, who had been Dr.
Dan's patient, came on the board and he and Wheeler divided
their attention between the beauties of nature and the problems of
Provident as they cycled through the countryside on Sundays.
Julius Avendorph arranged baseball games and the gate receipts
swelled hospital funds. Jenkin Lloyd Jones continued to lend his
encouragement. Despite all these, it was necessarily Dr. Dan, the
physician and surgeon, who was the guiding mind in the affairs
of the institution.
Herman H. Kohlsaat and George Webster, two of the hospi-
tal's wealthiest white supporters, also trustees, several times had
called him to come to Chicago when they felt his advice was
needed. The new building had at last materialized in late 1896.
Kohlsaat had given the land on the corner of 36th and Dearborn
Streets. It was seven blocks farther south, but the cable cars now
ran to 39th Street and only below that point were horse cars still
in use. The location was excellent. Armour paid for the new 65-
bed building with its "complete and superior operating room."
There was an enlarged dispensary; it could serve six thousand pa-
tients a year. George M. Pullman, Marshall Field and Otto Young
purchased two adjoining properties; a nurses' home "would eventu-
ally be erected on them.
Early in the fall Webster had taken satisfaction in writing Dr.
Dan that "the interior work of the Hosp'l is progressing & it looks
as if by Nov'r ist the whole building will be ready for occupancy.
In the meantime the col'd people have arranged a 'house warming'
the latter part of this mo. & I am at work in regard to the Furnish-
ing." A few weeks more and the momentous move had been made
to the new quarters "material realization of your dream," Web-
ster wrote Dr. Dan. Armour had made a speech. "He talked all
about Dr. Dan," later recalled James Gordon of the original com-
mittee; "he said, 'You be proud of him.' "
Despite the fine new building, all had not gone smoothly. A
man of really big caliber was lacking. Very soon Webster had
written Dr. Dan that there was dissatisfaction over the recent
DESTROYING MYTHS 175
medical appointments. A month later Kohlsaat had urged Dr.
Dan to come to Chicago for the holidays and look into the matter.
The men who had given so much did not want the usefulness of
their gift dissipated.
So all were delighted when Dr. Dan came back to stay. "We
need men of your stamp here," Kohlsaat said. Dr. Dan was again
Provident's chief surgeon. How much Dr. Dan was needed at
Provident was known to no one at the time. It would have taken
a prognosticator of unusual powers to foresee what was ahead,
and Dr. Dan was far too busy to look for trouble.
But trouble was present in the person of George Hall.
At that time George Hall's motives were not plain. No one
knew of his letters to the Washington newspapers attacking Dr.
Dan during his long illness. But those letters were the opening
guns in a battle to which Hall gave continuing pursuit imper-
ceptible at first as he was feeling his way, but increasing in mo-
mentum as events played into his hands.
George Hall was a big man, dark-skinned and heavy-featured.
He was ambitious, fearless and full of boundless energy, quick to
enter a fight, to defend what he felt were his rights. He seemed to
feel that the original reluctance to accept him on the staff of
Provident Hospital was a personal affront rather than a profes-
sional rejection of his Eclectic diploma.
He did, however, attend evening classes at Harvey Medical
School and brought back an allopathic diploma. The most tangi-
ble stumbling block to his progress was thus removed. When Dr.
Jaggard died and Daniel N. Eisendrath was brought in to head the
obstetrical department, there was no longer any concrete reason
why Hall should not be advanced from the children's department
to assist him. A year later, he was allowed to move still further up,
into gynecology.
But advancement through professional attainment was slow and
Hall, though intelligent, was not brilliant. He had other means.
Ingratiation was an art with him a compliment here, an innu-
endo there. He made himself persona grata with Nina Price, the
superintendent of nurses. That young white woman, daughter of
1 76 Daniel Hale Williams
wealthy parents, had chosen In missionary spirit to work among
the darker race. In her fervor for good works she was perhaps in-
discriminating about the wronged folk she sought to serve. Hall
delighted her with his affable ways and his eagerness to co-operate
with her. She saw no reason not to believe in him and spoke well
of him when occasion arose, as a superintendent of nurses is in
such excellent situation to do.
With white lay members of the board of trustees, Hall got on
well too. Agreeable, full of good cheer, never openly obstructive
to anyone, he seemed to them a fine young fellow, somewhat
flashy in dress and careless in grooming, perhaps, but creditably
ambitious. They were glad to help him get ahead. They knew
nothing of what was apparent to some of the colored professional
men that Hall was tricky. He seemed always to have something
on people. He made a point of watching a man's movements, at-
tempting to discover his secrets, if he had any, something to hold
over a person he might want to influence. But the white men
knew nothing of this and the colored men who did see it kept si-
lent out of race loyalty.
While Dr. Dan was away a vacancy had occurred on the board
of trustees and Hall had secured the seat. He managed, too, to get
on the executive committee of the staff which ran the institution
in Dr. Dan's absence. Later this staff committee was replaced by
a house committee, appointed by the board and responsible di-
rectly to it. This house committee was the center of power and
policy for many years and Hall was never off it after that moment.
Dr. Dan upon his return made no move to go on the house com-
mittee. Instead he went on the finance committee, the fund-
raising committee where he was particularly needed but where he
was not involved in the actual operation of the institution. Under
pressure of many other commitments, still prone anyhow to want
younger men to have their chance, Dr. Dan did not push himself
into the daily routine of the hospital. It was a serious omission, but
he more than had his hands full.
One of Dr. Dan's first jobs after his return to Chicago was to
examine recruits for the 8th Illinois Regiment the old 9th Battal-
DESTROYING MYTHS
ion now expanded for service in the Spanish-American War,
This was the first colored regiment to be entirely officered by col-
ored men. He might have been major of the medical department
on active duty, but went on the examining board instead and Gov-
ernor Tanner commissioned Allen A. Wesley in his place. Dr.
Dan with two young colored doctors Wilberforce Williams
and James R. White examined 1500 men in a few days.
Wilberforce Williams had finished his interneship at Provident
Hospital three years before; James White was but just through.
The young men knew themselves to be green and inexperienced,
but they soon lost their self -consciousness with Dr. Dan. Under
his quiet courtesy toward them, they relaxed despite themselves.
"He never made me feel inferior," White said years later.
Young White appreciated Dr. Dan's encouragement all the
more because, from another quarter, his self-confidence had been
shaken. White was engaged to be married and George Hall had
taken the occasion to remark to his fiancee that if she were inter-
ested in that young interne White she better get him to go back
to Tennessee where he came from. "He'll never succeed here in
Chicago," said Hall, shaking his head knowingly.
Hall's words had been cold water to the youth's aspirations un-
til Dr. Dan came along. But with the great surgeon evincing faith
in him, White decided to take a chance and stay on in the big
city. Only years later, when he was well established, did White
realize that Hall's motive had been to safeguard himself from pos-
sible encroaching competition. Hall made a point of advising
Provident's internes to start up anywhere else but Chicago. For-
tunately Dr. Dan had come back and was soon encouraging the
young colored doctors to gather regularly for reading and dis-
cussing their own papers, as he had in Washington. It was true
enough, he said to James White, that in Chicago colored men had
entree to the Chicago Medical Society, the A. M. A., and so on,
but they had special problems of their own and they needed to
discuss them togetner.
Soon Dr. Dan was as much at the service of the colored com-
munity as in the old days. He rendered free medical service to the
iy8 Daniel Hale Williams
newly founded Old Folks Home on West Garfield Avenue. He
made speeches and urged a more generous support by colored
people. "We are well able to take care of this home," he pleaded,
and reiterated his constant proud thesis: "We need not be de-
pendent on white people."
With half a dozen other prominent colored Chicagoans
S. Laing Williams, E. H. Morris, Commissioner Edward H.
Wright he threw himself into the organization of the ill-fated
United Brotherhood Fraternal Insurance Company. It was to be a
liberal interracial institution built on a national scale. Dr. Dan
wrote a friend that it was the most comprehensive and promising
business proposition colored men had ever entered into. He was
so enthusiastic about it that when the first executive pulled out
after a year, he allowed his own name to be used in an effort to
bolster the organization. The time was ripe for such a venture
and within a year or two other such companies succeeded, but
one of the founders of the United Brotherhood absconded with
the funds and this project failed.
One of Dr. Dan's biggest services to the colored community
lay in the position he maintained in white medical circles. With
everything else he did he still managed to attend professional so-
ciety meetings and join in the discussions. Indeed, after the cir-
cumscriptions of segregation in the national capital, he must have
thoroughly enjoyed these contacts with his fellows.
After his report on his heart operation, which he had finally
published four years after the event, in the spring of 1897, Dr.
Dan had no opportunity to do any medical writing. But away
from the turmoil of Washington and ensconced in a restful home
with a book-loving wife who wanted no more social life than an,
occasional lecture or evening at the opera, Dr. Dan settled down
to evaluate his now extensive surgical experience.
In December after his return to the Middle West, he presented
at a clinical meeting of the Chicago Medical Society the case of
the unusual molluscum fibromm he had removed at Freedmen's
from the German farmer's back. Dr. Lamb, who had prepared
DESTROYING MYTHS 179
the specimen and had shown it to the Medical Society of the Dis-
trict of Columbia soon after its removal, forwarded it to Chicago.
Dr. J. M. Beffel in the Northwestern Pathological Laboratory
made several microscopic slides and Dr. J. Nevins Hyde pre-
sented a photograph of the gross specimen to the American Der-
matological Society. Altogether the i2|-pound tumor, thought to
be the largest of its kind operated upon in the United States, had
widespread notice. Dr. Dan's paper was published first in the Chi-
cago Medical Recorder, journal of the Chicago Medical Society,
and later was reprinted in the Philadelphia Medical Journal
The same evening Dr. Dan presented this matter, he also pre-
sented two others of interest. The first was a repair of hernia of
the bladder through the groin. The case was rare and had led him
to search the literature on the subject. These findings, together
with his own, he presented to the society. The other affair was a
specimen of a large branching uterine tumor that consisted of a
half dozen masses the size of an adult's fist and larger, with many
nodules varying in size from a bean to a hen's egg. Some of the
tumors were imbedded in the walls of the uterus; others were at-
tached to the outer surface. This multinodular growth had com-
plicated a five-months pregnancy. The situation had been referred
to Dr. Dan when the patient was already in an extremely unprom-
ising condition and the diagnosis had been difficult to make. He
had been able to determine the fact of the pregnancy, but, in the
end, he had found it necessary to remove both uterus and tumors.
His case drew much interest and the journal Obstetrics reprinted
the paper.
Dr. Dan's vast experience with uterine tumors at Freedmen's
had led Stillman Bailey, his office neighbor, to ask him to prepare
a statement on surgical treatment of such cases. This Bailey had
read, while Dr. Dan was still in Washington, before the Clinical
Society of Chicago along with his own paper on medical treat-
ment of uterine fibroids. In that statement Dr. Dan had emphati-
cally contradicted the prevailing opinion that colored women har-
bor fibroid tumors more frequently than white women, or that
fibroid tumors were the prevailing disease in black women.
i8o Daniel Hale Williams
Now he spent some time working up another paper which he
presented to the Chicago Medical Society on December 26, 1900,
and in it he proceeded to dispel yet another medical myth. Col-
ored women, he declared, definitely do develop cystic tumors of
the ovaries, the same as white women. The contrary statement had
been made by professors in the best medical schools of the coun-
try since the time of MacDowelL So strong was the belief that
even when a tumor presented all the features of an ovarian cyst,
a surgeon would say that, since the patient is a Negro, this cannot
be a cyst, it must be a tumor of some other origin. Dr. Dan, how-
ever, had seen 1301 cases of tumor sent to Freedmen's in his three
and a half years there, and had operated on 2 10 of them. None of
his hearers could doubt that he had not only developed a skill
worthy of the better-known names of DeLee and Kelly, but
that he had gained an over-all picture that gave him authority for
his thesis.
Dr. Dan was pleading for the scientific, laboratory approach.
The myth, he said, would undoubtedly have gone on unchecked
had not methods of study and diagnosis changed. "He is an in-
different surgeon," declared Dr. Dan, "who would today extir-
pate a tumor and base his diagnosis on the naked-eye appearance
of the specimen." Fifty years earlier a distinguished operator
might express an opinion on a pathologic specimen and never be
questioned. But now, said Dr. Dan, the opinion of the most
learned operator in the world would not be accepted until the
specimen had been worked through a pathologic laboratory and a
written report submitted on it. Dr. Dan was putting the case
boldly, more ideally than was yet true; he was pushing for
progress.
It was a fine paper, illustrative of the true detached scientific
spirit. It showed extensive experience and intensive research and
was not without humor. He assured his hearers that not only f air-
skinned Negro women, but dark-skinned ones too had now evo-
luted to the cyst-bearing stage. And, anyhow, he took occasion to
say, of twelve million Negroes listed by the Census Bureau not
one fourth were full-blooded. It was a well-known fact, he said,
DESTROYING MYTHS l8l
that in the same family were often found brothers and sisters
black, mulatto, and white born of the same parents. "The color
of the skin in this country," Dr. Dan blandly pointed out with
forgivable relish, "furnishes no correct index of the purity of the
blood of a colored person any more than it does the purity of the
blood of a white person." So, he said, it might be pertinent to in-
quire if this interesting question was to be confined to Negroes of
black skins, brown skins, olive skins or to any shade of color.
"Who is to determine," he asked, "where the line is to be drawn?"
He then referred them for a further study of the relative shades
of color in native Africans themselves to a colored plate in Mey-
er's Konversations-Lexikon, published in Leipzig, giving types of
all the principal tribes of Africa. "That plate," said Dr. Dan,
"shows complexions varying from a clear mulatto to those of eb-
ony black."
While some of his hearers were doubtless smiling sympatheti-
cally and others were frowning with annoyance, he proceeded to
work in some pertinent observations as to why so few ovarian tu-
mors had been found in Negro women in the past. "Before the
war and for years afterward," he said, "little attention, if any, was
paid to the surgical diseases of the Negro. Very few had been op-
erated upon, and very small was the number of hospitals in the
South for either white or colored people ... a ruptured cyst, a
twisted pedicle, or a hemorrhage would cause death and only by
an autopsy would we be acquainted with the real cause." Or if a
colored woman did go to a doctor for examination, he pointed
out, too often her case was given faulty diagnosis. Many cases of
ovarian cyst were wrongly treated as dropsy, as Dr. Lamb's au-
topsies showed.
Dr. Dan went on to speak of the appalling mortality in cases of
removal of ovaries in the early days of operation. At that time,
when septic infection was almost a certainty, even white women
preferred to carry their tumors, have them tapped, and worry
along until death relieved them of their burden. It is no wonder,
he said, that the poor colored woman, unable to receive the ad-
vantages of proper diagnosis and treatment, died without opera-
1 82 Daniel Hale Williams
tion. There was no place where she could present her case for a
full hearing, and little or no attention was ever paid to her con-
dition. Doubtless hundreds of them, he said, have had their cysts
and died a natural death rather than an operative one. Fortunately
the situation was changing. With the advent of hospitals for the
colored and the training of colored physicians and surgeons, Dr.
Dan said in conclusion, with a bow to his confreres, the investi-
gation and study of diseases in the colored race inaugurated by
the white profession was now being continued by colored sci-
entists.
To some doctors present, Dr. Dan's paper was an unwelcome
declaration of colored independence. Albert J. Ochsner, known
for a sly unctuous manner, tried first to demolish Dr. Dan with in-
sincere compliments, and then to undermine him by attacking the
studies made by Howard Kelly at Johns Hopkins, studies which
Dr. Dan had just been quoting. Wrapping his barbs neatly in false
humility, he presented them in his best mortician manner.
The points the doctor had made, said Ochsner, are undoubtedly
of great practical value; they are based upon an unusually large
experience, Dr. Williams must be looked upon as an authority.
"My own ignorance," said Ochsner, "is founded on the lectures I
have heard and the books I have read and also every Negress I
have ever examined has had fibroids, consequently I thought the
various authors must be correct."
Ochsner was powerful. To cross swords with him meant retalia-
tion or frustration somewhere along the line. But Dr. Dan did not
hesitate. Sarcasm was a game two could play at. He delivered his
own thrust neatly, then followed it with a barrage of evidence
that won him the battle of the evening, whatever it might do for
his future opportunities at the hands of so powerful an adversary.
First Dr. Dan disposed of Ochsner's false humility. He did not
doubt at all, he said, that only women "who had fibroids presented
themselves at the Postgraduate School for treatment. But he had
perhaps had as large a gynecological experience as anyone in the
Postgraduate School. For four years he had had charge of a hos-
pital of two hundred beds and had made over one thousand pel-
DESTROYING MYTHS 183
vie examinations each year and had had reports from as many
more. "Not five per cent of the colored women who presented
themselves," said Dr. Dan flatly, "had fibroids."
While Ochsner blinked helplessly, Dr. Dan continued without
mercy. Dr. Ochsner might be correct about Dr. Kelly's enthusi-
asm, he said, nevertheless there was no denying that Dr. Kelly was
in a position to study these cases more accurately than any other
man in this country. Also Kelly did not go into the pathological
laboratory himself and examine these cases. "I have had some ex-
perience in Johns Hopkins," said Dr. Dan, "and I know these
specimens are removed from the operating room and examined in
the laboratory by entirely different men." With due deference to
Dr. Ochsner's opinion about Dr. Kelly's methods, Dr. Dan said,
his own personal knowledge of the man and familiarity with his
surroundings inclined him to give Kelly's opinion some weight.
And therefore he would continue to cling to the ideas he had al-
ready expressed and would not question the methods employed
at Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Dan's paper was reprinted and commented upon in various
Eastern journals. But he was not invited to join the Society of
Clinical Surgery which Ochsner, with Will Mayo and Harvey
Gushing, founded three years kter.
In March 1900, not many weeks after his tilt with Ochsner, Dr.
Dan was guest at a meeting of the Chicago Gynecological Society
when Albert Goldspohn read a long and controversial paper on
the Alexander method, which he favored, for surgical repair of
certain displacements of the uterus. Lengthy, heated discussion
followed. Dr. Dan presented some experience that indicated cau-
tion would be appropriate. Then Reuben Peterson remarked that
he could only wonder at the greatness of Dr. Goldspohn's diag-
nostic ability if he could always tell by bimanual examination
what there was within a pelvis. He always told his students, he
said, that what was found by bimanual examination and what was
found after the abdomen was opened were very apt to be en-
tirely different. Dr. Dan seized the opportunity to support Peter-
son. It was refreshing to him, he said, to hear a man say he did
184 Daniel Hale Williams
not know what pathology there was in the abdomen before he
opened it. "It is seldom," said Dr. Dan, "that, such a frank ex-
pression is made before a medical society." Dr. Dan was always in
the vanguard now, always pushing the old fogies to the wall, and
apparently thoroughly at ease among his associates as he did so.
A few months later Dr. Dan was again a guest of the Gyneco-
logical Society. This time he presented a report of the two com-
plicated Caesarean sections he had performed in Washington
three and a half years before. Most of the discussion at the meet-
ing swung upon the question of whether or not such operations
were justifiable. One critic thought Dr. Dan should have at-
tempted, in the case of the dwarf, to enlarge the pubis surgically
and extract the child by the normal route. Another critic admit-
ted that special conditions had made the operation necessary, but
he argued that otherwise it would be a doubtful procedure with
convulsions present.
The noted Joseph B. DeLee had engaged in the discussion
throughout. Now he arose and backed Dr. Dan on both counts.
Only yesterday, DeLee said, he had not done a Caesarean section
on a mother with convulsions 'and now he wished he had. He had
considered it, he said, for she was attempting to give birth to
twins. The foetal heartbeats of both were strong in the morning
when he had examined her. But he had dismissed the idea. Her la-
bor had lasted until seven in the evening, and, while she had sur-
vived it, both babies had died.
"Had we done a Caesarean section in the morning," the honest
man confessed, "both children and mother might have been
saved."
Courage is better than conformity when it is coupled with skill
and directed by a passion for saving lives. Dr. Dan was showing
them the way and DeLee was great enough to recognize it.
Dr. Dan sometimes discussed his papers with his office neighbor
Charles Kahlke before he presented them. He liked Kahlke's quick
and darting mind, so in accord with his own, and he could not but
respond to the man's evident friendliness. When Kahlke asked his
DESTROYING MYTHS 185
advice concerning a contemplated real estate investment, Dr. Dan
gave it readily. "It was canny advice, too," said Kahlke years later.
Soon the two doctors were off shooting quail and partridge to-
gether out of Michigan City. Once or twice they went with Dr.
EL B. Woodward and Dr. C. Gurnee Fellows on a fishing trip to
Rice Lake. His white companions liked Dr. Dan's strong face,
strong jaw and yet reticent, soft-spoken manner; and they liked
the way he quietly ignored any discrimination that came his way.
Dr. Dan's friendships were based on congeniality, not race.
Among his colored friends, Julius Avendorph and Robert L. Tay-
lor were his frequent week-end companions.
Dr. Dan resumed his hunting and fishing with immense satisfac-
tion. The elemental joys of forest and stream were in his blood,
the blood of his Indian forebears. Away from the city and pres-
sure of people, he was at peace. He would light the last of the
three Little Tom cigars he allowed himself in a day and enjoy its
fragrance while the others talked.
Bringing his trophies back to town he persuaded Alice to hang
their dining room walls, not with pictures, but with four particu-
larly brilliant specimens of pheasants he had first shot, then stuffed
with his own hands. Guests never failed to exclaim over the splen-
didly marked birds, the sole decoration in the room.
Dr. Dan needed these week ends all the more after his schedule
was further burdened by his appointment to the attending staff of
Cook County Hospital. His old classmate, Dr. Charles Davison,
was on the staff, as were Drs. William E. Schroeder, Thomas A.
Davis, and the colorful Weller Van Hook, pioneer in surgery of
the genito-urinary tract and ardent theosophist as well. However,
the big showman dominating everything was John B. Murphy. In
contrast Dr. Dan, on the same service with Murphy, stood out for
his opposite qualities. Kindness is not a characteristic always ex-
hibited by the older staff toward the younger men, and the in-
ternes, among them James M. Phalen, years later editor of the
U. S. Army surgeons' organ, The Military Surgeon, were grate-
ful for Dr. Dan's gentle courtesy.
At St. Luke's Hospital where Dr. Dan had many white patients,
1 86 Daniel Hale Williams
he had opportunities too, and used them, to be kind to another
young interne, Dr. Frank W. Van Kirk. Van Kirk's father had
been Dan's friend in the old days in Janesville and he was glad to
be useful to the son.
Dr. Dan went back to Janesville occasionally now and took his
beautiful wife to spend week ends with his old classmate, James
Mills. Frank Pember was not there; he had failed in health and
gone South. Mills, the Scot, was dividing his time between medi-
cine and the temperance cause. Occasionally Mills came up to
Chicago and he and Dr. Dan attended a class reunion. Sometimes
Dr. Dan served on the committee. Returning to Janesville, Mills
would drop into the Gazette office and insert an item:
QUARTETTE OF LOCAL DOCTORS
GRADUATED A SCORE OF YEARS AGO
Dr. D. H. Williams, the prominent Chicago surgeon, Dr.
Frank Pember, Dr. James Mills and the late Dr. Hugh Men-
zies, all of this city . . .
What Dr. Mills's small sons could never understand was why
their father's white-skinned visitors were Negroes. Even today
they remember how quick were Dr. Dan's every move, his con-
versation, his darting bright eyes. And how very fond their father
was of his old associate.
These were pleasant interludes in Dr. Dan's heavy schedule. Re-
laxed among these old friends, perhaps he occasionally strummed
a guitar once more and sang Carrie Jacobs Bond's new song, "I
Love You Truly." Carrie was Ida Williams's stepsister, and the
song was written right in Janesville, on East Milwaukee Street.
Alice Williams enjoyed greatly her first experience of living in
the North. It seemed marvelously unrestricted to one who had
suffered the color line all her life. "What I like about Chicago,"
she wrote back to Washington, "is its Freedom" 9 and she under-
scored the word. Later she found race prejudice was not lacking
in the North too. She returned home one day in great indigna-
tion. Some white woman on the trolley car had refused to sit by
a colored woman.
DESTROYING MYTHS 187
"So I went right up to the poor thing and sat by her," she re-
ported. Since Alice Williams showed not the slightest trace of her
African blood in her appearance, her act could only be taken as
the reproof it was meant to be.
All agreed that Dr. Dan had chosen a most beautiful woman for
his wife. Her taste in dress was strikingly simple and set off her
loveliness to every advantage. Years later women remembered ex-
actly what she had worn and the date when she wore it. "The first
time she came to call on me," said one, "she was all in white, with
a big white hat, a little black velvet bow at her neck with long
streamers, and a black velvet bow on her hat ... it was the sum-
mer of 1 899, after she lost her baby."
The baby that might have made so much difference in the lives
of Alice and Daniel Williams did not reach this world alive. Ev-
erything that could be done was done. Dr. Dan's friend DeLee,
who saved so many babies, could not save this longed-for little
creature; only his great skill saved Alice. Dr. Dan could not hide
his grief. He wept unashamedly in Otto Schmidt's car one day
when in the company of Schmidt, Frank Billings and DeLee. John
Mallet, Schmidt's chauffeur, came home and told his wife.
Alice Williams was ill a long time. "I went to the very brink of
the grave," she wrote Caddie. But in the Victorian manner, out of
consideration for the circumstances, people did not call or talk
of the disappointment. Afterwards Alice never mentioned the sub-
ject to Chicago acquaintances though she wrote an intimate
Washington friend that she was still hoping for a child. Dr. Dan
never told her how drastic DeLee's operation had been and that
she would never have another baby.
Her ordeal over, Alice regained excellent health though she
had to admit that she had grown stouter. Whenever she wrote to
Washington she could not help but remember that there were
those back East who had doubted her capacity to be a good wife
to a busy and popular doctor. One day she sat down and filled
sheet after sheet of her engraved notepaper in a long letter to her
first schoolteacher, Sarah Fleetwood,
1 88 Daniel Hale Williams
"When I came," Alice wrote in her even copperplate hand, "I
determined that I would help my husband keep his friends and
that I would aim to have them take me into their hearts. They
were quite ready to do so. They were anxious to see what man-
ner of woman T)r. Dan's' wife was. Much to the surprise of my
Washington friends " she put a question mark after the word
"who predicted that I would not make a physician a good wife, I
have made," she ended triumphantly, "a pretty good one. I miss
my associations in Washington very much and often find myself
thinking wistfully of them. But there are so many compensations,"
she finished, "I have made hosts of friends."
If the local press was any evidence, Alice Williams had little
"time to herself. "Mrs. B. K. Bruce will be guest of Mrs. D. H. Wil-
liams," said one issue. A few days after she had entertained the
widow of the famous colored Senator, the newspaper reported
that "Mrs. Dr. Daniel H. Williams gave a very instructive talk at
the Phillis Wheatley Club on how to teach the children of the
sewing school in a more systematic and methodical way, and
showed the ladies samples of work done in the sewing schools of
Washington, D. C."
And then in another few days, Mrs. Williams had y turned over
her home to the King's Daughters for an Evening^ Shakespeare.
The entertainment was to raise funds for charity and so twenty-
five cents was collected from each one present. Violin solos and
numbers by the Crest Trio opened and closed the evening and
were interpolated throughout the program. Alice Williams had
worked conscientiously over her paper on "Some Women of
Shakespeare" and doubtless it did show, as the society reporter
said, "evidence of the highest mark of intelligence," but people
perhaps enjoyed more the production of the courtroom scene
from The Merchant of Venice. Richard B. Harrison, a clerk in
the post office, put enough passion into his Shylock that evening
in Dr. Dan's parlor to explain his later Broadway success as De
Lawd in Green Pastures. Antonio was portrayed by Albert
George, somewhat later Chicago's first colored judge, and Portia
DESTROYING MYTHS 189
was played by Mrs. George C. Hall towering, red-haired, ef-
fervescent.
After the program everyone flocked into the dining room and
was served refreshments by maids and pages costumed in pink
and white. The whole first floor of the house was decked out with
pink and white "cut flowers," the reporter called them, and scin-
tillating candelabra. Altogether it was an occasion long to be re-
membered and the newswriter carefully recorded all names. Julius
N. Avendorph of course was master of ceremonies, as he was
for every major event in the colored social scene. On the com-
mittee were the wives of Dr. Dan's old friends and associates at
Provident Hospital, including the new Mrs. Bentley, formerly
Florence Lewis, another booklover like Alice Williams, and Harry
Anderson's new wife, the former Julia Settles. Harry Anderson
had found life lonely with all his children gone from home and
had married for the third time.
These women did not ordinarily welcome the aspiring Mrs.
George Hall, whose laughter and clothes were both apt to be a
little loud. But the King's Daughters was a church group, open
to everyone, and Theodocia Brewer Hall was a King's Daughter.
Besides this was an entertainment for charity and all bars were
down. However, when Dr. Hall called for his wife, unfortunately
the housemaid left him standing in the hall holding his hat and
failed to invite him into the parlor, while she fetched his wife.
George Hall was sure it was an intentional slight and told one of
the doctors Dr. Dan should pay for it some day.
It was not the same Dr. Dan who had come back to Chicago
from the pain and disillusionment of Washington. To old friends
and adoring patients he was unchanged, still their tireless friend
and advisor, the one to whom they inevitably turned in trouble.
Newcomers, however, found themselves somewhat diffident in
Dr. Dan's presence. As he walked along the street in his eternal
black suit and black derby, black topcoat added in colder weather,
his long, narrow black shoes with the toes a little turned up,
looking as though they had been polished, as they doubtless were,
190 Daniel Hale Williams
by himself he was a somber figure. And he was forever lost in
thought, with his shoulders bent forward, his head down and his
gait compulsive to some inner drive. He saw no one, so absorbed
in study would he be. To get his attention, he must be spoken to.
Then if it was an old friend, he responded warmly and cordially,
and even occasionally indulged in a mild sort of witticism. To
someone less known to him, while he was always polite, there
was something remote, cool even, in his courtesy. His manner
sometimes repelled sensitive persons, already awed by the fame
that now attended his name, while to envious persons this man
was arrogant, a snob.
In contrast George Hall seemed a fine man, jolly, full of anec-
dotes. He was popular. He got on committees easily, went into
politics, was a wonder on the platform. He understood crowd
psychology, knew how to sway large groups, became a public
figure. You perhaps had the key to all his activity when you
heard him orate to a younger man: "These doctors who stick so
hard to their doctoring, it wouldn't hurt their business a bit if
they mixed around more, got on some committees."
Negroes who did not see what harm he was doing and f ew
did came to look upon George Hall as a great fighter for the
race.
CHAPTER XIV
Moses to Negro Medicine
WITHIN a few months after Dr. Dan's return to Chicago, on
three separate occasions, colored women traveled up from Ala-
bama and Georgia to be operated on by him. Southern Negroes
desperately needed medical care. Forbidden entrance to white
hospitals, or treated offensively when they were admitted, or
worse still treated as guinea pigs, they died by the thousands an-
nually. Dr. Dan's soul revolted against this cruelty and human
waste. To change white prejudice was hopelessly slow. Negroes
themselves, he felt, must exert greater effort to advance medicine
and nursing within the race.
He decided to urge again upon Booker T. Washington the need
for a medical and surgical center for the colored in the South. It
was a matter he had already suggested, but without success, to
the Tuskegee Institute principal, now turned national Negro po-
litical leader.
These two Negro pioneers, exactly of an age, both educators
and organizers, yet so different in background and temperament,
had met in 1895. Even before that Dr. Dan, Lloyd Wheeler and
other prominent Chicagoans had given support to Booker T.
Washington and his struggling industrial school. They had sent
money, magazines and clothing. At the Cotton States Exposition
in Atlanta, where Dr. Dan helped organize the National Medical
192 Daniel Hale Williams
Association and where Booker Washington made his famous con-
ciliatory speech to the Southern whites and won leadership of the
race, the two men met, if they had not met before.
A couple of years later Booker Washington, already a candi-
date for the political mantle of the late Frederick Douglass, vis-
ited Freedmen's Hospital and afterwards wrote Dr. Dan that he
had never seen anything done under the supervision of a man of
their race that had given him so much encouragement. "I was not
in your hospital two minutes before I saw as I had never seen
before, what you are," he declared and then asked Dr. Dan if he
could spend two or three days at Tuskegee showing them how to
get their "medical and nurse training departments" on a proper
footing.
Tuskegee's medical facilities consisted of a two-story frame
cottage set aside as an infirmary for sick students. There was no
training of nurses in the modern sense. Dr. Dan leaped at the
chance to turn this infirmary into a real hospital and training
school to serve not only Tuskegee but all the area round. To his
mind the need was so clear, the means for meeting it so ready to
his hand, that he never stopped to guess Booker Washington might
not have the desire to go so far.
Dr. Dan wrote the Tuskegee principal that he had a scheme
that would be almost self-supporting. "You could draw work
from all over the South," he said, "and build a Monument there
and care for thousands of those poor people who die for the want
of surgical attention." And then, probably as a gesture of gener-
ous reassurance, he added, "I would stand for the success or fail-
ure of the work."
It now looks as if this last remark proved disturbing to Wash-
ington, who was just beginning to taste the delights of leadership.
Tuskegee Industrial Institute was still small. Booker Washington
wanted his own project to grow up before adding a tail that
might out wag it. If there were to be any Monuments, Tuskegee
itself must become one first. To get Dr. Dan down there for three
days of advice was a different matter from having so forceful an
organizer about too long. So he asked Dr. Dan to train an interne
MOSES TO NEGRO MEDICINE 193
to run his little infirmary and evaded any idea of expanding it into
a community hospital.
But Dr. Dan could not forget the vision he had caught of an-
other hospital for his race, a hospital needed even more than had
been Provident or Freedmen's. Again he wrote Booker Washing-
ton. Patients had corne to him, he said, all the way from Alabama.
They had talked of colored people back home, dying for lack of
care. Would it not be a good idea, Dr. Dan asked Booker Wash-
ington, "to develop at Tuskegee under your direction a self -pay ing
institution? Many who would come for treatment could pay for
it. And the progressive colored physicians of the South would
flock to Tuskegee to take advantage of the opportunities you
would offer them for their development."
All that colored men want, Dr. Dan pleaded, is the opportunity.
They made the best soldiers in the world, he reminded Booker
Washington it was but a few weeks past that colored infantry
had rushed in to save Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders and to
take San Juan Hill and they would make the best surgeons too,
given the proper chance to learn. He offered to come at stated
intervals to assist. "I think it is a great field," he ended, "and one
that would pay its own way. Give me your idea of it." And then
he added cordially, "When you come to Chicago, come to see us."
Booker Washington came to Chicago in October and Dr. Dan
wrote him again, addressing a note to his hotel. Again he assured
Washington he was interested in his, Washington's, plan. He said
he had talked it over with some wealthy Chicago people and they
thought highly of it. He hoped to discuss the matter with Wash-
ington while he was in the city. "Could you spare time," Dr. Dan
wrote, "to take dinner with us at 5:30 any day but Wednesday?"
Even with this self-effacement on Dr. Dan's part, even with all
the eloquence he could bring to bear, Booker Washington was
not to be won. He left the city without seeing Dr. Dan or express-
ing any interest that funds might be available for a healing and
teaching center for his neglected people. He wrote only that his
time was more than taken.
Fortunately others were not so indifferent as the politically ambi-
194 Daniel Hale Williams
tious Booker Washington to what Dr. Dan had to offer. Within
a few months he was approached by George W. Hubbard, aging
white dean of colored Meharry Medical College in Nashville.
Dean Hubbard came, at the urging of two colored doctors on
his staff, R. F. Boyd and F. A. Stewart, to lay claim to Dr. Dan's
services.
Meharry Medical College, "dedicated to the worship of God
through service to man," had begun educating Negro doctors ten
years after Emancipation. Nashville, like the national capital, had
become a center for Negro education as a result of the influx of
colored refugees there during the Civil War. The religious con-
science of the country had sent a throng of missionaries South in
the wake of the Union armies. At Nashville efforts to feed and
clothe the hungry and naked were followed by the setting up of
schools in churches and other buildings hastily prepared for the
purpose. Three denominations vied with each other in the good
work and out of it grew as many universities: Baptist Roger Wil-
liams University; Methodist Central Tennessee College; and Con-
gregational Fisk University.
All birth is wonderful but none more so than the travail out of
which was brought forth these war-begot Negro universities. First
the hungry and frightened refugees, naked or in tatters. Then, no
sooner fed and clothed, these eager men and women begging the
long-denied privilege of learning to read and write. The first year
there could be only a first grade, and all ages sat on the rude
benches together. Next year there were both first and second
grades. Each year a new grade was added. Finally a normal de-
partment could be set up for those who were now ready to turn
around and impart the cherished knowledge to others. A theologi-
cal department would come next, thanks to the churches.
Some colored men began to inquire whether they could not
learn to be doctors. Central Tennessee College organized a medi-
cal department ten short years after its primary school had been
opened, safeguarding the venture by requiring all students to take
an oath not to drink, swear or divulge the secrets of the dissecting
room. In time the theological and literary departments of the col-
MOSES TO NEGRO MEDICINE 195
lege, rejuvenated briefly as Walden University, faded away. The
medical department survived, thanks to aid from the five Meharry
brothers, and in their honor the school was renamed Meharry
Medical College. By the turn of the century, Meharry had grad-
uated 410 persons, fully half the doctors who attempted to serve
the colored South.
Dean Hubbard was anxious that with numbers there should be
no flagging in quality. Though Flexner's expose would not come
for a decade, the reform wave was on in American medical edu-
cation. Meharry Medical College had always given an honest
training. Meharry was founded to meet a definite need. Its teach-
ers had been earnest and enthusiastic. Now problems of standards,
staffs and curricula were agitating the medical educational scene
the country over and there were to be many fatalities among med-
ical schools, white and colored.
Dr. Dan agreed readily enough to go down to Meharry as vis-
iting professor of clinical surgery for a week or ten days each year
without recompense. Ever since he left college he had been teach-
ing as well as leading an active life as doctor and surgeon. He
loved to teach and he was a master before whom clinical students,
and older men too, sat spellbound. His techniques were unerringly
at his command, his judgments came unhesitatingly, his explana-
tions were clear and fluent. Above all he passed on to those who
sat before him his own passion for knowledge. At Howard Uni-
versity he had touched one of the two main nerve centers of sur-
gical education of the Negro. Now, fortunately, at Meharry he
would touch the other.
He threw himself into the work with zeal. The situation, how-
ever, demanded more than a yearly visit from him. That visit
could not be effective without hospital facilities. A temporary op-
erating room could always be rigged up, but patients must have
postoperative care, and no colored doctor or interne was allowed
in the hospitals of Nashville. Meharry had struggled along with-
out bedside instruction, either medical or surgical, as long as it
could; its continued existence as a proper medical school de-
manded practice facilities and continuing care of patients.
196 Daniel Hale Williams
The faculty recognized the problem. Dr. R. F. Boyd, a coura-
geous, self-made man, first president of the National Medical As-
sociation, had done what he could. Some years previously he had
opened up two "hospital" rooms in the basement under his of-
fices. Here a few obstetrical cases could be attended by Meharry
seniors before they went out to attempt professional work. The
last Meharry Announcement had pointed with pride to these "ex-
cellent" clinical privileges. It was a great advance over nothing at
all. In one of these dark basement rooms, by lamp and candlelight,
Dr. Dan performed four successful operations on his first visit to
Nashville. But these were scarcely the quarters for a clinic and
they would scarcely impress the Committee of Standards of the
American Medical Association.
Before he left Nashville, Dr. Dan had a frank talk with Dean
Hubbard in the presence of Boyd and Stewart. There was no use,
he told the dean, educating colored men to be doctors if they
could not give them interne training. A young man who has had
the advantage of the hard practical drill received in a hospital, he
said, is ten years ahead of the man who is deprived of that advan-
tage. If the white hospitals of the South would not accept colored
internes nor permit colored physicians to practice in the hospi-
tals, then there was only one thing to do. "We can't sit any longer
idly and inanely deploring existing conditions," he said. "We must
start our own hospitals and training schools!"
Hubbard was doubtful but Stewart and Boyd listened atten-
tively as Dr. Dan recounted how Provident was started.
At the end Boyd asked, "Will you come down here and tell
that story to our people here?" Boyd had worked for years as a
bricklayer and a janitor to get his own education; he knew what
could be accomplished when the will was there.
"We'll gather them in, if you'll just talk to them as you've
talked to us here today," Stewart cried, and added slyly that he
would arrange some quail shooting on his brother-in-law's farm.
Soon after New Year's Day 1900, Dr. Dan went back to Nash-
ville. All day after his arrival his talk was not scheduled until
evening a half dozen Meharry instructors tramped with him
MOSES TO NEGRO MEDICINE 197
over the brown fields and in and out of the copses on the W. H.
Compton farm, attended by the faithful soft-eyed bird dogs. Dr.
Dan enjoyed his hunt and won the lasting admiration of his host.
Years later Mr. Compton recalled what a "splendid shot" the great
surgeon was.
That evening, before a capacity audience of his people gath-
ered at the Phillis Wheatley Club, Dr. Dan began to speak. Every
city in the South, he said, with a population of 10,000 colored
people should have a hospital and training school There was no
education, he pointed out, which would yield such permanent and
practical results as training young colored women to be nurses.
Aside from the fact that a young woman was personally bene-
fited, given an opportunity for lucrative employment, she was
made a useful and valuable member of any community where she
might live. She taught people cleanliness, thrift, habits of indus-
try, sanitary housekeeping, the proper care of themselves and of
their children. She taught them how to prepare food, the selec-
tion of proper clothing for the sick and the well, and how to meet
emergencies. "In short," said Dr. Dan, no doubt stirring the im-
agination of more than one woman in his audience, "I consider
the trained nurse the most desirable addition to a community, not
excepting the school teacher."
He told them how highly the colored trained nurse was re-
garded both by some of the best families in the land and by the
most distinguished surgeons. There had been doubts, he frankly
said, as to whether young colored women had the ability to stand
the test of emergency, to preserve composure at the operating ta-
ble, to learn the techniques of surgical preparation and the details
of the operating room. But, said Dr. Dan beaming upon them, it
has been amply demonstrated that colored women make excel-
lent nurses. Only seven years ago, he told them, Provident had
sent out its first class of three graduate nurses. Now there were
two hundred, and as many more in training. What better way was
there, he asked them, to escape the prejudice that kept down an
educated, refined colored woman than to enter nurses' training?
198 Daniel Hale Williams
The way was open wherever a colored community started a
hospital.
"You can and you should," said Dr. Dan, "establish such an in-
stitution in Nashville at once." He did not let them think things
would be too easy. "You will have many discouragements to con-
tend with at the start," he warned them. "Lack of confidence," he
said, "has always been a deterrent in our relations with each
other." The ignorant and naturally suspicious would have to be
induced gradually to relinquish their unquestioning faith in the
infallible skill and judgment of the white man. "On the other
hand," he cautioned, "we must demonstrate our right to confi-
dence."
He mentioned other things they had not thought of. The first
requisite to the successful formation of any undertaking, he told
them, was that those who entered into it should be unselfish and
firmly of the opinion it was the right thing to do. They must ex-
amine themselves, he said, and determine to their own satisfac-
tion that they had the qualities within them, or among them, for
organization, industry, perseverance and self-sacrifice. After that
they might select a leader someone with influence and enthu-
siasm. "Bring to that leader," said Dr. Dan, "all the support
possible."
After they had elected officers and assigned to each the work
for which he was best fitted, then they could start to raise their
first money. Go about it systematically, he said, cover the field.
Few people would refuse to contribute something towards the
support of a hospital. And by all means, he said, make an early
start, however small. "It is better to start in a small way and
grow," said Dr. Dan, "than to commence with a flourish and dwin-
dle down to a failure."
He explained that a hospital of twenty-five beds, properly man-
aged, was almost self-supporting. He advised them not to attempt
to build a hospital right away. "Rent a house," he said, "of ten or
twelve rooms, preferably one with a basement, furnish it mod-
estly, so that it can be easily cleaned and kept clean. Select a level-
headed graduate nurse for superintendent. . . . Appoint upon
MOSES TO NEGRO MEDICINE 199
your staff the best physicians obtainable, . . . Have your head
nurse appoint as student nurses as many well educated, well-
mannered young women as can be accommodated. 7 ' As always he
set a high standard for personnel. It was the cheapest in the long
run, he said. "Then, when you have completed your prepara-
tory work," he said, "open your doors and your success will be
assured!"
"Before the founding of Provident Hospital," Dr. Dan told
them, "there was not in this country a single hospital or training
school for nurses owned and managed by colored people . . .
that was nine years ago . . . now there are twelve! And without
a single failure!" These were facts to stir an oppressed people.
As Dr. Dan looked down into the rows of black faces, he may
have thought back to his early days in Janesville. He may have
seen in memory Harry Anderson's Tonsorial Parlor and Bathing
Rooms on Main Street, himself snipping away at Orrin Guernsey's
whiskers, listening to Guernsey and Anderson and the local Con-
gressman talk. "Pity won't help us," Anderson had so often said.
Dr. Dan went on:
"Our white friends cannot do for us what we can do for our-
selves. Dependency on the part of the Negro has always proved
a detriment. When we have learned to do well 'what we have the
ability to do, we will have accomplished much towards changing
sentiments now against us."
He believed this, he made them believe it, but he was also a
realist. He did not leave them without saying one more word. "Do
not be deterred," warned Dr. Dan, "by the thought you may en-
counter antagonism. Few enterprises, even those for the better-
ment of mankind, have smooth sailing from the start. The Provi-
dent Hospital project," he told them, "met with fierce opposi-
tion in some quarters . . , and when I entered upon my duties at
Washington, I was very much discouraged by the condition of af-
fairs." He mentioned then the name sure to stir them, Frederick
Douglass, and he repeated the words Douglass had spoken to him
a half dozen years before:
"The only way you can succeed is to override the obstacles in
200 Daniel Hale Williams
your path. Hope will be of no avail. ... By the power that is
within you do what you hope to do!"
By September colored Nashville had opened its own hospital, a
large residence on Cherry Street in which were placed twelve
beds at first, later twenty-three, and then thirty-five as the work
grew and prospered. Here Dr. Dan held his clinics, the great event
of the Meharry medical year, attended not only by students but
by alumni and doctors from the country around. After a while
even the white doctors in Nashville began coming, as white doc-
tors had come in Washington. "They never saw such a clean,
swift operator," said John Hamilton Holman later when he him-
self had served many years as Meharry's professor of pathology
and bacteriology. "Why, Dr. Dan could sew up a man faster than
any sewing machine ever made!"
Dr. Dan opened the whole field of modern surgery to Meharry
students, and faculty too, as he had opened it to Howard Univer-
sity students and faculty. The annual school catalogue enumer-
ated the "rare and difficult" list: removal of fibroid tumors, dis-
eased ovaries and tubes, ovarian cysts, appendectomies. . . . After
the home tonsil removals of F. A. Stewart and the hernia repairs
of W. J. Snead, Meharry's previous professors of surgery, these
were exciting adventures. Enrolments climbed sixty per cent in
no time. Meharry's immediate future was secure.
Young men did any sort of menial work to finance themselves at
Meharry while Dr. Dan was there. "We knew he had worked hard
himself, on lake boats, in barber shops," said Dr. W. A. Reed of
these days. "I thought about that sometimes more than I thought
about his techniques when I watched him operating." Dr. Dan's
example gave his students the courage to go on waiting on tables,
cleaning out laboratories, working on Pullman cars during vaca-
tion. Some of them would never become surgeons just because
they would not be able to "afford the setup," but they were stim-
ulated to be better doctors.
Everything had to be shipshape when Dr. Dan arrived to con-
duct his clinics, Dr. G. Hamilton-Francis recalls, for he would
tolerate no less. But he was always encouraging, always willing to
MOSES TO NEGRO MEDICINE 2OI
lend an ear to the problems of the inexperienced. He made a spe-
cial effort to temper his explanations to a fellow's comprehension
and ability to understand. After he left, his operations and lec-
tures were subjects of conversation and discussion for weeks and
his influence was felt throughout the year. Some of the young
men he trained were graduated with honors and joined the Me-
harry faculty - W. A. Reed, J. A. McMillan, J. H. Hale and in
their turn handed down the Williams tradition to others who
came later.
The same autumn Dr. Dan started his clinics at Meharry, he
went to St. Louis to participate in the National Medical Associa-
tion's annual meeting. Dr. J. Edward Perry remembers how col-
ored doctors of the West anu South surged in at the promise of
seeing operations performed by the great Daniel Williams. The
Municipal Hospital grudgingly agreed to allow the colored group
to hold its clinics in its amphitheater and promised to provide the
patients.
Dr. Dan was advised that an accident case needing brain sur-
gery was being furnished him. A hospital cart was rolled in, on it
a baby of nine or ten months who had fallen from a window. The
baby was dying, Dr. Dan saw as soon as he looked at it. He turned
to the waiting colored men and described the moribund condition
of the little creature.
"This is what they think we will operate upon," he said, "but
we will kindly return it to the ward and not add insult to injury."
He then sought to make up to the disappointed men by lectur-
ing at length on head injuries and various types of fractures of the
skull. It was a classic discourse. When it was completed, Dr. Dan
engaged his audience in a heart-to-heart talk on the surgical and
medical situation confronting the Negro.
"Men," he said, "you must bestir yourselves." If they sat idly
by and waited for Providence and luck, he told them, they'd be
there a thousand years. When they left that amphitheater, they
must go out with the determination to have more hospitals, bet-
ter medical men and more scientific surgeons, he declared, and
202 Daniel Hale Williams
they must build the hospitals themselves. "I'll come and help you,"
he said, "whenever I possibly can." Booker Washington's indif-
ference had made him redouble his own efforts.
Out in Missouri a few months later, young Perry remembered
Dr. Dan's words. He had as patient an elderly woman who showed
the beginnings of cancer of the breast. He knew an immediate op-
eration might prolong her life as much as five years. He felt all
the more concern about the case because he felt he owed his own
life to the care with which this woman had nursed him, a worn-
out young practitioner, through pneumonia. When the local hos-
pital at the state university refused to admit her because of her
color and despite the fact her husband was well able to pay the
fees, Perry was in despair until he remembered Dr. Dan's words.
Immediately he posted a letter to Chicago and to his joy received
a quick response. Dr. Dan would come. First he sent certain ad-
vance orders and Perry and the woman's husband proceeded to
carry them out, strange though they seemed. Perry remembered
every detail years later.
The two men took all movable furnishings out of the big
kitchen-dining room and painted the ceiling, walls and floor. By
the time the paint was dry, Dr. Dan's nurse had arrived, a brisk,
starched woman who kept them busy for two days. Under her
direction, they baked sheets and towels in the oven of the stove
out in the summer kitchen. On top of the stove they set the five-
gallon wash boiler, after careful cleaning, to sterilize water. They
kept the water bubbling a full half hour, then the nurse spread
over it one of the baked sheets. With others she covered the stove
and dish cupboards in the proposed operating room. At her bid-
ding the men went over the freshly painted walls again, with a
solution of permanganate of potash. They stretched out the din-
ing table to capacity and added all its extra leaves, then scrubbed
and covered it with a clean quilt, next with a sheet. A sterilized
sheet would be added at the last minute. When all was ready, they
closed doors and windows, stuffed the crevices with cotton, and
set formaldehyde crystals to fumigate the immaculate room.
There were only two other colored doctors in that part of Mis-
MOSES TO NEGRO MEDICINE 203
souri. Perry sent them word and they came, by buggy, getting up
at dawn and driving, one twenty-five miles and the other thirty-
five, to watch the operation. To these three men Dr. Dan gave a
full classroom lecture. He described minutely the anatomy of the
breast. He told how the cells of the milk ducts change when at-
tacked by cancer, and why there is retraction of the nipple. Lost
in his subject, his voice rose and took on an excitement that com-
municated itself to Perry and the other two doctors. He described
the various types of operation in vogue for removal of the breast,
and what method he would use, and why. He went to as much
pains to make everything clear as if a full amphitheater were be-
fore him. Then under their watchful eyes, greedy of every move
he made, he set swiftly to work, continuing to talk as he operated
explaining, describing, answering questions.
Never had they had such an opportunity before. More than
probably, they never would again. When Dr. Dan was through,
they knew they had been in the presence of a great man, a mod-
est man who put them at ease. They felt a new sense of their own
worth, and responsibility, as colored doctors. They would never
completely lose courage after that.
As for the patient, Dr. Dan's nurse stayed with her for a week
and her recovery was "uneventful." She lived for six years.
This was the beginning. Soon Dr. Dan, despite his marriage, de-
spite his heavy private practice and all the demands upon him in
Chicago, was traveling everywhere, from the Great Lakes to the
Gulf, at the call of colored doctors who needed him. He might
have gone back to teaching at his alma mater and added to his
stature among white men, but he was a Williams and he devoted
himself to black men as his clan had always done.
Sometimes the call came from a former student or interne,
lonely practitioners struggling to find their way in a difficult
white-dominated profession that gave them little welcome. Some-
times several colored doctors would group their serious surgical
cases, collect a fund to cover travel expenses, and invite Dr. Dan
to spend several days with them, operating, demonstrating and
lecturing.
204 Daniel Hale Williams
When he was not traveling, he was writing letters, answering
questions. "I have a case of enlarged cervical glands. What shall
I do?" came a plea from Arkansas, and Dr. Dan's prompt advice
gave confidence and assured success to an isolated young profes-
sional.
"He never failed to respond to our requests," said Edward
Perry later after he himself had built up two hospitals. The more
difficult the situation, the more Dr. Dan's pioneer blood raced to
conquer it. He operated and lectured in kitchens, dining rooms
and parlors. Once the only light was a kerosene lamp and it had
to be held at some distance lest the ether fumes ignite. Once, in
the Deep South, the crowd of knowledge-thirsty doctors was so
much greater than the available small bedroom could accommo-
date that the patient was carried out under the boughs of a tree
and there Dr. Dan, pressed round by eager black faces, poured
out the gospel according to ^sculapius. To an unknown number
of these informal schools Dr. Dan carried the light of his skill and
understanding and left with countless ardent young doctors the
inspiration and courage that enabled them to live out lives of des-
perately needed usefulness.
Despite the satisfactions of his work in the South and West,
Dr. Dan grieved over the setback in the East to his magnificent
achievements at Freedmen's Hospital. His successor Curtis was a
good surgeon, but Curtis had not retained the direction of Freed-
men's very long. In 1901 Warfield, despite his failure to pin dis-
honesty on Dr. Dan, was emboldened to make similar charges
against Curtis. This time he succeeded and Curtis was forced out.
Warfield, who had taken pains to make the proper connections,
was appointed surgeon-in-chief. Shortly he again for the third
time brought charges against a colleague this time against
Charles West of the remarkably high civil service rating. West,
when he failed of appointment as surgeon-in-chief , had been com-
pelled for lack of other opportunity to accept an assistant sur-
geonship in the institution where he should have been head. But
Warfield did not want him around. So West was accused of dis-
honesty and ousted. Thereafter Warfield had held undisputed
MOSES TO NEGRO MEDICINE 2Q5
sway. A man with pitiful lack of professional ability, clever only
in self-seeking, he allowed the hospital to sink back into condi-
tions almost as bad as when Purvis was chief.
As he traveled, Dr. Dan bucked the color line sometimes, as
in Dallas, by refusing to operate in lily-white hospitals; other
times, as in St. Louis, by rebuking the cynicism of white doctors.
Always he had to be on guard against those who sought to trip
up a colored surgeon at whatever cost to the patient. But Dr.
Dan was more than a match for unprincipled provincials.
In Indianapolis, he put a white staff to shame. Dr. J. H. Ward,
president of the newly founded Indiana state organization of col-
ored doctors, invited Dr. Dan to their annual meeting. Rather
grudging permission had been obtained from the City Hospital to
hold a surgical clinic there "if a qualified colored surgeon could
be found." The men assembled happily; they were secure in the
knowledge they indeed had a qualified man, and they were eager
to see even one operation and learn from it.
A white attendant wheeled in a patient, announced it was an
"abdominal" case, and stood aside with a scarce suppressed sneer
on his face, as if to say, What can a Negro do?
"Where is the patient's record?" asked Dr. Dan. Surprised into
action, the interne brought it. Dr. Dan gave the record a glance
and laid it down.
"Please wheel the patient out," he said.
Like automata set in motion against their will, the attendants
obeyed. When the patient was out of earshot, Dr. Dan picked up
the record and turned to the little group of colored doctors, now
augmented by several white men who had slipped in.
"Gentlemen," he said, "this case is diabetic and therefore in-
operable. The urinalysis shows . . ." and he proceeded to give
a thoroughgoing lecture on the whys and wherefores of the situ-
ation. It was a masterly dissertation, but there was no operation,
and that was the end of the first attempted surgical clinic of col-
ored men in Indianapolis. "We didn't get what we came for," said
Dr. Lawrence A. Lewis, "but we went away with reinforced faith
in ourselves."
206 Daniel Hale Williams
Dr. Dan never talked much about the frustrations he encoun-
tered from racial prejudice. Hard work and worthy accomplish-
ment would eventually win the Negro his rightful place, not
talk. However, he did enjoy the opportunity presented one day
for a little mild retaliation. Returning from a trip, he found on his
desk a letter from the editor of a medical journal published in
North Carolina. The Southern editor had been reading some fine
articles, he said, by Daniel Hale Williams in the national medical
papers and he would deem it a favor if Dr. Williams would allow
his next article to appear in the North Carolina journal. Dr. Dan
knew this journal had been running pseudoscientific articles de-
claring the Negro physician could never gain efficiency in his pro-
fession because of the formation of the Negro skull. He took some
pleasure in sitting down and answering that he was a Negro and
too busy just now to send an article.
Dr. Dan's Nashville speech of 1900 was reprinted and broadcast
far and wide. Soon colored hospitals were springing up every-
where Knoxville, Kansas City, St. Louis, Louisville, Memphis,
Birmingham, Atlanta, Dallas. In a very few years his moving
appeal and his practical advice had fostered forty hospitals in
twenty different states. Today there are a hundred. One little
North Carolina hospital spoke for them all:
The hospital has had a wonderful effect on the death rate
among our people. The deaths used to be three to one when
compared with the whites, though the colored population
was only half as large as the white population. But since we
have had the trained nurse, there is a marked change.
At one time, seven different Negro schools in the country
were training colored doctors. Five have failed. The only ones
to survive are Howard University Medical School and Meharry
Medical College the two schools which, when newer techniques
and more stringent standards entered all American medical edu-
cation, were fortunate enough to be injected with the fervor, the
unremitting labor, and the uncompromising perfectionism of
Dr. Dan, Moses to Negro medicine and nursing.
CHAPTER XV
History-Making Operations
SELDOM has history produced a doctor as versatile as Dr. Dan.
His ability to organize and administer was a high quality in itself.
His talent to inspire and instruct has left an unending influence
upon doctors both black and white in this country. And with all
this went his masterful, ever-developing gifts in several areas of
surgery.
On a sultry July night in 1902, just such a night as the one when
Cornish was stabbed, Dr. Dan encountered another patient in-
jured in a brawl. This time the assailant's instrument was a gun,
not a knife, and the victim was white, not colored. The man had
been shot in his left side while stooping over and the ball had
passed through the space between the eighth and the ninth ribs.
Though nine years had ensued since Dr. Dan had successfully
operated on Cornish, surgeons were still reluctant to open up the
thorax. Abdominal operations had become common, but not so
with the chest. Throughout the Spanish-American War, men
wounded in the upper part of the body by gunshot, if they did
not die at once, were abandoned with a sterile dressing, a strapped
chest, and a dose of morphine. The possibility of surgical inves-
tigation and repair was not even considered. Textbooks still ex-
pressed a timid conservatism on the subject.
When Dr. Dan was told the position the man had been in when
shot, he remarked that there was probably no abdominal injury.
2o8 Dcmiel Hale Williams
"Balls don't turn corners," he said to the staff men who stood
watching while he examined the young Irishman, "not unless
they come into contact with some hard substance." As far as he
could tell from outer examination there was no injury either to the
diaphragm or to the abdominal viscera. However, as he always
did with emergency patients, he ordered an examination of the
urine, while the man was still on the table. Blood was present
and Dr. Dan said probably the kidney was involved after all.
Again he examined the abdomen and found muscular rigidity
on the left side, with absolute flatness from the twelfth rib into
the flank. He pointed out to the internes that abdominal respira-
tion was completely absent an important sign in men, he said,
of a peritoneal injury. He washed out the bladder, made a second
catheterization, and again blood was present.
"Well," said Dr. Dan, straightening up, "only one ball entered
the body. It must have turned the corner after all." He said he was
sure now that the abdominal viscera had been injured and he would
operate at once.
He made a five-inch incision following the angle of the eighth
rib, raised and retracted the tissues, and cut through about three
inches of the seventh and eighth ribs. He was much bolder than
when he operated on Cornish and gave himself ample space to
reach the diaphragm. As he worked away quickly, but calmly,
confident he could master any problem that arose, he explained
each step to the men standing by. Surgeons worry too much, he
said, about the invasion of air into the body through an incision;
he himself had found aspirating the air from the cavity and strap-
ping the chest firmly with plaster was all that was needed.
His opening made, Dr. Dan found the diaphragm actually had
been penetrated, but that tissue had plugged the wound so that
temporarily the abdominal and pleural spaces had been separated
as usual. Quickly he repaired the wound in the diaphragm, irri-
gated the pleural cavity with salt solution, aspirated the air with
a syringe and closed the outer incision. His hands, nimble as a
pianist's, moved with lightning speed, without a false motion, al-
most rhythmically, it appeared to those who watched.
HISTORY-MAKING OPERATIONS 2Op
He still had to discover where the bullet had gone after passing
through the diaphragm. And he must stop the man's loss of blood
before it proved fatal. Swiftly he made a seven-inch incision to
the left of the median abdominal line. With fingers that seemed
to carry in their sensitive tips the faculties both of seeing and of
thinking, he examined the intestines and the organs one by one*
In the inner upper surface of the kidney, he found a wound. His
opening did not give him good access, and before proceeding
with the bleeding kidney he hastily closed the incision he had
just made and made a third one, an oblique incision in the left
loin, the standard procedure for approaching the kidney.
When he reached the deep tissue of the lower back, he found it
bulging into the wound and the space dark with escaped blood.
As he cut in, dark clots appeared, followed almost immediately
by profuse arterial hemorrhage. He ceased speaking, his move-
ments lost their rhythm, became jerky, took on blinding speed.
Grabbing a tampon from the assistant he controlled the hemor-
rhage. Then under his direction the assistant continued the deep
pressure while he separated the damaged kidney from its sur-
rounding fat and removed it. As he dissected down to the ureter
he found both that duct and the large branch of the renal artery
had been cut by the ball.
Thanks to Dr. Dan's independent judgment, his intelligent
deductions, and his courageous assumption of responsibility for
whatever procedure, orthodox or not, which each step indicated,
the Irishman's life was saved. His recovery was slow, but steady,
and a year later he was in excellent health.
The very next day after this challenging operation, Dr. Dan
was called to Provident Hospital by another chest injury a
stab wound. It proved to be the most interesting and instructive
case, he said later, he had ever met. Like his heart operation, it
was another history-making case.
At first examination there were no indications for immediate
operation. It was the sort of thing usually treated on the expectant
plan and usually resulting in death. The temperature of the pa-
tient, a man of twenty-seven, was 98, his pulse 92, and good
no Daniel Hale Williams
quality. He complained naturally enough of pain in and about
his chest wound, but there was no hemorrhage from the wound,
which had closed valve-like, and his heart was normal But he
breathed with difficulty and soon he developed a short, shrill,
hacking cough and complained of pain in the left abdomen. Dr.
Dan found dullness there and some muscular rigidity, but no posi-
tive signs of hemorrhage into the abdomen.
As he continued to watch the case, the symptoms became pro-
gressively urgent. The man could not lie down, his pulse increased
from 92 to 140, the dullness in the left abdomen increased and the
muscular rigidity became extreme. All this, with an increase in
white corpuscle count, pointed to active internal hemorrhage and
Dr. Dan decided to wait no longer but operate.
Following the angle of the eighth rib, he cut a trap door as in
the gunshot case of the day before. Again he found the diaphragm
had been penetrated and plugged with tissue. Proceeding into
the abdomen and finding it full of free blood and clots, he dis-
covered the spleen had been damaged. It was hemorrhaging pro-
fusely. Slight traction on the surrounding tissue enabled him to
deliver the organ onto the abdominal wall for examination. Hastily
he threw a turn of gauze with a drawn loop about the pedicle
and controlled the hemorrhage. The wound, he saw, extended the
length of the spleen.
Dr. Dan stood and looked at the injured organ. What should
he do? The soft, pulpy, fist-sized mass, so highly vascular, held
together only by a delicate network of tissues, seemed to defy
any attempt at repair. Six years earlier Lamarchia had tried to
suture a spleen; he had failed and his patient had died of second-
ary hemorrhage.
Despite history, despite uncertainty, Dr. Dan was willing to
try. He began suturing, but every stitch tore out of the cheese-
like tissues as he attempted to draw his loop down. He saw he
would have to give up or change his tactics.
Although the properties of catgut had not been extensively
investigated and were not well known, Dr. Dan was aware that
wetting catgut caused it to swell. If it swelled, it should engage
HISTORY-MAKING OPERATIONS 211
the tissues and hold more firmly to them. Immediately he took up
a full curved round Mayo needle, threaded with No. 2 catgut, and
introduced it a half inch back from the margin of the wound.
Without exerting the least force, he allowed the needle to follow
its full curve and emerge on the opposite side of the wound the
same distance from the edge as it had entered. Then he made a
triple loop, without a reinforcing knot. As the edges of the wound
came together he applied hot gauze compresses to each loop.
The catgut swelled, and the stitches held firm! Not one pulled
out. For twenty minutes he waited to make sure the stitches
would hold. Satisfied then that the hemorrhage would not start
up again, he returned the spleen to the abdomen, surrounded it
with the abdominal tissues, explaining as he did so that the
omentum had a protective quality important to the healing, and
then he closed the outer incision. The patient made a rapid and
permanent recovery and was discharged from Provident thirty-
one days later.
A little over a year later, Nicholas Senn published a review
of surgical experience with the spleen on both sides of the Atlan-
tic. In America there had been only one successful suture for
traumatic hemorrhage previous to Dr. Dan's, an operation per-
formed by Tiffany in Baltimore in 1 894, which Dr. Dan had not
known. Abroad, out of fourteen cases sutured, two had died; out
of ten treated with tampon, one had died. While these ventures
were few in number, the percentage of recovery was high and
Dr. Dan was stimulated to urge that more men at least attempt
repair of injured spleens. He sat down and wrote a paper on his
own case and presented it before the Chicago Medical Society
one evening in mid- June 1904.
Not the suture itself but the method of applying the suture was
the crucial thing, Dr. Dan said. You could not apply suture to
a bleeding spleen as you would to almost any other tissue in the
body. "It requires method, technique and a proper adjustment
of the omentum in the completion of the operation to have a
successful result," he said. Previous failures were due to ignorance
of these points. Now, there was every reason not to be dis-
2i2 Daniel Hale Williams
couraged, not to reject the challenge. But despite Dr. Dan's urg-
ing, men still today shrink from tackling a damaged spleen and
the encyclopedias still say there is only one thing to do remove
the injured organ.
Dr. Dan included in his paper the gunshot affair and added still
another case to show how greatly penetrating wounds of the
chest can vary.
This third patient showed no symptoms relevant to any organ
or viscera within stabbing distance of the walls of the thorax,
and, without operation to discover the extent of his injuries, the
man would have died. The fellow had been stabbed, Dr. Dan ex-
plained, below the sixth rib, one inch from the nipple of the
breast. When Dr. Dan examined him, his temperature was 97,
his pulse no, fairly full and regular, and his respiration was 40,
but his skin was cold and clammy. The heart and lungs were
negative, except below the sixth rib; from there dullness extended
downward to the tenth rib. The abdomen was negative too. Ar-
terial blood was escaping from the intercostal vessels.
Dr. Dan made an incision, he told the medical society, four
inches long, following the curve of the sixth rib, forming a trap
door as in his other cases. When he opened the pleural cavity,
he had considerably more trouble than in his previous cases. The
lung collapsed and the right heart was unable to accommodate
itself to the emergency. Circulation was interfered with danger-
ously and the patient turned blue. Great haste was required. Dr.
Dan found two wounds perforating the diaphragm, one on the
outer or pleural side near the dome, and one in a direct line on the
inner or pericardial side. He sutured these rapidly and then found
an irregular wound in the pericardium. Fortunately the heart was
not injured.
Ten years previous almost to the day Dr. Dan had sewed up his
first pericardial case. Then he used very fine catgut. This time he
chose fine silk. Suturing the fluttering pericardium was like re-
pairing the wing of a bird in full flight. But he had done it be-
fore and he managed to do it again. Then he irrigated the pleural
cavity, closed the chest wound, and continued his incision below
HISTORY-MAKIXG OPERATIONS
the diaphragm to explore the abdomen. There he found a punc-
tured wound of the transverse colon.
So with no outward indications whatever, his patient had ac-
tually suffered four internal injuries. Only Dr. Dan's prompt and
dexterous surgery had saved the man's life.
From this experience he felt it proper, Dr. Dan said, to urge
the surgical exploration of the great majority of penetrating
wounds of the chest below the sixth rib. Not otherwise, he
pointed out, could one decide the important question of whether
or not the diaphragm had been perforated. In every case he him-
self had found the "omnipresent omentum" had temporarily
plugged the wound openings and masked the symptoms. And
since the dome of the diaphragm varies in height, it was equally
impossible to be accurate in estimating the extent of the injury
done to the viscera. Neither probe nor finger were proper instru-
ments of exploration. It was far safer, he declared, to open the
chest and make actual observation, positive diagnosis and direct
treatment. The imminent risk of lung collapse that always attends
operative treatment of wounds of the heart and lungs he con-
sidered less of a danger than blind waiting.
Dr. Dan's paper had wide circulation. It was printed in its
entirety in The Annals of Surgery and in more abridged forms
in the Chicago Medical Recorder and the Illinois Medical Jour-
nal First-rate surgeons still find it good reading today.
Dr. Dan did not confine his surgery to any one area of the
body. His interest carried him into several fields where he de-
veloped a skill that would now earn him the title of specialist.
Throughout his career he was opposed to amputations. His early
railroad cases, his own threatened loss of a leg, had fixed his
attention upon the possibilities of saving injured extremities, while
his love of people and concern for their welfare made of every
case a warm, living actuality.
One day in 1904 a little six-year-old Irish boy was brought into
the emergency ward at Provident. He had fallen off a wagon
and suffered a bad laceration of both skin and tissue from knee
to ankle, plus a fracture of the ankle. The torn tissue was badly
214 Daniel Hale Williams
infected. Tomietta Stokes Beckham, one-time assistant superin-
tendent of nurses, remembers how every doctor in Provident who
passed through the ward and saw the case said nothing could be
done but amputate. But Dr. Dan tenaciously clung to his treat-
ments. This was a poor boy, he said, who must some day make
his living. "I'm going to wait," he declared, "until I feel there
is no chance at all to save that leg." After all Fenger had worked
half a year to save his leg.
So Dr. Dan waited, and worked, a week, a month, six months,
and the boy was finally discharged with just a slight limp, a limp
that would eventually be outgrown.
Another time a Rhode Island railroad brakeman was brought in
with a crushed foot and ankle. Current practice indicated amputa-
tion. But Dr. Dan refused. He trimmed off evident nonviable tissue,
including the toes, which were hopelessly crushed, and made no
attempt at the primary operation to cover all the raw surfaces.
After the wound was granulating clearly, some four weeks later,
he fashioned skin flaps and applied razor-cut skin grafts. The
result was a foot upon which the patient could walk. It was a
question who was the prouder Dr. Dan or the brakeman.
For all the extraordinary operations, the history-making sur-
gery, Dr. Dan was still the family physician too. Old friends
could not do without him. When Julius Avendorph's sons were
born, it had to be Dr. Dan who ushered them into the world.
When the children in the household of Louis B. Anderson, once
Price Williams's newspaper partner and now a rising Chicago
lawyer, had to have their tonsils out, their ordeal was made easier
by riding to the hospital in Dr. Dan's shiny new Red Devil of
Mitchell make. No other colored doctor had such a car. Jessica,
six, and her young Uncle Archibald, nine, screamed with delight
from the rear seat as Dr. Dan turned the handlebar this way and
that and the corners whizzed by.
The Williamses had moved to a larger house at 3149 Forest
Avenue, next door to Bishop Archibald Carey. Madison Davis
Carey, aged four, tried to walk the fence between Dr. Dan's back
yard and his own. Davis fell and tore the palm of his hand on a
HISTORY-MAKING OPERATIONS 215
projecting nail On Eloise, seven, fell the responsibility of the
situation; her mother and her father, the bishop, were away at
a church conference, and the maid, in a dead faint, was useless.
Eloise ran for Dr. Dan. It was a nasty wound and it hurt, but Dr.
Dan talked to the children as to contemporaries, to contemporaries
whom he respected. Davis stopped sobbing while Dr. Dan showed
them what had to be done and called upon them to help him do
it. Another time when Dorothy Carey developed a carbuncle on
her ankle and Eloise accompanied her to Dr. Dan's office, the
great surgeon carefully explained all about gangrenous tissue and
why it had to be cut out like a rotten spot out of an apple. Doro-
thy was fascinated and submitted to the necessities of the situa-
tion with good grace.
Mrs. Carey sent a note saying "Money could not pay for
what you have done," and then forgot to enclose the check
which gave everybody a good laugh. Mrs. Williams might be
jealous of Mrs. Carey, and Bishop Carey and Dr. Dan might not
always see eye to eye in race matters. Still Dr. Dan was always
the family physician as well as neighbor and the Carey children
loved him.
Dr. Dan never totally escaped from obstetrical work. He ad-
ministered "twilight sleep" to Mrs. Richard Rainey and asked
her to name the baby Daniel. He laughed at the frilly bassinet.
"I was put in a cracker box," he said, "and I got along all right."
Dan Rainey, when he was grown and married, still carried the
newspaper clipping about Dr. Dan and his twilight sleep birth
and still worshiped the great man for whom he was named. "But
you wouldn't know he was great," Dan Rainey said, "he was
so simple and he had simple offices with old-fashioned furniture."
Dr. Dan never grew so great but that his patients felt free to
come to him about all sorts of things. One woman consulted him
about her first-aid lessons and he suggested she get a sheep's heart
at the stockyards to help her understand things. Another woman
telephoned and said "Dr. Dan, there's no money in it for you, but
I want you to come and tell my neighbor how to care for her
ailing daughter." The next day he went and saw the neighbor;
216 Daniel Hale Williams
he stayed an hour and told the family to move to the country and
how to diet the daughter to build her up. His instructions were
followed and the girl got well
There never was a squarer man, people said. He would not
doctor a man if he did not need it and he tempered his fees to
a person's pocket. "I can't charge my people much," he told a
friend. Even at his prime, after he was nationally famous, his
income was only $10,000 a year and he still lived in a modest
frame house on a side street.
When a case was hopeless and there was nothing he could do,
Dr. Dan stayed on anyway through hours of waiting, helping a
wife keep watch until her man's last, struggling breath was drawn.
A woman never forgot that.
It was as though in the sickroom, and only in the sickroom,
could Dr. Dan be a whole man, a man of feeling as well as a
man of science and intellect. Here emotions, buried deep by pride
and circumstance, were set free. Here he need put up no guard
and could pour out sympathy and affection as well as knowledge
and skill, without fear of rebuff or betrayal. In return his patients
gave him a devotion that amounted to adulation and brought to
him the recital of all sorts of troubles beyond the medical.
In the early 1900*5 more than one colored youth, reading of his
race's great doctor, was stirred to follow in his steps. Some could
not be satisfied until they came to Chicago to study, where he
was. They came from far and near, Ulysses Grant Dailey from
Texas, Reginald Smith from Florida, and they came despite pov-
erty and every drawback. They searched him out, at first on the
street, later drawn to his office as by an irresistible magnet, swal-
lowing their timidity, to seek his encouragement and advice.
Dr. Dan was never too busy to see them.
Each one he received with grave courtesy and to each he gave
his fullest attention. Sometimes a stripling with preconceived
ideas of how great men look and act was a little disappointed when
he met his hero face to face. Dr. Dan's slight build, quiet ways
and modest, almost diffident, demeanor were not what had been
expected.
HISTORY-MAKING OPERATIONS 2iy
Though he had little time to mingle socially with the medical
students, Dr. Dan saw to it that they enjoyed at least one party
in his home every winter. For several years Arthur J. Booker from
El Paso was commissioned by Dr. Dan to invite thirty to forty
medical students for a big feed and evening of hilarity in his home,
but Dr. Dan himself was often called away.
To young doctors starting up in practice, Dr. Dan was more
than generous. He invited them to call upon him for advice and
he gave them consultation service without fee. It was the day
when the woman physician had everyone against her, but he en-
couraged both sexes alike. It was a big help to Dr. Marie Fellowes
when Dr. Dan got her a job in a life insurance company as exam-
ining physician for woman applicants.
He urged the young practitioners to read up on their cases,
just as a lawyer did, and to know all about the problems they
tackled. A. Wilberforce Williams was one who followed his ad-
vice to such good effect that he became a specialist in the treat-
ment of tuberculosis, worked with the Chicago Health Commis-
sioner, and was sent to Europe to lecture to colored American
soldiers. Andrew McKisSick, another bright student, also prof-
ited by Dr. Dan's teaching and became a notable surgeon in
Mexico.
At meetings of the National Medical Association where Dr.
Dan went almost yearly to operate and read papers, he kept
his eye open for promising young men. When he found them,
he encouraged them and advised them as to their individual prog-
ress; he invited them to Chicago, sometimes to stay in his own
home, and opened doors for them so they might visit the important
hospitals and surgeons of that important medical center.
The late Dr. John A. Kenney, for years resident physician at
Tuskegee and donor of a $93,000 hospital to the people of
Newark, New Jersey, was one of Dr. Dan's finds. In 1903 Dr.
Dan tried Kenney out as his anesthetist and after that used him
each year at his Meharry clinics. His encouragement and instruc-
tion impelled Kenney to go back to Alabama and emulate his
mentor. Like Dr. Dan, Kenney improvised operating quarters
2 1 8 Daniel Hale Williams
in a small room with wooden floor and whitewashed ceiling. Like
Dr. Dan, he scrubbed and sprayed before he operated. Like Dr.
Dan, he met emergencies bravely. Kenney operated in Negro
cabins by oil lamp, tallow candle, and once even did a forceps
delivery with one old midwife for assistant, by the light of a pine
torch on the open hearth.
In 1907 Dr. Dan invited Kenney to Chicago. Kenney spent
three weeks as his guest, and, thanks to Dr. Dan, visited eight
hospitals, heard many lectures, met leading surgeons and witnessed
nearly a hundred operations. It was an experience of unbelievable
good fortune to the young Southern Negro. When George Hall
inserted an item in the newspaper stating Kenney was his house
guest Kenney wanted to make it clear to everyone that Dr. Dan,
and no one else, was his benefactor. When he reached home he
published a lengthy article of appreciation in the Tuskegee paper,
The Student, recounting Dr. Dan's good offices and eulogizing his
attainments.
He was proud of the fact, Kenney said, that the race had such
an eminent physician and surgeon as Dr. Dan. There were prom-
inent 'white men in medicine and surgery in Chicago who had been
his pupils and others who had been his internes. "He is at perfect
ease with the best surgeons in the city," wrote the segregated
Southern Negro, "they all recognize him and accord him a high
place."
Kenney exulted that Dr. Dan had the privilege of operating at
St. Luke's. He had watched Dr. Dan perform two abdominal
operations there one morning. "The nurses and internes, all white,
paid him the same deference that I later saw them giving the white
surgeons in the same operating room." There was absolutely no
difference. It made Kenney feel glad, he said, to see it and to feel
that here, at least, was a place where merit was being recognized
for merit's own sake.
Dr. Dan's student ways and his study well stocked with medical
works impressed young Kenney. "He follows closely the best
authors on medical and surgical subjects," Kenney wrote. Dr.
Dan's books were not on the shelves just for ornament. Kenney
HISTORY-MAKING OPERATIONS 219
looked Into them and found them interlined and appended with
the penciled notes of the reader.
Dr. Dan did not, however, take another assistant into his own
office for some years after his unhappy experience with Curtis
and Warfield. Some had asked for the privilege and had been
refused. Their complaints swelled the murmurs that he was selfish
and carried weight with those who had no comprehension of what
a great surgeon's requirements might be. It was not until 1908
that Dr. Dan ventured upon the uncertainties of a close profes-
sional relationship.
On a raw day late in February when it seemed the lake wind
was everyone's foe, Dr. Dan encountered young Grant Dailey
near 33rd and State Streets. The late Dr. Dailey remembered
almost a half century afterward every detail of that meeting. He
had recently won his M.D. at Northwestern with a record high
enough to be teaching anatomy there as Dr. Dan had done. Al-
ready he had assisted Dr. Dan in operations at Provident Hospital.
The men greeted each other. "How are you getting on?" Dr.
Dan asked. "Well enough," answered the younger man and ex-
plained that he was now located nearby in rooms with another
doctor and a dentist.
"Oh," said Dr. Dan, "why have you left Hall?"
Dailey had had office space with George Hall during the past
year and a half since graduation. He explained to Dr. Dan that
Hall had once promised Spencer Dickerson an assistantship if he
came out to Chicago. Dickerson had come on from Massachusetts
and Dailey had had to find another berth. Dr. Dan stood silent
a moment, turning his penetrating look on the young face before
him.
"So you're no longer working at all with Hall? Your disattach-
ment has been orderly, then, and complete?"
"Yes, sir," replied the puzzled Dailey. Another moment of
silence ensued and then Dr. Dan spoke, slowly.
"Well," he said, "it's some years since I've had an apprentice
with me. I thought I wouldn't again, but how would you like
to come in with me and act as my surgical assistant at Provident?"
220 Daniel Hale Williams
If he had been offered a heap of jewels on a golden platter,
Dailey would not have been more astounded. Since that day years
before when a Negro newspaper had fallen into his hands on the
Texas frontier with a photograph of Daniel Hale Williams in
it, Grant Dailey had vowed to be a surgeon. By hard, often menial,
work and exacting self-denial he had won his education. But his
wildest dreams had not included such a moment as this. To work
at close hand with his idol, to see all his techniques and to learn
them! Somehow he gasped his acceptance.
Later Dailey realized that his news had been no surprise to Dr.
Dan. This proposition had certainly been duly weighed before
Dr. Dan broached it.
A few weeks later Dailey brought his few possessions and moved
into the front room of Dr. Dan's suite at 3129 Indiana Avenue;
Dr. Dan had moved to the new address a few years back.
The two men shared a small waiting room. There was no
office girl or office attendant of any kind. Dr. Dan was opposed,
Dailey found, to office attendants. He felt his patients would be
discussed and he knew how sensitive some of his women patients
were to privacy. Negrodom was a circumscribed community and
many colored women in those days preferred to consult white
physicians rather than risk gossip about their affairs. Dr. Dan re-
spected their feelings and ran an office that, in comparison with
those of other practitioners, was severely sanctumlike.
Dailey was inexperienced, but Dr. Dan was infinitely patient.
He was also fussy, Dailey found, about many little things clean-
liness, neatness and order, and especially about never accepting
even the smallest thing, a pencil or a nickel to make change, from
anyone. His honesty, or independence, whichever it was, was
trying at times. But Dailey did not know how Warfield had
accused Dr. Dan of thievery ten years back. Apparently ever
since, Dr. Dan had been on the watch lest some careless action
be used by someone with evil intent.
Dailey gave the anesthetics in home cases, of which Dr. Dan
still had many, assisted at the hospital operations, and gave the
aftercare on obstetrical cases. Like Dr. Dan himself years before
HISTORY-MAKING OPERATIONS 221
in Dr. Palmer's office, Dailey was ever alert to learn. Dr. Dan's
surgical judgment and bedside diagnostic skill continually amazed
the younger man. "It was uncanny," he said.
Dr. Dan was getting to the age, the middle fifties, when many
men lose their enthusiasms. But fortunately for Grant Dailey, Dr.
Dan was as buoyant and keen in his interests as ever. Whenever
the opportunity arose to do an anatomic review on a cadaver,
Dr. Dan's whole being vibrated with joy.
One day as the two men walked up Dearborn from Provident
after an operation for hernia through the groin, Dailey brought
up some questions regarding the surgical anatomy of the lesion.
He had seen E. Wyllys Andrews demonstrate his overlapping
method of repairing a hernia in the classes at Northwestern, but
from the amphitheater benches, Dailey said, the view had been
too poor to get a clear conception of the process.
"Your answers," replied Dr. Dan, "can only be found in the
dissecting room."
Arrived at his office, Dr. Dan went straight to the telephone and
made arrangements. The two men, dropping everything else, has-
tened off to the anatomical laboratory. "Wyllys Andrews was my
classmate," said Dr. Dan on the way, "and his father was my pro-
fessor of surgery."
For the next three hours the two were alone in the laboratory.
Carefully, patiently, Dr. Dan went through the entire operation
and would not stop until Dailey thoroughly understood every
step.
Another day Dailey asked about the techniques for providing
a substitute passage from the stomach to the intestines when the
normal route was damaged. The same thing happened. Dr. Dan
took Dailey to the dissecting room. Dailey never forgot that opera-
tive surgery must be built upon sound anatomical foundations and
even after he had reached surgical eminence himself and had
carried his skills beyond the United States to India, to Pakistan,
and to Africa, Dailey looked back with awe upon the uncanny
accuracy of Dr. Dan's knowledge of the human body and the
perfection of his surgical technique. For his part, Dr. Dan never
222 Daniel Hale Williams
stinted with his knowledge nor spared himself in teaching Dailey,
for this time, he knew, he had found the right man to train.
Not every genius is able to train other men. Dr. Dan's contem-
porary, the brilliant Murphy, according to his biographer, wore
out his assistants, but did not make great surgeons out of them.
Fortunately for posterity, Dr. Dan could, and did.
Dailey proved to be as eager for knowledge and as painstaking
in his labors as Dr. Dan himself. He would go on to make his
own individual contribution to this great work for the race, for
humanity.
Dailey did more. His quiet ways and high standards were hap-
pily congenial to the great surgeon at his zenith. Dailey must have
accomplished something toward healing the wounds inflicted by
Curtis and Warn* eld.
CHAPTER XVI
Alice Tries to Be a Good Wife
WHILE Dr. Dan was operating, training Dailey, traveling and
lecturing in the South, his wife was active in colored society. Dr.
Dan's friends became her friends. With Florence Bentley, Charles
Bentley's new wife, she joined a white literary club downtown.
She devoted herself to the South Side colored people, helping am-
bitious young women secure suitable positions, making talks here
and there.
When the Reverend Reverdy Ransom asked her to take charge
of the kindergarten work at the Institutional Church and Social
Settlement two blocks from Provident Hospital, Alice responded
willingly. First she must raise funds. She decided to put on a good
lecture course and accomplish two ends in one intellectual
stimulation for the neighborhood and money for the kindergarten.
She tried to get Booker Washington to open the course but,
failing that, secured Mary Church Terrell, the distinguished col-
ored suffragette and now one of the first two women on the Board
of Education in Washington, D. C. Mrs. Terrell proved an ex-
cellent choice. She was followed by other good lecturers Dr.
Gunsaulus and Rabbi Hirsch who had helped Provident Hospital,
Professor Shailer Matthews, Dr. Carlos Montezuma. Thanks to
Alice's efforts enough money was raised to make it possible
to increase the number of children cared for from sixty-five to
eighty-two, and to pay the kindergarten principal a salary. Five
224 Daniel Hale Williams
girls were accepted as students in training for kindergarten work.
So well did the whole scheme work out that the next fall a kinder-
garten school "equal to the best" was opened. Alice Williams
could be well satisfied.
Hard as she worked for the kindergarten, she found time for
other activities as well at the Institutional Church and Settlement.
She helped raise funds for the day nursery which cared for sev-
enty-five babies a week while their mothers were out working,
and she served on the committee for the kitchen garden. Both Dr.
Dan and Alice had a special interest in the Reverend Mr. Ransom's
venture, the first attempt by Negroes anywhere in the country
to do social settlement work. Twenty years before, Reverdy Ran-
som had been minister of a church in Hollidaysburg, where Dr.
Dan was born and spent his early childhood. Dr. Dan was doubly
glad to support the Reverend Mr. Ransom.
The Institutional Church did not bother about denominational
lines. That pleased Dr. Dan. This was a kind of religion, practical
religion, he could subscribe to a church with a reading room
and library, music, an employment bureau, clubs for all ages,
classes in manual training, stenography, cooking, plain sewing and
dressmaking.
Dr. Dan liked the way Ransom entered fearlessly into all that
affected the neighborhood. The Armour men struck for better
conditions and the management retaliated by manning the trucks
with Negroes, whereupon the strikers threw rocks at the scabs
and knocked them from the seats. Ransom, to Dr. Dan's delight
when he heard about it, strode into the middle of the fray and did
some plain talking. u Our colored men," he told the strikers, "are
not trying to take the bread out of your mouths. It's not our fault
we aren't in organized labor!" Then Ransom invited everyone
involved to come to his Sunday Forum and talk things out, with
Clarence Darrow on the platform leading the discussion.
Dr. Dan had always been optimistic that race relations would
improve. But Darrow was pessimistic:
"When I see how anxious the white race is to go to war over
nothing and to shoot down men in cold blood for the benefit
ALICE TRIES TO BE A GOOD WIFE 225
of trade, when I see the Injustice everywhere present, the rich
people uniting and crowding the poor into inferior positions,
I fear the dreams we have indulged in of perfect equality and
unlimited opportunity are a long way from realization."
Darrow said more:
"The colored race should learn this: if the white race insults
you on account of your inferior position, they also degrade them-
selves when they do it. Every time a superior person invades the
rights and liberties and dignity of an inferior person he retards
and debases his own manhood."
Dr. Dan attended Ransom's Sunday Forum whenever he pos-
sibly could. He met many friends there Louis B. Anderson, soon
to be alderman; Ed Wright, already County Commissioner; Oscar
DePriest, who had married one of Dr. Dan's many cousins. De-
Priest was a house painter and had not yet thought of sitting in
Congress.
A number of theatrical people attended, who were not welcome
in most churches Dick Harrison, Burt Williams, Sam Lucas who
wrote songs. There were many singers, too, and Mrs. Potter
Palmer was enchanted when Ransom brought them to sing for
her guest, Mascagni. Once a month there was a big orchestral
concert of thirty to forty pieces. Dr. Dan was reminded of the
days when he played bass viol in All Souls in Janesville, As he
listened, he doubtless wished he could get up there himself and
pull a stumpy bow once more back and forth across the deep-
throated strings.
In late July 1900, Dr. Dan was called back East by the death
of his mother. At seventy-two, Sarah Price Williams was still
lively and vital when a sudden stroke ended her life. Dr. Dan
attended the funeral but was unable to go to Annapolis for the
burial. A seriously ill patient demanded his attention in Chi-
cago.
Alice told Hale (she called Dr. Dan "Hale") that with his
mother gone he should charge his sisters rent for the house in
Kingman Place. They were both working and should support
themselves; he had done enough for them already. His family
226 Daniel Hale Williams
were always draining him, she said. 1 lie sisters replied that if they
were to pay rent they would pay it for something that suited
them better, and they moved to Pierce Place.
Dr. Dan's friends felt Alice Williams had an unfortunate effect
on him. Her exclusiveness, the standards she set, cut him off from
people, one after another he who had been so close to many,
who had a passion for friendship, and who required a great deal
of affection. They felt she encouraged him to harbor grievances
and to resent slights. She was forever defending him where no
defense was called for, and would point out flaws where he had
seen none. If a student wrote him to say, "Thanks to your tute-
lage I was able to do that operation and go home and relax with
a novel," Alice was sure to remark that novel-reading was shal-
low and Dr. Dan would forget the gratitude his student had
expressed.
When young Dr. J. W. McDowell, once Dr. Dan's student at
Howard University, moved to Chicago and came rushing to see
his former teacher, he was met at the door by a Swedish maid,
replete with uniform and card tray. McDowell was upset. He
had no card, but he was eager to see Dr. Dan. He brushed by the
maid and went right in. Alice welcomed him pleasantly enough,
but McDowell was added to the group who were shaking their
heads and saying, "She's not the wife for a doctor."
Certainly Alice Williams tried to be a good wife to Dr. Dan.
She entertained constantly. In the summer of 1904 when the Re-
publicans assembled in Chicago to nominate Theodore Roose-
velt, many prominent colored Republicans from all over the coun-
try attended the convention. Many were friends of Dr. Dan
and of his wife, and they took this opportunity to entertain them.
They gave a party in their home to honor the Honorable Judson
W. Lyons, Register of the Treasury, and James Carroll Napier,
the Nashville banker. Mrs. Napier was the former Nettie Langston
who had taught at Mott School with Alice Johnson. She helped
her hostess receive, and the society reporter, already bedazzled
by the new electric lights, went into ecstasies over two such beau-
tiful women, so handsomely gowned and gracious in deportment.
ALICE TRIES TO BE A GOOD WIFE ^^ f ^
To say that the scene was one of splendor, yet simple and
elegant, is but to put it mildly. The gentlemen were all in
full dress. Burnished silver, fine china, and cut glass glistened
in the soft flood of electric light like a sparkling array of
huge gems. But why attempt to polish the lily or burnish
the rose? The affair was all it possibly could have been.
Alice Williams was a society reporter's dream come true. The
newswriters followed her social calendar with meticulous atten-
tion, describing her parties and her costumes in every detail, un-
til no superlatives were left and comparisons ran out. "She ap-
peared never to better advantage," the reporter would sigh, and
her readers presumably sighed with the reporter, "a very beauti-
ful and graceful lady in a lovely creation of white crepe meteor
and taupe and pink, trimmed in real lace.' 1 Whether entertaining
sixty-five of her husband's prominent friends or a dozen of her
own intimates at luncheon, simple elegance and correctness were
always the keynote Alice Williams sounded.
The Forest Avenue neighborhood deteriorated, and first the
Careys left, then Dr. Dan and Alice. By the fall of 1905, they
were living at 270 East 42 nd Street and a year later they moved
to 470 on the same street. This was largely a white neighborhood.
Some Southern white people on the adjoining property put up
a twelve-foot "hate" fence. People flocked to see the monstrosity
which shut off the daylight from the Williams's windows. Dr.
Dan had to seek an injunction and the judge ordered the fence
down. Times were changing in Chicago.
In these years, the name of Alice Williams's father was fre-
quently in the news. In 1903 Moses Ezekiel presented his school,
Virginia Military Institute, with the sculptured group "Virginia
Mourning Her Dead." In 1907 his heroic bronze of Homer went
to the University of Virginia, and Thomas Nelson Page spoke
on the occasion. The next year he was executing his Napoleon
for President Theodore Roosevelt's sister. All this was never
spoken of outside the Williams household. Alice kept his framed
photograph hidden in a drawer, but once was moved to show
it to her friend Christine Shoecraft Smith. Tongues wagged in
228 Daniel Hale Williams
Chicago, as previously in Washington, and the- malicious said,
"She does not even know who her father was."
Alice tried hard to be as friendly with people as her husband
was. Every season she gave a luncheon for a club of the younger
girls; but they did not enjoy it very much, nor did she. People
stood in awe of her and she could not reassure them, for she did
not know how to unbend. When she was growing up some people
had drawn lines against her mother, against herself, and it had
become her defense to draw lines of her own lines of manners,
decorum, good breeding. She herself was ill at ease; she had been
a recluse too many years, had grown didactic through too much
schoolteaching. She was always formal according to code, never
casual.
Unfortunately for one of Alice's inflexibility, times were
changing and she could not change with them. She was forever
cutting from her list someone who could not cling, as she clung,
to the Victorian pattern by which she had been reared.
One day as she was about to enter Jennie Avendorph's parlor
for a meeting of the Ladies' Whist Club, she saw triumphantly
seated in that exclusive circle the breezy Mrs. George Hall, who
had come uninvited. The other women, taken aback by her
boldness, sat uncomfortable but unresisting. Alice Williams, how-
ever, caught a glimpse of the intruder's towering red coiffure
from the hall and turned on her heel and left, never to return.
To be steadfast to her early principles was part of her loyalty
to her mother. From her women friends she tried to get that
same absorbing, all-enveloping affection that Isabella Johnson had
given her. She adored Mary Lizzie Tibbs, wife of her husband's
protege, Wilberforce Williams, and was jealous because Mary
Lizzie had other friends besides herself.
For some reason she was also jealous of Mrs. Carey. Her feeling
made for difficulties in Dr. Dan's circle of friends. When Mrs.
Jerry Stewart, wife of one of his earliest associates on the Provi-
dent board, gave a luncheon and invited Mrs. Carey, she could
not invite Alice Williams.
Alice Williams knew more about books than she did about
ALICE TRIES TO BE A GOOD WIFE 229
life. "Fd rather stay home and read a good book," she wrote
Caddie Parke, "than mingle with ill-bred people."
One hot day Mary Lizzie gave a party, a boat trip to Benton
Harbor, and Alice consented to go. She sat by the rail, tapping
kid-gloved fingers on the polished wood, as she discussed religion
with Louise Mingo, the elocutionist. Mrs. Mingo found Alice's
ideas a little startling. She could not believe in God, Alice said,
certainly not in a God who was good or omnipotent. She had
had a wonderful mother, who had worked hard to bring her up.
Yet just when she had married and could do things for her, her
mother had died. "How can God be good?" Alice asked Mrs.
Mingo.
Retaining her child's outlook on life, with her immature emo-
tions, her feeling that God like her father, perhaps had been
unjust, Alice Williams could not care for anyone in an adult
fashion. She demanded, but she could not give, love. Her dilemma
was Dr. Dan's dilemma too, for Alice had married a man who
required a large measure of love, who found himself frequently
insecure without the reassurance that approbation gave him. It
was not surprising then that Dr. Dan, who had sought and won
affection from a number of women before he met her, in time
was seeking emotional fulfillment elsewhere than with the un-
moved, and, for all her beauty, unmoving woman he had married.
A Frenchwoman came to his office one day as a patient. She
was not so much beautiful as she was engaging. She came back
for further consultations and it was not long before it was ap-
parent these calls could not be purely for medical advice. Then
she stopped coming altogether, but coincidentally Dr. Dan's med-
ical calls to the North Side seemed both more frequent and more
lengthy.
Dr. Dan was discreet, he planned that no one should ever know,
for he had no desire to hurt Alice's sense of dignity and right
decorum. He probably knew that nothing more deep in her
would be touched, even if she found him out, for he knew now
that nothing deep in her ever had been touched. He had made a
promise to her mother and he intended to keep that promise. He
23 Daniel Hale Williams
would always take care of Alice. But someone must care for him.
He poured himself out constantly to his many patients. Somehow
he must be replenished, even if it were an unworthy sort of re-
plenishment, not the fulfilment he had once dreamed of, caught
sight of for a moment, and had snatched from him.
The affair went on for some years. Alice might never have
heard of it had not the janitor in the Frenchwoman's apartment
building on the far North Side been both colored and a medical
student. He talked.
When Alice heard of Dr. Dan's defection she fled to Washing-
tor^to give herself time to think. She tried to get up the courage
to talk things over with her old friend Mary Robinson Meri-
wether.
"Mary," she began hesitatingly, "I have something to tell you."
Mary saved her the embarrassment of going further. "I know,
Alice," she said.
"What shall I do?" Alice asked.
In the end, Alice decided to do nothing. She returned to Chi-
cago; and Dr. Dan, in the immemorial fashion of erring husbands,
welcomed her with a Woods electric coupe of midnight blue. Al-
ice was nervous about running the autocar with its unpredictable
steering device. Finally she ran it up on a sidewalk, knocked down
a fence, and would have overturned it if someone had not reached
in and cut the switch. The coupe was finally sold. But it had been
a magnificent gift and many said, "How good he is to her," and
the undiscerning continued to remark, "What a perfect couple
they make."
After that Alice Williams went frequently on long visits to her
friends, several times to Christine Shoecraft Smith in Detroit.
Coming home from one such visit, she walked into a surprise
party of all her close friends. Dr. Dan had asked Mary Lizzie to
invite them and had sent in a caterer to do the supper. "Alice is
such a good woman," he said to Mary Lizzie when he asked her
help.
But it was a cold home. The fire had died out of it.
CHAPTER XVII
Break with Booker T. Washington
IN the half dozen years immediately following Dr. Dan's return
to Chicago, Booker Washington reached the height of his power.
In those years, too, severe critics arose to confront him, younger
Negroes better schooled than he, men who felt the Tuskegee prin-
cipal was overemphasizing industrial training and thereby stifling
the cultural education of a potential Negro leadership the Tal-
ented Tenth, they called it. They were all vocal and their views
were circulated in several Negro journals. In Boston, Monroe
Trotter, Harvard '95, and George Forbes, Amherst '95, published
the bitterly satirical Guardian. In New York City, the able
T. Thomas Fortune edited the more restrained weekly, The Age.
In the South, J. Max Barber managed The Voice, a flourishing
monthly. From the scholarly pens of W. E. B. DuBois and Charles
Waddell Chesnutt came essays and novels that were winning na-
tional attention from both colored and white.
Disturbed by growing disfranchisement, these men felt Booker
Washington should push harder for their political rights. When
he in his own person became political referee for the whole race
during the Theodore Roosevelt administration, they were out-
raged. They felt he bowed too easily to the spread of Jim Crow-
ism, that he even put the chief blame for the situation upon the
black man. They wanted to organize in defense of their civil
rights, to fight back, and they bitterly resented what they claimed
232 Daniel Hale Williams
was Booker Washington's muffling of all ideas but his own. They
felt they saw more clearly than he did what the acceptance of
white money by Tuskegee did in this respect. Barber published a
cartoon in The Voice showing Washington with a padlock on his
lips.
In the winter of 1907, young Barber was in Chicago, stopping
with the Bentleys. One night Alice and Dr. Dan invited the Bent-
leys to bring Barber and come help eat the last of Dr. Dan's prai-
rie chickens frozen away from his autumn hunting.
Dr. Dan received the fiery youth with quiet but warm cordial-
ity. Inevitably the conversation turned upon race interests. Dr.
Dan let Bentley and young Barber do most of the talking while,
with his usual deep reserve, he measured and weighed. Barber re-
calls his dignity, his refusal to be argumentative or quarrelsome.
"He must have thought me sophomoric indeed," Barber says in
retrospect. But Dr. Dan had given Booker Washington his inter-
est, his effort and his belief over the years and he was not in-
clined to change now despite the best reasoning of the other two.
Bentley grew exasperated. He settled his pince-nez more firmly.
"Don't you see," he cried, "Booker Washington hasn't the ca-
pacity to conceive a comprehensive race policy!"
"Nor the ability to carry it out," Barber added.
But at the end of the evening they had to go away without ei-
ther their host's sympathy or his money.
These divisions within the race disturbed Dr. Dan. They were
occurring all over the country. His oldest friends on the Provi-
dent Board were divided now. Madden had gone over with Bent-
ley to the opposition, the so-called Niagara Movement. Wheeler,
like himself, refused to abandon Booker Washington. Dr. Dan
thought colored people should stick together, keep a united front;
that had always been his feeling. There was enough for all of them
to do without fighting each other.
Yet almost before he knew it, Dr. Dan was drawn into the fray.
Perhaps nothing else could have won him but his passion to save
Freedmen's Hospital for the greatest usefulness of the colored
people.
BREAK WITH BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 233
During the years since Dr. Dan had come back to Chicago, the
struggle had continued in Congress and committees whether to
build a new municipal hospital and send Freedmen's patients to it,
or to give Freedmen's the new plant so long overdue and main-
tain its special character as Dr. Dan had pleaded. Controversy
continued too because the jurisdiction of the hospital was still di-
vided among the Department of the Interior, Howard University
and the District of Columbia. One by one these matters were set-
tled. An appropriation was finally made for a new Freedmen's
Hospital of two hundred beds, on land owned by Howard
but leased to the federal government in perpetuum at a dollar
a year. The support of District of Columbia funds was discon-
tinued and with it the District's partial authority over the hos-
pital, leaving complete jurisdiction to the Department of the
Interior.
As the new building neared completion, Dr. Dan could bear
the betrayal of Freedmen's no longer. Somehow Warfield must
be got out and a capable man appointed who would make the
very best of the new facilities for the benefit of the race.
And now Dr. Dan was up against the very situation Bentley
and Barber had complained of. The job at Freedmen's was now a
political job, and all Negro patronage came from Booker Wash-
ington. If S. Laing Williams wanted an appointment in the De-
partment of Justice in Chicago, he must address himself to Tuske-
gee, Alabama. If he got little attention at first, fortunately his
wife guessed how to bring into play her battery of wiles, blandish-
ments and useful journalistic articles glowing with praise for the
Wizard of Tuskegee. Fannie Barrier Williams helped put across
the first little Provident Hospital and she put across her husband
with Booker Washington; the arbiter of Negro destiny wielded
his influence and S. Laing Williams got his job.
Dr. Dan was no fool. To get the attention of the dictator, busy
manipulating his far-flung empire* he must somehow offer Booker
Washington useful service. Already Dr. Dan knew to his sorrow
how little vision Washington had when it came to Negro medi-
cine and nursing. He could not approach the Tuskegee principal
234 Daniel Hale Williams
directly about Freedmen's Hospital. He must begin somewhere
off at a tangent.
Booker Washington was concerned about his failure to get the
support he wanted from the Negro press. Eulogistic articles em-
anating from his own secretary, the very able Emmett Scott,
whom some thought the brains of the Tuskegee machine, were too
often turned down and critical comment published instead. In
Chicago, the Conservator was one such derelict.
Like most colored newspapers, the Conservator had financial
difficulties and like the rest kept alive on contributions from the
more well-to-do citizenry. The next time Dr. Dan was approached
it was a simple matter for him to say he was not inclined to sup-
port a paper that was attacking Booker Washington. In short or-
der, Dr. Dan was quietly blue-penciling everything that went
into the Conservator and was lining up the Broadax as well.
Booker Washington was grateful.
Now Dr. Dan could broach the matter of Freedmen's and rest
assured he would be listened to. He lost no time. The new hospi-
tal off ered a prize for which many were aspiring, including a me-
diocre white sundown doctor in the Interior Secretary's own
office.
Dr. Dan put the matter before Booker Washington in strong
terms. If an inefficient man were appointed, he wrote letting his
spelling get out of hand as always when he was deeply moved
"it would be a calamaty to the whole aspiring race." It would turn
the clock back years. In no other position, he said, could such
harm be done. "It is too important to our men of science," he
pleaded, "to be dealt out through favoritism. You are unbiased;
only you can put the true situation to Secretary Garfield." Dr.
Dan ended with an appeal perhaps more in keeping with his own
character than Washington's. "I am appealing to you," he wrote,
"for the interest of deserving men who will never know anything
of this unselfish move on your part."
Booker Washington replied that he would do whatever seemed
wise to prevent the appointment of an inefficient man. But to Dr.
Dan's horror, both Washington and Scott assumed he himself
BREAK WITH BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 235
wanted the job, else why had he bothered? Tuskegee's mail was
heavy every day with the letters of job seekers. They saw no real
difference between his plea and the rest.
Dr. Dan tried again. He wrote Scott, "I want you and the Dr.
[Washington had been given an honorary degree and Dr. Dan
carefully used it] to understand me. My interest is sincere, it is
not for preferment." What he wanted, Dr. Dan said, was to en-
sure the retention of this splendid new plant for the perfection of
their young men and women in nursing, scientific medicine and
surgery. They needed postgraduate work and they could get it
no other place. "As the hospital stands now," he said, "it is sim-
ply running itself, just existing." It could be a grand place for
work, he urged, "a credit to us all," if only the proper person
were named surgeon-in-chief .
Dr. Dan wanted the brilliant, much abused Charles West ap-
pointed to the job. Then if he himself could be placed on the
Board of Visitors, he would work with West and between them
they would put Freedmen's in the front rank and keep it there.
This Board position, he explained, was a purely advisory one, no
pay, nothing but work. He wanted Booker Washington's assist-
ance, he said, in what he knew was a good project, one that would
show results in the future. "Now is the time," he urged, "when
we can do much for our young men and women who are grop-
ing in the dark for leadership. They can do little for themselves
without opportunity and guidance."
So Dr. Dan pleaded with Booker Washington the case of the
Talented Tenth the education of Negro leadership though he
refused to join with the Niagara Movement.
The summer went by and Booker Washington failed to see Sec-
retary Garfield, though he assured Dr. Dan he had tried. He was
working for an October appointment, he said, and suggested Dr.
Dan himself go talk to the Interior Secretary. Dr. Dan replied he
was willing to do so only if the Secretary invited him; otherwise,
he said, his visit would just stir up the Wolves who would assume
he was an applicant. He pointed out that Garfield's private secre-
tary, James Parker, was a member of the Board of Visitors. If
236 Dmiel Hale Williams
Parker should sit in on the interview, he would repeat what was
said to the other Visitors, all of whom were working for the ap-
pointment of the third-rate white doctor in Garfield's office.
Before Booker Washington could answer Dr. Dan's letter, Dr.
Dan followed it hard with another. He had received a letter, he
told Washington, from a friend in the Interior Department, a
white man who kept him posted on the affairs of Freedmen's.
This friend had written:
"Do you know Mr. Washington very well? I am informed on
what I regard as good authority that he is endorsing strongly a
Chicago physician for the position of Surgeon-in-chief of Fr.
Hospital."
Dr. Dan said he could not harmonize this statement with his
present understanding, relations and confidences with Booker
Washington. He felt the proper thing was to communicate di-
rectly and ask if he had been misinformed. His own feeble efforts,
he said, would come to naught without Washington's all-powerful
assistance. That was why he had appealed to Washington to save
all they had in sight for the general good. "So-called society, out-
side show, sham, humbug of any kind," Dr. Dan said, "I have
nothing to do with."
The unnamed Chicago physician was George Hall. While Hall
was steadily entrenching himself in Provident Hospital and creat-
ing a flourish in colored society, he was also busy bringing him-
self to the attention of the Tuskegee principal. Mrs. Hall helped
him. She wrote to thank Booker Washington for a copy of his
newest book ghostwritten, the Niagara men thought, by Scott:
"When the Dr. returns [from his trip], he will find your de-
lightful gift awaiting him. To say he will be pleased is putting it
very mildly. The Dr. indulges in a sort of hero worship for the
'Wizard of Tuskegee,' you know, a condition to which the rest
of the family must also plead guilty. His books therefore occupy
a unique place in our affections and the autograph renders them
altogether priceless."
A few glances through Tuskegee and Its People, she said, had
increased her already great longing to see his "big wonderful
BREAK WITH BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 237
Tuskegee." Immediately Booker Washington wrote back: "I wish
very much you will decide to come here to spend a portion of the
winter. I think you would enjoy it here very much."
There was no question but that Theodocia Hall enjoyed her
stay at Tuskegee or that George Hall enjoyed the prospect of
closer and closer contact with the Tuskegee machine. He seized
every occasion to let Chicago Negroes know he was a loyal
Barber called him a "raucous" supporter of Booker Washing-
ton. But if Hall was now asking Washington for a plum, Wash-
ington denied it. His answer to Dr. Dan was categorical: "I not
only have endorsed no Chicago party for this place," he said, "but
I have not been asked to do so."
Dr. Dan was easily convinced, especially when Washington
kept his promise to mention Freedmen's to Garfield. At the same
time Booker Washington mentioned Dr. Dan. "I had not finished
telling him about you," the politician reported, "before he, him-
self, suggested he would like to see you and wondered whether
you would come to see him on his invitation."
Before an appointment could be made, however, Booker Wash-
ington's faithful secretary, Emmett Scott, who had had chronic
appendicitis for some time and who was worn out with overwork,
became worse. Washington was away in the North. Kenney wired
Dr. Dan to come down and operate on Scott. Washington, in-
formed of the situation, plied Dr. Dan with telegrams and urged
him to give Scott his best attention. Dr. Dan dropped everything
and went down to Tuskegee, performed the operation, and
watched the patient for two days before returning to his work in
Chicago.
That the private secretary to the principal of Tuskegee Normal
and Industrial Institute had been ill, had been operated upon by
Dr. Daniel H. Williams of Chicago, and was now recovering, was
duly noted in the Tuskegee Student. As Washington's mouth-
piece, the Student enjoyed a wide circulation all over the United
States. It was no ordinary school newspaper. Negroes everywhere
read it before they did their local white newspaper. It must have
been hard enough for Hall to swallow the long "Appreciation" of
238 Daniel Hale Williams
Dr. Dan which Kenney had published in the Student some months
previously. The publicity about the operation on Scott was more
than he could stand.
Hall had at last reached a long-coveted position on the surgical
staff of Provident Hospital. By confining his efforts to pelvic sur-
gery he had become a fair operator of the rough and ready sort
in that part of the body. He had arrived where he wanted to be,
where, so he himself put it, the money was. Not that he would
chance too much. Several remembered how Hall had cautioned
Austin Curtis not to risk his reputation by operating on a rich
white patient. "Suppose he died," he had said to Curtis, "where
would you be?" Hall, says a former associate, kept his mortality
record low by prudently not operating unless he could see certain
success; if a patient died through his omission to operate, Provi-
dence could be blamed, but not George Hall.
Hall was scarcely appointed to the surgical staff before he felt
himself altogether on the same footing as Dr. Dan. He sought to
emulate Dr. Dan's surgical tours by offering his own services in
the Negro hinterland, and to offset Dr. Dan's campaign for hos-
pitals he proposed to set up infirmaries. Such was the need, Hall
was frequently invited, but frequently, too, he was not invited
back. In Birmingham a local surgeon had to take the knife out of
Hall's hand in the middle of an operation to save the patient's life.
But in Hall's own eyes he was now an actual rival of Dr. Dan and
as such he demanded equal rights, including equal appreciation in
the Student. He sat down and poured out his indignation to
Booker Washington. His six-page letter may still be read in the
Washington files in the Library of Congress.
Hall told Washington he still prized and appreciated his friend-
ship above all others, but certain things had occurred, he said, that
led him to believe his enthusiastic support might be a source of
embarrassment to Washington and of humiliation to himself. He
was not complaining, he assured Washington, about the leader's
personal treatment. Nor was it in his mind to expect Washington
to interfere with any of his teachers or subordinates on his behalf.
"It was not that I desired so much to do an operation on Mr.
BREAK WITH BOOKER T, WASHINGTON 239
Scott,'* Hall said, "as that I desire that through the Student he
stop operating on me." Hall had an engaging, ready wit and he
used it now. He also had a very tender ego.
"My grievance," he said, "is the use the Student is put to, ex-
ploiting a man whose professional rivalry with me is known to
you and to every one around Tuskegee. A man who lets every-
body know when he has just received an urgent telegram from
Mr. Washington to come to Tuskegee. When my friends, on
whom he has taken special pains to impress how important he is
to you at Tuskegee, asked me about it, I said it was not true. So
you can well imagine I was embarrassed beyond all measure when
there appeared in the Student a column and a half of Apprecia-
tion of this great man!"
Hall complained he had received twenty marked copies of that
issue from various parts of the country and many personal letters
asking how this had happened, a number of them "I-told-you-so"
style. Further to appreciate his chagrin, Hall asked Washington to
remember that not long ago he himself had performed several op-
erations at Tuskegee, lectured to the nurses and to the student
body, and not a word of it had appeared in the Student. He had
noticed the omission at the time, he said, but had dismissed it,
thinking it must be the policy of the paper. But no, just let Dr. W.
go to Tuskegee and perform one operation, grumbled Hall, and
his name was boosted as high as printer's ink could go, including
a quarter-page account of an old operation performed eighteen
years ago.
Dr. Dan's famous heart operation rankled sorely with George
Hall, who could not hope to produce anything like it. Partisan-
ship was another matter; he was sure his record beat Dr. Dan's.
"When I think of my unquestioned well-known stand for Tuske-
gee and all concerned, in Chicago and everywhere," he said, "as
compared with one who has never opened his mouth in public to
advocate the school or the policy of its principal, I think I have
earned the right to seriously object to such a plain case of par-
tiality."
Hall wound up his long diatribe with a neat bit of humor. He
240 Daniel Hale Williams
could always get people to laugh and while they were laughing
he often got his way. "Like the old Negro in the bear fight who,"
he said to Washington, "called upon the Lord and prayed, 'If you
don't help me, don't help the bear,' all I ask is that whatever little
struggles we may have here, we be left alone and if any help is
given, let it be along the lines of consistent loyalty and work for
Tuskegee."
Booker Washington answered in his suavest fashion, thanking
Hall for his kind letter and assuring him that no one at Tuskegee
had intentionally meant to offend him. Everyone felt the highest
appreciation for his interest in the school and his valuable services
for it. "Sometime when I am in Chicago," the principal said, can-
nily putting nothing on paper, "I shall hope to have the privilege
of talking to you and of telling you more in detail just how I feel
toward you."
Hall's letter appeared to have no effect on the close relationship
of Dr. Dan and Booker Washington. Unknown to the public and
even to Dr. Dan, the Tuskegee boss had managed through an in-
termediary to buy out The Age and so had shut off Fortune's
criticism in New York, but he still needed Dr. Dan's services in
Chicago. Letters continued to flow between them weekly, often
daily, if not about Freedmen's then about the newspapers. Wash-
ington would write Dr. Dan to let the treasurer of the Conserva-
tor have fifty dollars, letting him believe it was a contribution
from Dr. Dan himself. Dr. Dan would send his receipt to Tuske-
gee and Scott would reimburse him.
In March Dr. Dan went East and saw the Secretary of the Inte-
rior. The men talked for two hours. Dr. Dan came away happy.
He liked Garfield. He thought him a fine manly person, "not a
politician," and found him very understanding about the bad con-
ditions at Freedmen's. Garfield promised to clean things up and
asked Dr. Dan to keep in close touch with him. Booker Washing-
ton was in the city and Dr. Dan spent an hour telling him every-
thing, but he also took care to write Scott all the ins and outs of
the matter. He knew as well as anyone who the real tactician was
at Tuskegee:
BREAK WITH BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 241
"I so much want your interest and help in this important mat-
ter, this one grand opportunity of our time, to finally develop an
exceptional institution. If it is lost or carelessly handled, it will put
our doctors and nurses back 25 years."
Later Booker Washington himself saw Garfield and wrote Dr.
Dan that the Secretary of the Interior wanted recommendations
for a reorganization of Freedmen's. Washington asked Dr. Dan
to send him by return mail the names of six or eight colored doc-
tors who in his opinion represented the very highest and best in
Negro medicine, men as far as possible who had specialized in
some direction. It was the Secretary's idea, he wrote, to have a
staff of visiting lecturers in the medical school and the nurses'
training school. "Of course," he said, "we want to include your
name." Having disposed of Freedmen's, Washington added that
when he saw Dr. Dan there were "other and more important mat-
ters" he wanted to take up with him. So much of Booker Wash-
ington's negotiations could not be committed to paper.
Dr. Dan was elated. "It is very encouraging," he wrote, "to
know you would take the time from your busy life for a matter
so entirely foreign to your work and interest. This is the only
opening in America for our men along this special line." With su-
perlative selflessness, he thanked Washington for permitting him
to assist in this important work. The entire race, he said, would be
permanently advanced and benefited by the foresight of Secretary
Garfield and by Booker Washington's wise counsel.
Dr. Dan's list of outstanding men in Negro Medicine included
F. A. Stewart and C. V. Roman of Nashville; John E. Hunter of
Lexington, Kentucky; John A. Kenney of Tuskegee; Harry Mc-
Card of Baltimore; Marcus F. Wheatland of Newport; Felix An-
toine of Chicago; Charles I. West and John R. Francis of Wash-
ington; and Henry M. Minton of Philadelphia. The others, he
said, were only "surface men."
Washington's next letter brought an ominous small cloud on
the promising horizon. "Do you not think it a good idea," Wash-
ington wrote, "to put Dr. Hall's name down in some department?
Of course," he said, U I understand the conditions surrounding him,
242 Daniel Hale Williams
but sometimes I find it pays to overcome littleness with bigness
and to do our whole duty regardless of how people may feel to-
ward us. What do you think of it?"
Booker Washington had asked Dan for a list of the "very high-
est and best" among Negro doctors. Hall had no claim to such
distinction. Dr. Dan might conceivably have named Austin M.
Curtis for surgery, but he chose West. Either was head and shoul-
ders above Hall. Washington might not have known this, but
now he was not asking for the best man, only that his touchy sup-
porter in Chicago be included. It put Dr. Dan on the spot, but he
replied forthrightly, and his life philosophy was in his words:
"In selecting the names sent you, I drew upon my knowledge of
what each individual had actually done to merit recognition, and
not upon newspaper notoriety. I believe the names seldom appear
in the Negro Press, though they are powerful factors in race
progress. They are doing something. You know I am a great ad-
mirer of the doctrine you advocate: 'The Man Who is doing
Something,' quietly adding something to the sum total. That is
the man who can get my endorsement.
"I cannot say that I consider the party you named in this class.
There is so much that you do not know and have no way of
knowing.
"All of the Gentlemen I named are not friends of mine. Some
of them I never saw, but I do know of their ability and honor,
and assure you that they are men of such standing that I would
be perfectly willing to serve with them.
"And again, I want to impress most sincerely, Mr. Washing-
ton, that I am in this for the love of the work and the advance-
ment of my people, to make conditions better for them, to prepare
them for serious life work. I am serious in everything I undertake.
If I go into this, it is not for social prestige or outside show; it
means to me long days of patient hard work from home."
Dr. Dan added that he would be glad if Booker Washington
would keep him informed of whatever action was taken, bur he
did not feel sanguine, he said, as to the success of Garfield's idea
of visiting lecturers. However the Secretary was a grand man,
BREAK WITH BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 243
with a humane heart and a noble spirit, and he was willing, Dr.
Dan said, to work hard to support his plan.
He added that the Secretary had advanced the idea of making
the hospital assist in supporting itself by arranging for paying pa-
tients. "This is quite feasible," Dr. Dan said and, without referring
to his own plea for such a plan years before, he enclosed an esti-
mate of income that might be expected from private and semi-
private patients and remarked that it would raise the tone of the
hospital and attract a good class of people to it.
The next day Dr. Dan wrote Booker Washington again. He
said he had reread Washington's letter and thought perhaps he
had not been frank enough in his reply. He said he did not want to
embarrass Washington, but he was sure that to add George Hall
would dismember the working harmony of the staff of lecturers
in short order. "I have tried it," said Dr. Dan, "many times I have
subserved for peace and harmony, but it never carne." In a sen-
tence this had been the history of Provident Hospital for the past
ten years. It had been a weary time and he could not face entering
upon a similar situation elsewhere. "I cannot see my way clear,"
he said to Washington, "to serve in association with him. I am
sure it would only eventuate again in cliques and factions and ac-
complish nothing. That is what would happen by the inclusion. I
think I know you well enough to say that I believe you want me
to be frank."
No more to Dr. Dan than to George Hall did Booker Washing-
ton take a clean-cut stand. "For the present," was his answer, "let
the whole matter concerning the party about whom I wrote pass
out of your mind. Nothing has been said or done to obligate me
or any one else in the matter, and there is no special reason why
he should be taken up just now at least." He had recommended
to Garfield, he said, that Dr. Dan be appointed a member of the
Board of Visitors.
Dr. Dan referred no more to Hall. He thanked Booker Wash-
ington for his courtesy and confidence in recommending his ap-
pointment. Probably his friend in the Interior Office had been in
touch with him, for he added: "I am of the opinion the Secretary
244 Daniel Hale Williams
has some plans of his own. I rather incline to the view those Wash-
ington City factions are working on the Sec'y to contravert your
plans. You will know best."
Dr. Dan was altogether right in his fears. The faculty at How-
ard University had submitted their plan for reorganization, with
their candidates for staff. Purvis had written his usual letter about
his lifelong sacrifice for Howard and put up his own candidate for
surgeon-in-chief . Warfield, taking a leaf out of Purvis's Bible, had
stirred up his own supporters to write the Secretary urging no
changes lest dire things result.
James Parker, Garfield's private secretary, was in a strategic po-
sition to influence the well-intentioned but overburdened Secre-
tary of the Interior. He had seen Dr. Dan call on Garfield and
remain closeted with him for two hours; he had read Booker
Washington's letter recommending the appointment of Dr. Dan
to the Board of Visitors, the Board on which he himself sat. When
he prepared his memoranda for Garfield on the subject of Freed-
men's, he inserted a paragraph where it was sure to be read:
Dr. Williams of Chicago, who called here a few days
ago, was formerly surgeon in chief of the hospital. Upon an
investigation before the Board of Visitors of charges of
alleged misconduct, where he was attended by his attorney,
Hon. Jerry Wilson, now dead, he was unexpectedly con-
fronted with charges that he was compelled to admit, and
when told by his attorney that he had committed a felony,
he was so startled and confused that he fainted and had to be
resuscitated by the assistance of the committee. The details
of this matter, I am advised, will be found in a report now on
file in this Department.
Parker felt safe in so twisting the facts. He counted on Gar-
field's not asking to see the ten-year-old report, and Judge Wil-
son was dead. The easiest thing for Garfield, confronted with a
confusing situation, was to leave the matter in abeyance. He went
off for the summer without doing more than to acknowledge re-
ceipt of Booker Washington's suggestion, not indicating what ac-
tion he would take.
BREAK WITH BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 245
In August the National Medical Association was to meet in
New York City. A few weeks before the medical meeting, Booker
Washington wrote George Hall a letter from his summer home
on Long Island. It showed he had made up his mind as to his real
answer to Hall's long letter of the previous March.
MY DEAR DR. HALL:
My son whom you saw at Tuskegee when you were there,
is now in Denver, CoL, and has been there since early in
June. He is seemingly better, but we are not quite sure as to
his exact condition. Mrs. Washington and I are both very
anxious that you give him a thorough examination and pre-
scribe for him. He will be returning East about August ist.
We have planned for him to stop in Chicago for as long a
time as you think it necessary for him to stay in order for
you to see him thoroughly.
Are you coming to the National Medical Association? If
so I wish very much that you and Mrs. Hall might make a
visit to us at our summer home at Huntington. We are not
far from New York and are right on the seashore, and would
extend you both a hearty welcome here.
No matter now to Hall if the great leader's secretary were at-
tended by the man he aspired to rival. He was commanded to
serve the royal family itself, even to visit with them in their sum-
mer palace! As George Hall commuted back and forth between
the North Shore and the medical meetings in the city, he must
have been in top form, feeling his oats, and ready for mischief.
Opportunity was not long in presenting itself.
Five hundred colored doctors, pharmacists and dentists from
twenty-nine states gathered for the tenth annual meeting of the
National Medical Association. While the doctors met in the Plaza
Assembly Rooms on East 29th Street, fifty-nine colored nurses,
representative of 450 in the country at large, congregated in St.
Mark's Methodist Episcopal Church on West 53rd Street and
formed the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses.
Kenney reported on the ever-growing number of hospitals now
246 Daniel Hale Williams
operated by and for colored people in the United States. The har-
vest of Dr. Dan's sowing was coming in.
At the surgical clinic held in Lincoln Hospital, Dr. Dan per-
formed three major operations, one on the breast and two abdom-
inal cases. He also read a scholarly paper on "Conservative Treat-
ment of Crushing Injuries of the Extremities," the subject which
had long interested him. He had expended a considerable sum on
stereoptican slides and showed forty views both drawings and
photographs all taken from his own cases and illustrating various
apparently incurable injuries. As he showed them he explained in
detail how he had treated each case and successfully maintained
"the continuity of the parts." His explanations, said a reporter,
were couched in such simple language that the humblest person
readily grasped his thought. Every doctor present agreed it was a
magnificent treat. When he had finished, the entire hall full of
men and women rose and enthusiastically clapped their thanks.
Professionally Dr. Dan was the bright star of the conference.
Politically it was another story. Dr. John E. Hunter, a rising
young surgeon of Lexington, Kentucky, another who had re-
ceived inspiration and friendly encouragement from Dr. Dan,
placed the name of his hero in nomination for the presidency
without consulting him. Immediately George Hall, fresh from his
victory with Booker Washington, plunged into a campaign to
defeat the man he hated.
Already Hall had won adherents in the National Medical Asso-
ciation among others like himself who were disgruntled at their
lesser position, men whose pride had been hurt when, as in one
instance, Dr. Dan had been forced to take the knife out of fum-
bling hands to save a patient on the clinic table. Such men were
only too ready to respond to Hall's sniping tactics the well-
placed hint, the lifted eyebrow, above all the ridicule of which he
was past master and with which he could make the most innocent
and upright squirm. Dr. Dan with his old-fashioned loyalties and
formalities, with his adoration of his Mistress Medicine, and all
his underlying timidity and sensitivity, was only too easily victim-
ized by Hall.
BREAK WITH BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 247
At the Association meeting in 1905, Hall had dared to bring his
fire into the operating room, a precinct that to Dr. Dan was little
short of sacred. Dr. Dan had been lecturing to the assembly pre-
paratory to operating upon a fibroid tumor of the uterus. It was
apparent the case would not be simple. As he lectured, he began
to operate. He dwelt upon the possible complications that might
be present, especially the possibility of a tubo-ovarian abscess. He
described the changes in technical approach and the drainage that
such a finding would demand. As he proceeded, such an abscess
was in fact found; in addition, the uterus was firmly fixed in the
pelvis. It was a difficult problem. Hall was sitting in the front
row.
"If it's too much for you," he taunted, "why don't you come
out and close up?"
Dr. Dan ceased lecturing instantly. He pushed his assistant
aside, took over and handled all the instruments himself. In a few
minutes the tumor was lying on the table. Then he drained the
abscess and finished the operation, all in complete silence.
Eyewitnesses found it hard not to embellish their accounts of
what happened. One Mississippi doctor told how he saw Dr. Dan
pull off his gloves and gown with a curt "Thank you, gentlemen,"
stride from the room, "never to return again" to a meeting of the
association he had helped found.
Actually Dr. Dan did return, though it was only to bear in-
creasing humiliation. There was not only backstair electioneering
against him in New York, but the emboldened Hall now thun-
dered in resounding tones from the very convention platform
against "those who come among us only when the honors are
being dispensed." Dr. Dan was defeated. Afterward, when Dailey
tried to draw him into an account of the meeting, he refused to
discuss it. Dailey thought his humiliation had much to do with his
never publishing the valuable paper he had read.
Dr. Dan could only regard this as another rejection of a deep
and painful sort. He did not care to be president of the National
Medical Association; he had had that opportunity if he had de-
sired it. But he did not want to be voted down.
248 Daniel Hale Williams
In these months Dr. Dan was pressed with patients, patients
who came halfway across the country to seek his skill, patients
he traveled miles to serve. In September he was in North Dakota,
in October he spent a week operating in Dallas, Texas, and fol-
lowed it by another week holding his annual clinic at Nashville.
Returning to Chicago, he found Lewis M. Dunton, aged white
president of Claflin University, South Carolina, bedfast in the
Auditorium Hotel where he had been waiting a week for Dr.
Dan to return and care for him.
Correspondence between Booker Washington and Dr. Dan had
almost ceased. Dr. Dan had little opportunity for it, and Wash-
ington needed no more help with the Chicago press, the Con-
servator having been reorganized with his henchmen in control.
Scott, however, kept up a flow of letters to the man he felt had
saved his life and Dr. Dan scrawled an answer when he could be-
tween trips. In October he wrote Scott: "Just saw Dr. W. off for
Washington in the best of spirits. He is fully alive to the matter
you and Mrs. Washington discussed. He sees the point and has
observed certain things himself that are very clear to others."
Matters had come to a pass where the potentate had to be pro-
tected from the wiles of the flamboyant Theodocia Hall, or so
his wife thought. Mrs. Hall had arrived at Tuskegee too many
times with her numerous trunks and set that simple rural com-
munity agog with the lavishness of her wardrobe and her cos-
metics. At Huntington she doubtless outdid herself. While Booker
Washington was an excellent politician and manipulator of peo-
ple, fully aware of Hall's maneuvers and willing to accept them,
or even to sympathize with them, he was apparently not so ob-
jective about Mrs. HalFs tactics. Evidently Dr. Dan had been en-
listed as someone who could speak to Booker Washington on so
delicate a matter and be listened to. Every appearance of scandal
must be kept from the great man and tongues once set wagging
are hard to stop.
Dr. Dan risked a good deal in approaching Washington on so
ticklish a subject. Despite Washington's going off in apparent
good spirits, this act may well have put the seal to the death sen-
BREAK WITH BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 249
tence Washington had already written to their long-time rela-
tionship.
That sentence was inevitable, first, because of Hall's intractable
demands and, second, because of Booker Washington's precarious
position during the presidential election year. If he were to retain
his political power, Taft must be elected. Dr. Dan was not in pol-
itics, Hall was on the executive committee of the Hyde Park Re-
publican Club. So Washington dropped Dr. Dan to favor Hall
and Hall gave his effective support to the Washington-Taft cam-
paign. When it was all over, a lieutenant in the capital city wrote
Booker Washington: "The election of Taft is a distinct triumph
for Tuskegee Institute."
All this time nothing more had been said about Freedmen's Hos-
pital. Late in November Dr. Dan asked Scott to remind Booker
Washington of his promise to write him about a certain matter
when he got back to Tuskegee. Scott answered that Washington
found himself unable to recollect what the thing was. "He will be
glad," Scott said, "if you will let him have a memorandum. The
only thing he seems to remember is that he was to send you five
dollars which he borrowed and which he thinks he has already
returned."
This must have hurt Dr. Dan deeply. How could either Scott or
Washington entertain the idea for a moment that he would ever
refer in words or writing to the five dollars! To him it had been,
he said, a mark of friendship, a mark of cordial relationship. What
he wanted to hear about was how matters stood with relation to
Freedmen's. As he had walked to the train with Mr. Washington
in Chicago, Washington had said he would be looking over af-
fairs in the capital city next day and when he got home would
write Dr. Dan. "My interest," said Dan, "led me to inquire fur-
ther knowing it must have slipped his mind."
Booker Washington still did not answer Dr. Dan for over three
weeks. Then he explained he had not written because, as a matter
of fact, he had nothing to report. "I find the Secretary has made
no move in the direction of carrying out his promises," he wrote,
"and when a man does not keep his promises I soon get cold feet
250 Daniel Hale Williams
on him." He said that until the Secretary did make some move in
the direction mentioned, he would not feel encouraged to go fur-
ther. Dr. Dan could plainly see there was nothing further to be ex-
pected from the dictator at Tuskegee on behalf of the national
Negro hospital.
Warfield retained his hold and Freedmen's, despite the new
building, continued in mediocrity for many years, at one time
being threatened with loss of its license from the National Asso-
ciation of Trained Nurses. Dr. Dan had not exaggerated when he
said the wrong man at Freedmen's would be a calamity to the en-
tire aspiring race.
While correspondence between Booker Washington and Dr.
Dan, from being a weekly and often a daily matter, ceased alto-
gether, that between Washington and the two Halls mounted
steadily. At the same time their letters grew warmer and warmer
in tone and finally reached a freedom and intimacy of expression
never set to paper by the dignified Dr. and Mrs. Williams. From
making reservations for the Washingtons when they came to Chi-
cago, the Halls began taking the .royal couple into their own
home. Regularly they went to Tuskegee to return the visit.
Mrs. Hall undertook to do little shopping errands for Mr.
Washington. Into the correspondence this entailed crept coy
phrases understandable only to the initiated: "Met Mrs. White
just as I left you. The luck of some people! ! !" Or when the "mag-
netic Teddy" (Roosevelt) came to Chicago, "How can you stay
away? Whew! Mr. Banks!!!" Or, T. J. H. wrote that she found
Major Moton a charming visitor and had enjoyed piloting him to
Hull House. "You see," she said, "he was so much more tractable
than some other visitors we've had. I didn't take him to Marshall
Field's however."
"You will be glad to know," Washington wrote to Mrs. Hall,
"I have settled my bill at Moff etts and you are therefore free to
call upon them for your picture." Mrs. Hall answered by return
mail that it was a positive relief to her to know she could look
Moffett square in the face. "I haven't been going on Congress St.
you know," she said, "I shall claim my picture tomorrow." There
BREAK WITH BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 25!
were gifts, too, of Southern possum and Tuskegee sweet potatoes
sent Mrs. Hall and disappointment expressed when the Halls
failed to make their winter visit. On the occasion of their previous
visit so many eyebrows had been raised that Mrs. Washington had
decided Mrs. Hall must be told she had overstayed her welcome.
This fact was either not known to Washington, or he pretended
not to know it.
It was George Hall now, and not Dr. Dan, who got press no-
tices into the Chicago papers favorable to Washington and his af-
fairs. It was Hall who manipulated this one and that one and en-
joyed himself thoroughly. "If you will just leave that newspaper
reporter to me," he wrote Washington, "I think when I get
through he will be good. He is hugging me now to save himself
and I am sawing off his limb close to the tree." Things were quiet
in the Windy City now, Hall assured the Tuskegee principal.
Anyone who spoke out at all spoke for Washington. "You have
absolutely nothing to think about," Hall told his overlord, "as far
as the Chicago Negro is concerned."
In January 1908 Dr. Dan was chairman by common consent of
the three hundred men and women who worked industriously on
the various committees for the big charity ball held in the First
Regiment Armory for the benefit of Provident Hospital. In May
doctors and leading professional men gave him a complimentary
banquet at Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church to celebrate the
twenty-fifth anniversary of his work. Colored doctors from all
parts of the country sent tokens of their affection and esteem a
cut-glass and silver inkstand from New York, a solid silver water
pitcher from Philadelphia, a "nice little sum of money" from
Texas to make the hall a "profusion of flowers." Chicago doctors
presented a silver loving cup. In the thirty-seven names inscribed
on it that of George Hall is conspicuous by its absence.
Dr. Dan was still the community's hero, but Hall, emboldened
by his success with Booker Washington and with the National
Medical Association, now began to speak out more and more dar-
ingly against Dr. Dan. The envious and the ne'er-do-wells re-
252 Daniel Hale Williams
sponded willingly enough to his insinuation that this "fair com-
plexioned fellow doesn't quite seem to know what race he wants
to belong to." Mrs. Hall tossed her head at the women's parties
and declared she didn't know why they should be forced to ac-
cept as colored everyone who said he had colored blood. "And be-
sides," she added, "the younger men should be given their chance."
Step by step, the Halls promoted their thesis that Dr. Dan and
his wife were not only snobs but disloyal as well. Whispers went
around that you never saw really dark people cross their threshold.
And since so many of the old settlers, their long-time friends, were
of free mixed lineage, there was a modicum of truth in this asser-
tion that gave it plausibility.
Where the dark-skinned George Hall could maintain an easy
approach to all and sundry, the fair-skinned Dr. Dan was at a dis-
advantage. In the ever-growing colored colony there were now
many who no longer knew him by sight, who threw hostile
glances in the street at one they assumed was alien. One day as
Dr. Dan strode up Dearborn Avenue, the fire bell rang out and he
spoke to an old colored woman in the friendly common vernacu-
lar. "Where's the fire, sister?" he asked. She gave one look at his
pale Caucasian features and drew back outraged. "I ain't no sister
of yourn," she retorted. The South Side had been Dr. Dan's home
for a quarter century, but it was less homelike now.
Neither Dr. Dan nor his wife possessed the qualities demanded
to wage the sort of warfare confronting them. Dr. Dan, ever ready
to discuss medicine and surgery and professional articles, would
not waste his time dallying in the Provident corridors over what
he considered chitchat. Besides he thought a hospital, and particu-
larly a race hospital, ought to present the highest standards of
busy, quiet efficiency. George Hall on the other hand, says Dr.
Max Gethner, then one of the white internes, was always ex-
tremely sociable, ready with a smile and a story. New people
might admire Dr. Dan for his extraordinary abilities, but admira-
tion is not liking, and they fell only too easily under the sway of
Hall's hearty cheerfulness. George Hall was human, people said.
More than one hospital has been the scene of a struggle for
BREAK WITH BOOKER X. WASHINGTON 253
power. Petty jealousy and dissension often crop up among doc-
tors and surgeons. Perhaps something of the daring, the lif e-and-
death aspects of the work, makes some enjoy their power and
seek more. While George Hall was undermining Dr. Dan at Provi-
dent, John B. Murphy and Nicholas Senn, in another part of Chi-
cago, were carrying on an ugly feud. The chief surgeon of a
white hospital on the North Side remarked that he was retiring
with pleasure from the petty politics and bickering of the active
staff to the restful status of an emeritus. At Provident all such fac-
tors were overemphasized because it was the only hospital in Chi-
cago where doctors of dark skin could function. Had there been
no race barrier in the other institutions, envy and rivalry need
not have been bottled up to explode in mortal fashion.
While Dr. Dan, immune to restrictions by virtue of his light skin
and his long-established eminence achieved in a more tolerant,
less competitive day, was free to operate in other hospitals and
was very busy doing so, the ambitious George Hall had no other
outlet for his energy than Provident. Dr. Dan's occupations else-
where left Hall a clear arena and he made the most of it. He was
always on hand, at every board meeting and on all the important
committees. The staff came to feel their jobs depended on HalFs
favor, and he was shown every possible attention. The superin-
tendent of nurses, Jeanette Lyon, became his devoted lieutenant.
Her obeisance to Hall led her to express criticism, even hatred,
of Dr. Dan at every possible episode, says Gethner. If Dr. Dan
gave the nurses a party, she said he was promoting insubordina-
tion. Her attitude was demoralizing to discipline among the nurses
and internes, some of whom were only too prone anyhow to re-
gard Dr. Dan's uncompromising standards and his severity to-
ward laxness as needless fussiness.
Gradually his service was impaired at every turn. The operating
room would not be ready for him. Nurses would not be detailed
to him. His patients were shown little discourtesies. If internes
did not actually countermand his orders, they indifferently forgot
them.
Even Alf Anderson, a man now and forgetful of the times Dr.
254 Daniel Hale Williams
Dan had fetched and fended and protected him In Janesville, al-
lowed himself to be turned against Dr. Dan. Almost daily Mrs.
Hall was seen hobnobbing with Alf at his clerk's desk in the Prov-
ident iobby and Alf did what he could to throw confusion into
Dr. Dan's affairs. Dr. A. J. Booker remembers how he would turn
some of Dr. Dan's patients over to other doctors or urge private
patients to enter the free ward.
The Halls were a perfect team for their purpose. Hall pres-
sured any younger doctors who manifested a show of independ-
ence by cutting them off from opportunities for advancement. At
the same time he offered to "fix it up" for the meek who allowed
him to dominate. Mrs. Hall dictated the social destinies of their
wives, kept them out of clubs, off party lists, and otherwise as-
signed them to outer limbo if their husbands misbehaved. It took
those who had lived in Chicago a long time and who knew Dr.
Dan in the early days not to succumb to this kind of skirmishing.
In spite of their success with the newcomers, however, the
Halls never penetrated into more select groups. Women nurtured
in gentler ways shrank from the aggressively aspiring Theodocia
Hall Scrupulous men drew back from her husband's uncertain
ethics. The Bentleys and the Joneses never invited the Halls into
their homes. Hall met other defeats. He was never accepted into
the exclusive Negro fraternity, Sigma Pi Phi. Dr. Dan grew sick
of Hall's pressures to get in. He had been a charter member of
the Chicago Boule, but in 1909, tired of the constant drumfire
kept up by Hall's faction, he resigned. Immediately Hall circu-
lated the report that Dr. Dan had been kicked out. Despite every-
thing, however, Hall failed to muster enough votes to get in.
Dr. Dan must have found it a relief to get away from the con-
tentious scene in Chicago. His trips to assist struggling colored
doctors in the South and West renewed his spirit. His annual
week at Meharry Medical College came to seem like a vacation,
though he performed five operations a day. Dean Hubbard always
gave what amounted to a dinner of state, with all the medical fac-
ulty present. The F. A. Stewarts gave a dinner too.
Sometimes Dr. Dan stopped with Dr. C. O. Hadley, and some-
BREAK WITH BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 255
times with the James Carroll Napiers when Alice accompanied
him. Usually, however, he stayed with the Stewarts. Little Annie
Stewart looked forward to the annual coming of childless Dr.
Dan. He tossed her on his shoulder and called her Mooks, a name
of his own invention. Young Ferdinand Stewart looked upon this
Northerner as a remarkably free person and resolved to get out of
Jim Crow Nashville as soon as he grew up. Mrs. Stewart invari-
ably found her stock of china increased by a few pieces of Havi-
land or Dresden after each visit. Invariably too Dr. Dan carried
home a bag of game, for a little shooting was always squeezed in
somehow.
In 1910 his Meharry visit was marked by the opening of a -fine
new hospital with facilities for forty patients, later extended for
eighty, and an amphitheater that allowed 125 students to witness
operations. Only ten short years before, his operations were per-
formed by lamplight in a crowded basement room. Now Meharry
graduates flocked in from all over the South, and patients were
brought from a half dozen states for Dr. Dan's services. Grateful
students unveiled a life-sized portrait of Dr. Dan in the lobby of
the new hospital.
There was no question in Nashville as to where credit should
be given or honor paid for a student body tripled in numbers in
a decade. But in Chicago George Hall was now circulating the
statement that Provident Hospital had been "kept alive" by him
when Dr. Dan went off to seek, Hall claimed, greater honors
elsewhere.
Soon he was attacking Dr. Dan's weekly clinic at Provident, a
clinic to which young Negro doctors had come across the miles,
the one clinic in Chicago where a black man could get an inti-
mate view, ask questions and be answered. But Hall found reasons
why Dr. Dan's clinic was not practicable and it was eliminated.
The best a man could do was to watch the postings and try not
to miss such operations as Dr. Dan still performed at Provident
despite all hampering. Dr. Dan, on his part, did what he could to
visit the operations of the younger men and give them his quiet,
unobtrusive advice. Dr. Gethner never forgot how Dr. Dan stood
256 Daniel Hale Williams
by at his first abdominal operation, asking questions, making cer-
tain suggestions, praising his effort. This was now the only way
the younger men could enjoy the kind of instruction that Dr.
Dan gave so superbly.
Dr. Dan had staunch friends who were impregnable to Hall's
maneuvers. Their numbers did not dwindle through any change
of heart, but death took its toll of some and the influx of newcom-
ers gradually outweighed the others. This was true of the Provi-
dent board of trustees. In the beginning there were colored men
on the board who were not so susceptible to Hall as were the
white members Negroes who had begun the institution with
Dr. Dan, given of their funds and their time, as they knew Hall
had not Lloyd Wheeler, James Madden, Charles Bentley,
Charles Smiley, Jerry Stewart, Theodore W. Jones. As long as
they were on the board, Hall's progress was slow.
Allen Wesley should have been another. He was among the
founders too. He was scholarly and well prepared, but Wesley
was vacillating. "He couldn't make up his mind where to cross
the street." Wesley grew less and less interested in surgery and
more and more interested in his job with a fraternal order. He
never tried to oppose Hall. As head, figurehead, of the interne
committee, he was influenced by Hall's idea that colored internes
were too inclined to stay on in Chicago. More and more white
men were appointed and colored graduates had little opportunity
for a dozen years in the institution founded to train them. Had
Wesley been different, this story might have been different, for
he outlasted many of the colored board members who dropped
from the scene through death or disgust.
Lloyd Wheeler would have helped counteract Hall, but he had
business misfortunes and went off, a brokenhearted man, to take
a job at Tuskegee. His loss at Provident, where for eleven years
he had been president of the Provident Hospital Association of
supporting members, was a great one. By 1907, aside from Wes-
ley, there were only four others of the original fifteen on the
board; by 1912, but two.
So as the early founders disappeared from the scene, Hall had
BREAK WITH BOOKER T. WASHINGTON 257
worked his way up. Dr. Dan did what he could to make the situ-
ation tolerable. His hand may be seen in the appointment, too late,
to the surgical staff of James F. Neff from the Mercy Hospital
staff, and of J. Charles Hepburn of Northwestern. This was some
support for Dr. Dan, but not enough, and Neff left at the end of
a year and Hepburn shortly thereafter.
In 1911 Hall strengthened his position still further by the for-
mation of another powerful committee the committee on selec-
tion of staff. On it were Allen Wesley and the white Judge
Robert McMurdy. Judge McMurdy was already interested in and
later married Jeannette Lyon, the superintendent of nurses who
by now was telling around that Dr. Dan drank too much and
even that he used drugs.
Hall's campaign drew to a head in 1912. In that year he was on
four of the six hospital committees, as well as on the board. His
network was complete, he only awaited a test of his power. He
found it in Dr. Dan's appointment as associate attending surgeon
at St. Luke's Hospital. This was an unprecedented honor for the
race, but it was bitter gall to George Hall. He chose to inter-
pret it as an act of disloyalty to Provident. By careful preparation
he brought the board to feel that Dr. Dan ought to bring all his
patients rich and poor, black and white to the 65~bed Provi-
dent Hospital.
As early as 1900 Dr. Dan had had patients in five hospitals at
once. Many of his colored patients as well as white ones preferred
St. Luke's or some other hospital to Provident as it was then run.
For a half dozen years after his return to Chicago he had been
attending surgeon at Cook County Hospital. Those things had
not been considered disloyal to Provident, but now this appoint-
ment, with its honor and acclaim, the prestige it brought the race,
was declared an act of faithlessness.
George Webster had become the first white president of the
board when Lloyd Wheeler left Chicago. Fifteen years before,
Webster had regarded Dr. Dan as the cornerstone of Provident
Hospital, kept in the closest touch with him in the capital, and
welcomed his return with admitted relief. But soon Webster, too,
258 Daniel Hale Williams
succumbed to criticism of Dr. Dan. He set his clean-shaven, tight-
lipped mouth in a hard line, stuck out his belligerent chin beard,
and put into his support of Provident the passion and hardness of
a zealot. This was a man who could come to believe, when prop-
erly prodded, that Dr. Dan, child of a dark mother, son and grand-
son of men devoted to the race, did not love his own people. Web-
ster could believe that he, a white man, loved them better.
Only Bentley and Madden of the old friends, if Allen Wesley
is discounted, still sat on the board. They could not prevent
the addressing of a letter to Dr. Dan ordering him to bring all
his cases to Provident. From the professional point of view, it
was absurd; from the race point of view, it was ridiculous. But
there it was. What was Dr. Dan to do?
In Washington he had fought valiantly for Freedmen's against
Purvis and had won out with Howard University faculty and
Congressional committee alike. He had faced down Warfield's
dastardly attack and preserved his honor, only to find himself
hounded by Hall. For fourteen years he had endured an increas-
ingly nasty situation. He had tried to show Booker Washington
what Hall really was, but to no effect. How could he convince
these white men?
The truth was, he couldn't. Grimly he wrote his resignation
from the staff and the board of the hospital he had conceived
twenty-one years before. He said no word in defense or explana-
tion, but made it as brief as possible and signed his name.
He must have felt as though he had dismembered his own body,
destroyed forever the continuity of the parts. He felt insupport-
ably lonely.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Record Made Straight
IN August 1926, Chicago was sweltering in a heat wave, but Dr.
Dan, propped in a wheel chair on his big screened porch in the
north Michigan woods, his feet up and a rug over his knees, was
comfortably cool. Old blood runs cool anyway. At seventy, he
would not have been too hot even in Chicago, but he would not
have been so happy.
Every year he could hardly wait to get back to the pines and
oaks of Idlewild, "back to the sticks," he called it, and he made a
long six months of it when he got there. He had roamed the north
woods in his old Ford, ferried delighted children over the lake
in his speedboat, or, best of all, sat silent in the flat-bottomed row-
boat and fished with Charles Chesnutt, the novelist. But now,
facing eastward over the shimmering water at the foot of the
slope before him and letting his gaze shift from the clump of sil-
ver birch north of his boathouse to the big pines southward, he
could only reflect that his fishing days were probably over.
As dusk approached, Margaret Croker, his German house-
keeper, widow of his friend Fred Croker, a colored doctor, could
be seen tucking another rug about him, picking up William
Fuller's letter from the porch floor and putting it back in his
nerveless hand. It was a letter to bring back memories.
Young Fuller was forever at his elbow in the old days in the
first little Provident Hospital, watching him operate, asking ques-
260 Daniel Hale Williams
tions, demanding to be shown how. He was there in '93 when
Dr. Dan operated on Cornish's heart. And then, twenty-three
years later, Fuller repeated that operation himself and he hadn't
forgotten a step; he followed Dr. Dan's technique almost to the
letter. Dr. Dan may have smiled at the recollection, a twisted half
smile, the best his paralyzed muscles could accomplish.
Fuller was a good student. When a hundred Chicago surgeons,
Dr. Dan the only Negro, w r ere formally installed as charter mem-
bers of the newly founded American College of Surgeons back in
1913, Fuller was there too. Fuller was always filled with gratitude
for what he said Dr. Dan had taught him. His letter said so again.
As soon as he had heard Dr. Dan had suffered a stroke he had
written. "I thought I would drop you a line," Fuller said, "to let
you know your friends miss you and hope to see you back in
harness very soon."
The bad news had come at a meeting of the credentials com-
mittee of the American College of Surgeons, and the business of
the meeting had been forgotten and boiled shirts and collars
wilted in the humidity while one after another told what he knew
of the famous Dan Williams and his ability and reputation as a
surgeon. Coleman Buf ord Buf ord had been at the heart opera-
tion too swore he had never seen a finer operator and Carey
Culbertson chimed in there was no doubt about it. "When they
got through," wrote Fuller, "I took a shot at what I knew of you
when the rest of us were just embryo surgeons."
Ah yes, it had been a long time, Dr. Dan could have mused, his
gaze on the purpling twilight. "Rest, eat, sleep, laugh and be of
good cheer," urged Fuller, "you will soon be well and back at
work." Fuller knew how a man hated to give up. "Business is not
very rushing anyway," Fuller assured him, "you are missing but
little or nothing. Even if you were, they will come flocking back
when you are here." Fuller and Buford and Culbertson. Doubtless
they didn't make up for Curtis and Warfield and Hall, but they
must have helped greatly.
The fourteen years since Hall drove him out of Provident had
been busy, fruitful years for Dr. Dan, though the harvest had rip-
THE RECORD MADE STRAIGHT 261
ened above a graveyard of burled hope and endeavor. His success
at St. Luke's had been complete. His remarkable reputation had
preceded him and he had fulfilled it in every way. The other
staff men Samuel C Plummer, Arthur Elliott, Louis Schmidt
found him an outstanding person, well grounded, faithful, sincere,
a gentleman and extremely satisfactory to his patients. They ap-
preciated his discriminating surgical judgment and gave no one
higher standing either as a man or as a doctor. He got his white
patients, they pointed out, on merit, not notoriety. Younger men,
like N. C. Gilbert, one day to be chairman of the department of
medicine of Northwestern Medical School, Dr. Dan's own alma
mater, were happy when they caught him in the smoking room
and could draw him into talk of cases.
Everyone liked the way he did not fuss about his rights but
quietly took them for granted. His poise was perfect. "You never
saw him go off," said one. They called him by his first name and
he called them by theirs. When Margaret E. Johnstone, director
of the nursing school, died after years of service, Dr. Dan pre-
sented a marble bust to the hospital in her memory. He saw to it
that his colored patients were given private rooms if they wished
them and he refused to have a ward named for him. "I knew it
might lead to segregation," he told a friend.
While white doctors stood beside Dr. Dan in St. Luke's operat-
ing rooms and watched and questioned and learned, colored doc-
tors at Provident, deprived of their heritage, struggled unhappily
under the Hall regime. "You let Hall do something for you,"
said Spencer Dickerson, "and you soon wished you hadn't." Any-
thing short of complete vassalage was unacceptable to this man of
unabashed ambition. He brooked neither rivalry nor rebellion.
Any show of independence was swiftly punished. He left Dicker-
son off the staff for years, refused Carl Roberts's request for trans-
fer from gynecology to surgery for eight years, forced Dailey to
set up his own private sanitarium. J. W. McDowell resigned as
staff president and took his patients to Dailey's.
Bentley resigned from the board and Frank Billings, now a
noted member of white medical circles, refused curtly to have
262 Daniel Hale Williams
anything further to do with the hospital on whose original staff
he had been. A whole group of young colored doctors Wilber-
force Williams, Roscoe Giles, Herbert Turner, Spencer Dicker-
son, Carl Roberts and others lived on the hope another interra-
cial hospital might materialize in the neighborhood.
Provident lost 250 patients the first year after Dr. Dan left and
almost 300 the second. It was five years before the old figure was
approached and many more before a normal rate of increase was
again achieved. Provident outlived Hall's machinations, and Dai-
ley, when Hall was gone, returned to help build the institution
again to first rank, but meanwhile the struggle was long and
needlessly difficult.
The legend grew that Dr. Dan came back in the dead of night
and paced the Provident corridors. Certainly his heart never left
there. Not infrequently during the years he had telephoned Dailey
or Reginald Smith and asked them to drop over for a smoke,
then half wistfully inquired how things were going. Meeting Rob-
erts and Turner on summer vacation, he stopped and listened
while the two men twanged guitars and sang. "I used to sing," he
said, "tenor." Then abruptly he asked, "How are things at Provi-
dent?"
It was a bitter time all around. The South Side, once a friendly,
neighborly place, bound in mutual interest for the race, divided
into two warring factions. Doctors and laymen, sick and well,
men, women and children took sides. Families split. It was civil
war in all it ugliness. Harry Anderson stood by Dr. Dan as he had
ever since the stripling won his heart, and so did his wife Julia,
but Alf and Bertie too joined the hue and cry against him. Bert
resented Dr. Dan's not taking him into his office and then later
taking Dailey. Harry Anderson died in 1922. Dr. Dan begged to
be allowed to erect a tombstone over the grave of the best friend,
he said to Bert, that he had ever had, but Bert refused. Of Dr.
Dan's Rockford cousins, now living" in Chicago, some stood for
and some against him: Jessie Williams DePriest and her sisters
voiced hatred of him, Mabel Williams Parrish and her brother
Hugo loved him dearly and visited with him weekly. Howard
THE RECORD MADE STRAIGHT 263
Woodson, a young engineer, descendant of one of the Lewistown
branches, came often too. This division of Dr. Dan's cousins was
only too like the divisions that had rent the Williams clan a cen-
tury earlier; old suspicions and resentments only inflamed the
new dissension, and color of skin had more to do with it than any
one cared to admit.
Dr. Dan himself did not enter the fight. His refusal to defend
himself was incomprehensible to some and disgusting to those of
tougher fiber. Hall, swaggering along in his flashy clothes, was
ever ready to back up his views with his fists in fact he put
down his doctor's bag on more than one occasion and did so.
This was easier for most people to understand than Dr. Dan's
withdrawal. Dr. Annie Beatrice Schultz, graduate of the first
nursing class and later become an M. D., could hardly bear the
way things turned out. She adored Dr. Dan, but her make-up was
simple, like HalPs own. Once when she had differed with Wilber-
force Williams over a medical case, she had slapped his face.
Now she offered to horsewhip any one who said a word against
her hero. She could not understand Dr. Dan, but she would de-
fend him with her life if need be.
Dr. Dan never had had the stomach for quarreling; he had
given up law because it seemed a matter of listening all day to
people's quarrels. But he could not help wanting his friends to
take up the cudgels for him, as he had hoped for so long that
Sarah Price Williams would do ... fend off the world . . .
love him.
White controversialists Dr. Dan seemed to meet with vigor and
equanimity, perhaps because he met them on an intellectual basis,
a mature basis. But colored people were different. All his dreams
and illusions were woven about colored people, his people, and
when any one of them acted less than ideally, he was cut to the
quick. He always met colored people on an emotional basis and
here he was never altogether mature. Here he had a way often,
one devoted friend said, of suddenly throwing himself on you, ex-
pecting you to enter into his pain and trouble with him.
There was always somewhere deep inside Dr. Dan, never en-
264 Daniel Hale William
tirely recovered, a hurt little boy. So he could not help feeling
warmly gratified and a little triumphant too when fifty-five of his
old friends gave a fine banquet on his birthday, a full-dress affair
with place cards, and toasts, and exhibition dancing. Or when the
colored doctors of Missouri presented him with a silver loving
cup in "appreciation of his work in advancing the medical pro-
fession in Missouri and in the nation." Or when Wilberforce Uni-
versity, and later Howard University, gave him honorary degrees.
Or when he was asked to speak at the graduation exercises of
nursing classes in some of the hospitals his inspiration had helped
to found, or at some school or other organization.
In his sixties Dr. Dan made a good many addresses before both
colored and white audiences. One of the best he had delivered in
Rochester, Minnesota, before the Surgical Association of the Chi-
cago & Northwestern Railway. Invited to speak on "The Malin-
gerer" he attacked the subject with such mental vigor and prob-
ing for truth as to give his audience a considerably larger view of
the matter than they had bargained for. His old eyes might well
gleam at the recollection. He had told them plainly that the prob-
lem of the malingerer, linked as it was with the problem of the
dishonest physician and the dishonest lawyer, was only one aspect
of the whole moral problem of a selfish, materialistic age. "Those
who toil," he said, "get too little of the benefits of their labor." If
the power of the state were used to regulate economic condi-
tions and raise the standard of living of humbler folk, then a wider
diffusion of education might be expected and after that of ethics
and religion. The way to solve malingering was to accelerate the
evolution of a better society. Dr. Dan had come a long way from
the simple theory with which he left college that hard work and
thrift are all that are needed. He had lost his admiration of
Booker T. Washington's philosophy as "best for the masses" even
before Washington died, as he did unexpectedly in 1915.
Washington's sudden death must have been a blow to George
Hall. The Tuskegee dictator had commanded wide publicity in
the Negro press, after he gained control of it, for the dictator of
Provident. "Send me your best photograph and a sketch of your
THE RECORD MADE STRAIGHT 265
life," Washington had written his Chicago henchman, "put in the
most prominent and successful operations you have performed. I
can use this in a way to be of great service." Hall speedily com-
plied. Within a few weeks Washington sent Hall a marked copy
of the Baltimore Afro-American spreading forth the self-styled
successes of the mediocre Hall; the article had appeared in thirty-
five Negro newspapers. Within another few weeks, Washington
requested his pay: he wanted the confidential list of colored sub-
scribers to the recent big YMCA campaign in Chicago.
The game went on between the two who suited each other's
purposes and temperaments so well, until Booker Washington
died. Hall then tried to make capital for the last time of his rela-
tion to the big boss. The flowers were scarcely withered on
Washington's grave before members of the Tuskegee board of
trustees received a letter from a certain Robert White who said
he was compiling a book to perpetuate the memory of Dr. Booker
T. Washington. In this work he was being assisted and supported,
he stated, by Dr. George C. Hall, "one of Dr. Washington's most
intimate friends." "You," wrote Mr. White, "together with a
number of the world's most prominent men and women, are
called upon for a short reminiscence of Dr. Washington to be
used in this work." The trustees, instead of complying, repEed that
they were referring this request to the secretary of the board,
Emmett Scott. Whereupon White immediately wrote Scott that
though he had neglected so to state in his previous letter, it was
the intention of himself and Hall to donate twenty-five per cent
of the profits of the book to Tuskegee Institute. Scott probably
never had greater satisfaction in his life than he did in replying
that the board was not in a position to take official cognizance of
the proposed publication or to say or do anything that would
place the seal of authority or approval on the effort. Moreover it
would not be possible for the board to accept the offer of twenty-
five per cent of the profits.
All suns set in time, and George Hall's proved no exception. But
the event came too late to make much difference to Dr. Dan.
George Hall was never able to disrupt the relationship of Scott
266 Daniel Hale Williams
and Kenney to Booker Washington. Washington needed both his
secretary and his staff doctor and both stayed on at Tuskegee de-
spite their dissatisfaction with many things. But throughout the
years Scott and Kenney remained deeply loyal to Dr. Dan, cor-
responding frequently and sometimes going up to Chicago for a
visit in the Williams home.
When Kenney's first wife lay ill and dying he sent for Dr. Dan
and Dr. Dan rushed South, taking with him Stewart from Nash-
ville. He operated, but to no avail. Dr. Dan was brokenhearted
and swore never again to operate on a close friend. His attempt
however, drew the two men, if anything, closer together than
ever. Kenney plunged into work and brought out a compilation
of the achievements of Negroes in medicine, and Dr. Dan has-
tened to give him every praise. It was a fine, comprehensive job,
he said, it would find its way into every library in the United
States, "this pioneer collation and presentment of the work of a
new people in an old field. It shows," he wrote, "the light and
glory of opportunity it shows the vanguard easing on to greater
and fuller development the men of work, serious work, patience
and endurance going to the front, not as colored men, but as part
of the world's best thought and work." It had inspired him, said
Dr. Dan, and added, "I see so much in your little book to encour-
age us all."
When at first correspondence between Booker Washington and
Dr. Dan had dropped off, Scott sought to make his own loyalty
clear. "Somehow I am able," he wrote Dr. Dan, "to keep in touch
with your movements through newspaper publications. Probably
there is no special reason," he continued, "for my writing to you
except to say I still have the keenest recollection of your great
service to me several years ago." Scott assured Dr. Dan of his will-
ingness to be of whatever aid he possibly could in any matter at
any time that interested Dr. Dan. "I very much hope," Scott said,
"there will be no doubt in your mind as to my eagerness to serve
you and I hope you will not hesitate to write me when the spirit
moves you."
Dr. Dan, always quick to be touched by sincere expressions of
THE RECORD MADE STRAIGHT 267
friendship, kept in closer touch with Scott after that. He inquired
about Scott's physical condition, never of the best, sent him in-
structions for his diet, his exercise, and his hay fever, told him
about the baseball games he still enjoyed. When Scott needed a
stenographer, Dr. Dan found one for him. Scott on his side sent
Alice Williams butter from the Tuskegee dairy and Dr. Dan
crape myrtles, running roses, and wistaria for his garden. When
he heard that Dr. Dan had been called to New York to attend the
ailing Bishop Derrick, he hastened to congratulate Dr. Dan on this
recognition, "not that you need it," said Scott, "but only because
it makes your friends feel good that there is widespread apprecia-
tion everywhere of the high place you hold in the profession." To
Dr. Dan, sore from many a betrayal, Scott's words must have
been balm. "Your letters always have the ring of sincerity and
good will," he answered. "We prize you as a friend, one to whom
we can cling, always dependable, and true. . . . Come to us again
this summer for a quiet visit."
It was not until Ocober 1917, two years after Washington's
death, that Dr. Dan ever mentioned to Scott the rift between him-
self and the Tuskegee leader. The United States was at war; six
hundred colored officers were to be commissioned at Camp
Funston near Des Moines. Emmett Scott, now in the position of
wider usefulness that Dr. Dan had thought his due, was serving
in an advisory capacity on behalf of Negroes to the Secretary of
War. He asked Dr. Dan to accompany him to Funston for the
ceremonies. They rode all day across the state of Wisconsin amid
the solemn splendors of the dying year, across the state where
Dr. Dan had spent his youth. James Mills had just died and Dr.
Dan must have been in a pensive mood. Suddenly he turned to
Scott and without warning mentioned Washington's name.
"Why did he stop calling me up when he came to Chicago?"
he asked. Scott told him of Hall's letters to Washington. "He just
decided Hall could be more useful to him than you could," Scott
said. Dr. Dan made no comment.
That night at the dinner given to celebrate the commissioning
of these volunteer colored officers, Dr. Dan was not a scheduled
68 Daniel Hale Williams
speaker, but he was called on to make some extemporaneous re-
marks. He arose slowly, looked up at the ceiling, down at the ta-
ble, and finally began to speak in a quiet, almost monotonous tone
of voice, a tired voice: You are giving to your country . . . but
they won't thank you for it such was the gist of what he said.
The presiding officer jumped to his feet. He could not let those
remarks pass unchallenged, he said. The next minute Scott took
over, drawing upon all his resources of tact and suavity. "Dr.
Williams's loyalty to his race is very great," Scott said, "that does
not mean he is not also loyal to his country. In Chicago he has
been putting in long hours as Medical Examiner for the Board of
Appeals . . ." Jumpy nerves were soothed; there was no protest
to the War Department afterward.
The story leaked back to families and home towns. Some said
it was an example of Dr. Dan's tactlessness. Others quoted it as
proof of his race loyalty. Still others were glad Dr. Dan had shown
he could speak out and only wished he had sometimes done it in
defense of himself.
Through changing times and passing years Dr. Dan cherished
old friendships. He went back to Hollidaysburg to visit the sons
of Moses Brown, his father's associate in the Equal Rights League.
His onetime playmate and lifelong confidant, David Kennedy,
long since married to a Williams cousin, came to visit him. He
went on a vacation trip in Wisconsin with Hutchins Bishop's
daughter and her husband. When his friend J. Carlos Davis was
having some difficulty, he wrote a letter Davis folded away and
treasured. If there was any assistance he could render, wrote Dr.
Dan, Davis must call on him, or if Davis had any expense, let him
know. "I feel deeply for you," wrote Dr. Dan, "always remember
I feel very near to you and am at your command." When in 1923
his old fishing and hunting companion of so many seasons died,
Dr. Dan wrote Jennie Avendorph a letter she too treasured and
kept:
"Thinking of you in these saddest hours of your life, and know-
ing something of your ambition for your boy Julius, my heart
goes out to you and with this I am impelled to assure you that if
THE RECORD MADE STRAIGHT 269
Julius rings true in his professional attainment and development,
and if I am alive and active, it will be my pleasure to assist him in
paving the way to success in the Practice of Medicine and Sur-
gery."
Dr. Dan did everything he could to keep active. He continued
his office hours long after he was able, stoutly denying that his
diabetes made any real difference. During winter months in the
city he went down cellar and chopped cords of wood to keep up
his muscle tone, and summers in Idlewild he gardened vigorously.
Idlewild was one thing Dr. Dan could thank George Hall for.
Hall had not been satisfied with driving its founder out of Provi-
dent Hospital. In a rage one day at some deference shown the
name of Dr. Dan, he cried to Carl Roberts, "Curse him! I'll pun-
ish him worse than God ever will. I'll see he's forgotten before
he's dead!" Within a few years, while Dr. Dan was still very
much alive, though rarely seen any more among the colored med-
ical fraternity, a group of Southern colored doctors visited Prov-
ident Hospital and asked, "And whatever became of the famous
Daniel Hale Williams?" Before Roberts could answer, another of
the visitors spoke up: "Oh, didn't you know? He died years ago."
Carl Roberts shivered.
Hall carried his campaign to Benton Harbor where H. O.
Bailiff operated one of the first Negro summer resorts. The pa-
tronage was dignified and conservative and Dr. Dan and Alice
had enjoyed several summers there before Hall came with his
familiar tactics to spoil the place for them. He forced Dr. Dan to
look elsewhere for a vacation retreat. In the end Dr. Dan found
it at Idlewild.
Here in Lake County was a perfect site high sandy soil, good
water, a lake for fishing and swimming, endless forests for hunt-
ing. He and his friends, Ed Wright, Louis B. Anderson and some
others, formed a company and developed a fine summer resort on
the location. Many of his old patients, his nurses and internes, his
friends who could not be budged from their faithfulness, came to
build homes there. In the end he had peace. He saw no more of
HalL
270 Daniel Hale Williams
Idlewild had a big clubhouse with great stone fireplaces where
friends and neighbors might gather on rainy days and delightful
verandas facing the lake for fine days, a boat dock and a diving
pier. Forums and concerts soon made Idlewild a cultural mecca.
Dr. Dan built a summer hotel, Oakmere, which drew a good cli-
entele from Washington, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis and the
South. He fitted up a little hospital for emergencies and hung a
fire bell in a high tower. His old organizational faculties made him
remember every detail.
Dr. Dan called his own home Oakmere too. He laid out a little
park across the road. Both properties were enclosed by neat white
picket fences, and white arches carrying the words Oakmere and
Oakmere Park stood over the gates. He built a small hexagonal
summer pavilion in the park, where one could sit and watch the
sunset. Everything was left as natural as possible. Gravel walks
wound under the trees, their edges kept neat by his own efforts.
Early risers saw him out at dawn, down on his knees, clippers in
his hand. He fussed endlessly over his prize tulips, his many vari-
eties of fine roses, his burgeoning peonies, and gave them away
right and left to the colored postmistress in Idlewild and the wife
of the white banker in the neighboring town of Baldwin. Wher-
ever the sun filtered through he planted flowers. He grew a
vegetable garden too and got Dailey up on a visit to show off
his Swiss chard.
He located his house, a simple bungalow made luxurious with
electricity and Oriental rugs, on a high knoll facing eastward over
the lake and he had never tired of the site. He cut as few trees as
possible. His bungalow, his small chickenhouse, his workshop
where the tools were kept as precise and clean as a laboratory, his
garage, all were nestled under the inviting shelter of whispering
green branches. "Save your trees," he urged everyone and did a
job of tree surgery on Ed Wright's place that proved his hand as
clever with bough and trunk as with human leg and arm.
But now his hands had lost their cleverness. He doubtless sighed
there on his quiet porch watching the long evening shadows creep
across the grass. He might recover temporarily from this stroke,
THE RECORD MADE STRAIGHT 271
It looked as though he would, but this was the beginning of the
end. He was a doctor and he knew.
Alice had already gone, and gone bravely. She had enjoyed Idle-
wild but four years and most of that time she had spent in a wheel
chair, victim of Parkinson's disease. Dr. Dan had called in N. C.
Gilbert from Northwestern to care for her, but Gilbert could do
little. Even those who had not loved Alice admired her fortitude
and the vigor with which she kept her intellectual and artistic in-
terests to the end, going to hear Clarence Cameron White play a
violin recital when she was far from able. "Of course I am going,"
she said, "he was my pupil."
As Alice lay dying someone timidly ventured to suggest a min-
ister be sent for, "some one to pray." "A little late, don't you
think?" the intrepid Alice remarked and turned her face to the
wall. So at her memorial service a friend read "Crossing the Bar"
from Alice's own marked copy of Tennyson and no pretense was
made of getting in a clergy for whom Alice or Dr. Dan had little
use.
Religion had to be lived before it could mean anything to Dr.
Dan. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Reverdy Ransom, those were the
preachers Dr. Dan had liked, preachers who were not so much
concerned with the hereafter as with here and now. "All that de-
velops the bodies and minds of men ... all that renders us more
intellectual and more loving, nearer just . . ." Ingersoll had
voiced Dr. Dan's creed for him there in Janesville so long ago.
These were the things his father had worked for, and his grand-
father, all the Williamses. And now, Dr. Dan might have thought
in the ever-deepening twilight, he would soon be gone and there
would no longer be a Daniel Williams to carry on the fight. This
hurt undoubtedly was the greatest hurt he had known, not to
have a son . . . But perhaps he remembered the children of his
tutelage.
"Daughter, this woman's got to live." Perhaps his own words
rang again in his ears, perhaps he felt again the oppressive Wash-
ington heat, smelt the sweetish odor of chloroform that hung
heavy in Freedmen's operating room, saw the white-capped, dark-
272 Daniel Hale Williams
eyed nurse standing obedient, concentrating on his words.
"Daughter, this woman's got to live." "Yes, sir."
What fine young women those nurses were Isabella Garnett,
Jessie Sleet, Elizabeth Tyler, Edith Carter wonderful daugh-
ters. Yes, to be sure, Dr. Dan could tell himself, he had daughters,
sons too. Their faces may have passed before him Kenney,
Perry and West, McDowell, Hale and Reed, Holman, McMillan
and Francis, McKissick, White and Wilberforce, Roberts, Geth-
ner and Giles, Dickerson, Kendall and Stewart, Jackson, Chislett
and Phalen, some dark and some lighter, Buford, Fuller and
Dailey. These were his sons, his heirs. He would never know the
full line of his progeny, stretching down the years, passing on
their heritage, the skills he had taught them, saving lives, easing
pain. "The men of work" that was what he had said to Kenney
"the men of work, serious work, patience and endurance . . ."
When Mrs. Croker came out to wheel him into the house, prob-
ably he looked very peaceful there asleep in the dusk, the only
sound the gentle lap, lap of the lake at the foot of the slope.
Dr. Dan rallied and lived five more years. He sent his medical
books to Henry Minton in Philadelphia to start a library for
Mercy Hospital. "It only takes a small room and some chairs and
shelves," he wrote Minton, "but why not a pretty room, neatly
furnished. It will add so much to your hospital." He could never
stop dreaming and planning for Negro hospitals. He had dinner
with Billings and after it Billings agreed to head the campaign for
funds for a third and greater Provident Hospital. He gave Dailey
some files and a chair.
He made his will provision for his sisters and his brother's
widow, his housekeeper, his secretary; he forgot no one, and
even added $1000 for Ida Williams Lord, the sweetheart of his
Academy days, now a widow. There was $2000 for the colored
YWCA in Washington, a similar sum for the operating room of
the proposed new interracial hospital on the South Side, and
$5000 each to Meharry and Howard to assist indigent medical
students. The largest bequest, $8000, went to the National Associ-
THE RECORD MADE STRAIGHT 273
ation for the Advancement of Colored People, spiritual heir of the
Niagara Movement, and that organization was also his residuary
legatee. In the end he had joined his old friends Bentley and Mad-
den in their support of the DuBois program. His will provided
plain evidence if any was needed of his loyalty and love for his
race. It was not an immense fortune, not such as many a surgeon
less skilled than himself had accumulated, but as he had said to
Mrs. Rainey, "I cannot charge my people large fees." And a good
deal he had already given away.
But his rally of strength was short-lived. Other strokes fol-
lowed. Those last five years were a sad time for Dr. Dan and his
friends a time of slow death, with his mental powers going first.
Finally on Tuesday, August 4, 1931, in his beloved Oakmere at
Idlewild, Daniel Hale Williams died. The race's great pioneer sur-
geon was dead. The wires flashed the news and white and colored
newspapers noted his passing, recounted his great deeds, his serv-
ice to both races. Nowhere was a finer tribute written than that
published in the Lake County Star by his white neighbor and
friend Herbert Davis. The editor gave front-page headlines to
Dr. Dan and never once in two columns of type felt it necessary
to mention that he had had Negro blood.
... an invalid for nearly five years . . . His departure from
Idlewild was attended with honors and reverence of excep-
tional character. With the summer season at its height and
several thousand residents and visitors at the resort, all activi-
ties were suspended for the day and in the evening a
memorial service was held in which all joined in paying
tribute to the splendid character of a beloved associate. . . .
It is remarkable that so famous a man should carry his
honors so lightly. In 1920 he built his beautiful cottage in
Idlewild and went there summers to rest. He did not prac-
'tice, but he never turned a deaf ear to a call for help. One of
our bankers owes his life to the skillful ministrations of "Dr.
Dan," and many others found him willing and ready to
serve without pay in the cause of humanity. Modest, retiring,
unassuming, he found his little world here full of reverent,
274 Daniel Hale Williams
loving friends. To the children he was "Dr. Dan" and a
friend, even though regarded awesomely as a miracle man.
Like many other truly great men he found peace, solace
and instruction in nature. He loved his flowers and his garden
was filled with lovely native and exotic plants. He loved
the woods and waters and the living things in them. . . .
To have known him was a pleasure to know him inti-
mately was a priceless privilege. He was at once an inspira-
tion and an aid. To emulate his simplicity, his kindly spirit
and his great modesty is to pay tribute to the truly great.
The world has lost greatly. . . .
The owner of a local historical museum, a white man, began to
assemble what relics he could of the departed Negro surgeon.
In Chicago funeral services were held for Dr. Dan in St. An-
selm's Roman Catholic Church. His housekeeper had called Father
Eckert to baptize him a few months before. Few of his Catholic
friends approved, since everyone knew that Dr. Dan was now
helpless; and those who felt such an act was necessary were sat-
isfied that his mother, who had been converted to Catholicism
after her husband's death, had had him baptized as a child. St.
Anselm's was then a white church, and while hundreds of people
packed it to overflowing not many of them were colored.
Dr. Dan was buried in a corner of Graceland Cemetery, sepa-
rate from his wife. No stone was erected over his grave. When
representatives of the Negro National Hospital Association came
some years later to put a wreath on his grave, there was nothing
to show where he lay, and the wreath had to be carried back. In
Provident Hospital his picture stood in a basement corridor, its
face to the wall, covered with dust. Five years later, when the
dream of the third and greater Provident Hospital was realized, a
portrait of George Hall, who had died in 1930, was hung in the
lobby. There was no memento anywhere of Daniel Hale Williams.
But the life of a lie, Ingersoll said, is simply a question of time.
Nothing but truth is immortal. One day James Gordon, last sur-
vivor of the original hospital committee of 1891, entered the new
Provident as a patient. When he saw the state of affairs, he sent
THE RECORD MADE STRAIGHT 275
up a protest that had considerable repercussions. A new admin-
istration had its eyes opened. There was a scurry for souvenirs of
Dr. Dan. A case filled with silver cups, certificates of honor and
some of his own surgical instruments appeared in the lobby. On
the wall was hung a portrait and under it a bronze plaque mis-
quoting his birth date but setting the essential record straight:
DANIEL H. WILLIAMS, 1858-1931, DISTINGUISHED SURGEON,
FOUNDER OF PROVIDENT HOSPITAL.
(genealogical Chart of the
3
Joseph Williams ?
b 1760? YorkCoPenn,
(Joseph or his wife or his
daughters -in law were
wholly or part German)
1 (son) 2 (son)
I
3 (son)
m Kolklazier*
(Dutch)
i
<4 Samuel
b 1780?
( his son grew
ub speaking
German)
5 Daniel Williams
1783 -1854?
m Sarah
b 1769
(Scotch- Irish)
1 Peter A 2 (dau) 4 (dau) 5 Thomas 3 Daniel Wilham$ t Jr
1813-1897 blS15? b 1825? b 1827 1520-1667
m Caroline \ married. 184-3
1829-1911
III!
1 Ann Effine 2 Henry Price 3 Sarah O 4 Ida, 5 Daniel Hale
J846-1P33 1847-1895 1849-1915 1853-1902 WlllumtS
1856-1931
m 1898
Alice D Johnson
1859-1924
Clay m(o Matilda M m(t)Blufini m William,
WSamuel A Mature Turner Cornell
Sarbour (Mexican) (2 ) Nhbit
and Price Families
NOTE, = white
~ went white
Shorter
part Negro, Indian, white, came to Annapolis
from Yarmouth, N 5,
before 1790)
l Ann Shorter
2 (son)
Smith Price* ?
d 1507
( part or wholly white)
(2) Stevens
(married before Jan 1819)
3 Peter
d!860
Wilks 6 (son)
3 Henry Price
1792-1863
m Ann Wilks
1803-1376
(part white } Negro
avid Indian } related
to Frederick Douglass)
T
1 Sarah 2 Janey 4- hint 5 Betty
Price
7 Smith d Jamt* 9 Thomas
Price Price
. i _.. . - . . .
6 Sarah Ann Price 1 Henry H 2 (dau)** 3 (dau) 4 JoknM s Alexander
1828-1900 1814-1862 m white man* 1820-1647 Smith
I m MaryJant fn>m Philadelphia 1626-1872
' Mills* '
T
6 Mice Pace
1657-1938
(spinster)
7 Florence May d Martha, 9 Mane
1659 -19J4 (died m infancy) ( died in infancy )
(spinster)
Notes and Sources
Abbreviations used: BTW for Booker T. Washington Corre-
spondence, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washing-
ington, D.C. NA for National Archives, Records of the Secre-
tary of the Interior, Washington, D.C. JNA for scrapbook of
the late Julius N. Avendorph. NMA for the National Medical
Association. NMA Jnl for Journal of the National Medical As-
sociation. Publications No. 1-14 for the articles by Daniel Hale
Williams, which are listed in detail on page 366 together with
the journals where they appeared.
I have mentioned in the Foreword something of my experience in
securing the data for this book. Nothing extensive has heretofore been
published on the life of Daniel Hale Williams one or two magazine
articles, entries in various biographical dictionaries. Much of the data
had to be secured from persons who had known Dr. Dan or knew his
story. A list of those consulted is found on p. 362.
The Williams Family
History of the Williams family was given by the following de-
scendants: Harriette Kennedy Brown; Elizabeth McCard Clark; Berta
Cornell Coleman; Alice Williams Cuffee; Virginia Powell Florence;
Chester A. Franklin; Alamanda Williams Garnet; Josephine Williams
Garnet; Helen Williams Ramsey Gray; Charles Kelly; John W. Kelly;
Pearl Barbour Marchant; Blanche Williams Stubbs; Florence Pretty-
man Suydam; Ada Blanche W. Z. Williams; Hugo Williams; the late
Raphael Dumas Williams; Sadie Fitzgerald Wilson; Howard D.
Woodson.
Also by the following who are related by marriage: Henry W.
Furniss, M.D.; the late Sumner A. Furniss, MIX; the Reverend G.
2 So Darnel Hale Williams
Lake Imes; Harriet Layton McFadden; the late Howard D. Scott; Mr.
and Mrs. James Scott; Lizzie Ramsey Still; the late Gardner Thomas;
William B. Turner.
The genealogy of the Williams family is given on pp. 276-277.
U. S. Census records were examined for the years 1790-1880 for all
localities where the Williamses lived. Tax lists and deed records were
also examined. Marriage and birth records for the earliest years do not
exist. Old city directories were often a useful source.
By the time York County was erected in 1749 the Williamses Jo-
seph, Thomas and Isaac, Abraham, Samuel and Daniel were many
among the thinly scattered population of that frontier. These names
persist down through the generations. They are numerous in the 1790
U. S. Census of York County and are found in the rolls of the Revo-
lutionary War as set forth in The Pennsylvania-German in the Revo-
lutionary War, /77y-/7#5, Part XVIII of a Narrative and Critical His-
tory y prepared at the request of The Pennsylvania-German Society,
published at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1908. Thomas Williams's oath of
allegiance is in the hands of Dr. Francis Jamison, Wilmington, Dela-
ware, who showed it to me.
The early settlement of York County is described in The Beginnings
of the German Element in York County, Abdel Ross Wentz, B.D.,
Ph.D., Part XXVI of Narrative and Critical History, published by the
Pennsylvania-German Society, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1916.
The notion that intermarriage was heinous was one to which peo-
ple yielded slowly. Again and again the Pennsylvania Legislature re-
fused to pass bills that would have voided mixed marriages. In the
early nineteenth century, the tall, spare, fair-skinned Williams men
married not only into other free mixed families of southeastern Penn-
sylvania like themselves the Armstrongs, Underbills, Browns, the
Scotts, Kellys and Vashons but also frequently married white wives.
Of the offspring of Joseph Williams Grandpap Joseph, Dr. Dan's
German-speaking great-grandfather at least two sons and three
grandsons are known to have married white women. But, as more and
more black refugees flocked in by underground from Virginia and
Maryland, bringing with them the problem of cheap labor and lowered
wages to antagonize the working classes and the burden of pauperism
to irritate the upper classes, prejudice grew.
Within the Williams clan the children of one set of parents might
differ greatly from each other and among them show characteristics
of all the racial strains that had entered their inheritance. Of eight
children in one family, two sons were "as white as any one," one
daughter had Indian features, hair and coloring and was tall and
"walked very straight," while another daughter was short and plump
NOTES AND SOURCES l8l
and African in feature, "always laughing," and the remaining four
children showed varying combinations of traits. In Dr. Dan's family,
his oldest sister Annie was fair like thek father, as was young Dan;
Sally, the next daughter, and the son Price were dark like their
mother; Ida, Alice and Florence, the three youngest girls, were "mid-
dling."
All that we know about Dr. Dan's Great-Grandpap Joseph is that
he lived in Dauphin County in his old age among numerous grand-
children and kept busy selling Bibles. He and/or his wife were doubt-
less German-speaking since two of his grandsons are known to have
grown up speaking German rather than English. Whether he was al-
together white or of mixed blood we do not know. Joseph's descend-
ants, as their opportunities and privileges grew more and more re-
stricted (Pennsylvania disfranchised colored persons in 1838), moved
farther and farther westward.
Dr. Dan's grandfather, Daniel Williams, followed the Juniata River
beyond the Tuscarora Mountains to Lewistown, the route of the state-
wide, state-owned canal system. He was settled there with his Scotch-
Irish wife, his three sons and two daughters, by 1830. There were
thirty-five colored families among the 1200 inhabitants, and two Afri-
can churches. In one of them Daniel Williams, already approaching
fifty, preached on Sundays. On weekdays he operated a barbershop.
He looked "mostly white" and had some Indian and some African
characteristics. He owned property on the canal. In 1846, according to
the tax list, he went to Haiti. The press was constantly urging free
Negroes to leave the country and go to Liberia or Haiti. Perhaps the
sixty-three-year-old preacher went seeking a new home either for
himself or his flock. But he returned to end his days in Lewistown and
last appears in the Lewistown Census for 1850.
For the history of Lewistown, Pennsylvania, the following were
consulted: History and Topography of Northumberland, Huntington,
Mifflin, Centre, Union, Columbia, Juniata and Clinton Counties, Penn-
sylvania, etc., I. D. Rupp, Lancaster, 1847; History of That Part of the
Susquehanna and Juniata Valleys Embraced in the Counties of Miff-
lin, Juniata, Perry, Union and Snyder, No author, Vol. I, 1886; A His-
tory of the Juniata Valley and Its People, John W. Jordan, Vol. I,
New York, 1913; The Pioneers of Mifflin County, Pennsylvania:
Who's Who in the Early Records before 1790, John Martin Stroup
and Raymond Martin Bell, Lewistown, 1942.
Other Williams cousins lived in Lewistown. Thomas had a German
wife and their daughter became one of the town's early schoolteachers.
Dr. Dan's uncle, Peter A. Williams, born in 1813, was a tall dashing
magnetic fellow, full of initiative, much admired for his commanding
282 Daniel Hale Williams
figure and courtly manners. He went off to New York and, after op-
erating a barbershop for a time, rose to be chief steward for a line of
coastwise vessels. His position was lucrative and he set up his wife in
a fine brownstone house in Brooklyn, gave her an Irish servant girl,
and maintained a carriage and pair. Peter gave his name to a daughter
of his wife by a previous marriage and that daughter's sons are the two
physicians, Surnner (recently deceased) and Henry Furniss, the latter
for a number of years U. S. Minister to Haiti.
Dr. Dan's father, Daniel Williams, Jr., was seven years younger
than Peter. He too learned the barbering trade from his father and at
seventeen undertook to buy a house and lot on the canal in Lewis-
town that had once belonged to his father. The purchase price was
$55, twice what he could hope to earn in a year. It proved too large a
burden for him to carry and the property was sold at sheriff's sale.
But he had a stubborn persistence that was to appear later in his son.
After a few years he bought back the desirable holding and kept it
throughout most of his life, though he early left Lewistown. For a
while he worked in Harrisburg and there met the girl he married.
Sarah Ann Price had come from Annapolis to visit her brother, Harry
Price, established in good property in Harrisburg by his father, Rev-
erend Henry Price of Annapolis.
The Harrisburg Business Directory and Stranger's Guide, with a
Sketch of Its First Early Settlement, H. Napey, published by the au-
thor, 1842, lists two uncles of Dr. Dan, brothers of his mother: John M.
Price, Cake Baker, and Henry H. Price, Barber, Hair Dresser & Wig
Maker. There is also a relative, Jacob Smith, Barber, Hair Cutter & Vi-
olinist. Dr. Dan's father seems to be the partner in Williams & Thomas,
3 Third Street.
The Free Negro
That there was a considerable body of free Negroes in this coun-
try, both North and South, before Emancipation is not generally
known. The following are useful sources: Elihu S. Riley and Jeffrey
R. Brackett, works cited below under THE PRICE FAMILY;
Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia, by
a Southerner, 1841; The Negro in Pennsylvania: Slavery, Servitude,
Freedom, 1639-1861, Edward Raymond Turner, 1911; The Free Ne-
gro m Maryland, 1634-1860, James M. Wright, 1921; The Free Negro
Family E. ^Franklin Frazier, 1932; The Negro, Too, in American His-
tory, Merl R. Eppse, 1938; Speech of Col. Curtis M. Jacobs on the
Free Colored Population of Maryland, delivered in the House of Dele-
NOTES AND SOURCES 283
gates, 17 February 1860, Printed by Elihu S. Riley, Annapolis, 1860;
Proceedings, Eastern Shore Slave Holders' Convention, 1859; and the
following works by Carter G. Woodson: Free Negro Heads of Fami-
lies in the United States in 1830, together with a Brief Treatment of
the Free Negro, Washington, 1925; A Century of Negro Migration,
1918; The Negro in Our History, 1928; Free Negro Owners of Slaves
in the United States in 2830, together with Absentee Ownership of
Slaves in the United States in 1830, Washington, 1924; The Education
of the Negro Prior to 1861, Washington, 1915. See also Notes for
5-
The Price Family
The story of the Price family was given by the following descend-
ants: Alice Thornton Butler, Pearl Barbour Marchant, Blanche Thorn-
ton Parnall, Ada Blanche W. Z. Williams, the late Raphael Dumas
Williams. Also by descendants of Peter Shorter, "a kin": Sarah Jen-
nings, Anna Pounder Sorrell, and Lola Brown Whipple. Also by two
old residents of Annapolis: Mrs. Clifton Moss and Mrs. E. H. B. Par-
ker. The Reverend L. L. Berry of the Asbury M. E. Church stated
that the Reverend Henry Price, Dr. Dan's grandfather, donated the
land for the church.
Additional sources were: The Ancient City, A History of Anne
Arundel County in Maryland, 1649-2887, Elihu S. Riley, Annapolis,
1887; Article 19, Part I, of a series written for The Maryland Gazette,
Elihu S. Riley (undated clipping in the scrapbook of Mrs. E. H. B.
Parker); The Negro in Maryland, Jeffrey R. Brackett, Baltimore,
1899.
The Price family's wills, deeds, marriages, manumission records and
travel papers are found in Anne Arundel County Courthouse, Mary-
land, and the Annapolis Hall of Records. I also consulted the U. S.
Census records for Anne Arundel County for the years 1790, 1800,
1830, 1840, 1860. Harrisburg property records are found in Dauphin
County, Pennsylvania, Courthouse.
I visited the old Price home on Main Street near Church Circle and
the Price burial lot in St. Anne's Churchyard, Annapolis.
The genealogy of the Price and Shorter families is given on pages
276-277.
The Prices of Annapolis were, like their contemporaries and friends,
other old free mixed families the Snorters, Browns, Butlers, Ridg-
leys, Bishops "of a marked and elevated standing," according to an
early white chronicler, Elihu S. Riley. "There was no need of one's
being told," wrote Riley, "that these were capable, intelligent, and
284 Daniel Hale Williams
high-minded people. They carried these virtues and qualities in their
very bearing and associations with each other and with their white
fellow townsmen." They filled places of credit and engaged in leading
occupations. A young free woman of color kept a small school, and
white children attended it. They voted in the city elections, along
with other persons who owned a lot with a house on it or had an es-
tate of the value of 20 sterling. Those who wished worshiped in St.
Anne's and when they died were laid to rest in an unsegregated ceme-
tery, unless, like Smith Price, they had a private family burial ground
on their own land.
Dr. Dan's great-grandfather, Smith Price, may have been altogether
white since his will does not state specifically, as does that of his son,
that he was a "free colored citizen." His wife was of free mixed blood,
Indian, African and Caucasian. When Smith Price died in 1807 he left
a considerable inventory of property, farm, shop and household, with
many amenities walnut furniture, framed pictures, tea table with
china cups and saucers, wine decanter and glasses, stores of tea, spices,
tobacco. The executrix of his estate, his wife, was bound in the not
small sum of 250 for faithful performance of her sad task. During his
lifetime he had purchased slaves in order to liberate them. The manu-
mission records of some he "forever set free" may be seen still in the
Annapolis Hall of Records: ". . . Zack whom I bought of William
Glover of Annapolis for $100 . . . Rachel, 35 years old, and her
child. . . ." Pitiful little, when you thought of the tens of thousands of
men in slavery. But each free man did what he could, reached back
and pulled up out of the horror a few one man set forever free, one
woman and her child, each was a human soul in a human body.
Dr. Dan's grandmother, Ann Wilks Price, had Indian hair; her in-
heritance, like that of his great-grandmother, included the three racial
mixtures. She was a slave until freed by her husband's purchase. (For
her relationship to the famous Abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, see
Notes for page 82.) She was an excellent cater ess and a stickler for
cleanliness. She would not allow her sons to put up the horses lest
their clothes become redolent of the stable. She sent a grown grand-
daughter back upstairs to bathe properly "all over" while her beau
cooled his heels in the parlor and horse and buggy waited at the curb.
Dr. Dan's grandfather, Henry Price, built well on his inheritance
and like his father exhibited the same openhandedness. He manumit-
ted slaves, gave his mother a house and land, loaned money to relatives,
and acted as trustee for the minor children of his friends. Despite his
shop and real estate interests, his main concern was religion. He gave
the land for the Asbury M. E. Church where he preached. His ser-
mons were awaited eagerly and quoted weekly; his eloquence became
NOTES AND SOURCES 285
a tradition. When the Nat Turner slave insurrection flared up in Vir-
ginia in August 1831, and Maryland fearfully restricted movements of
all colored, free or slave, the Reverend Henry Price went into action.
He secured permission to hold a meeting in his church of the free
colored of Annapolis. He sought to allay fears and suspicion on both
sides and the Maryland Gazette published the memorial he then drew
up. As the freedom of the free colored people was more and more
curtailed, their movements restricted, Henry Price would walk up the
hill behind his home and go into the white-pillared Capitol and say
he wanted to see his sons up North and would the gentlemen be so
kind as to issue travel papers. He did not always get what he wanted,
but he never stopped trying. His religion sustained him until Emanci-
pation came. Seven weeks later he died "in great peace and joy," said
the Baltimore Sun of February 24, 1863, giving his obituary unusual
space. Though snow was falling in Annapolis, the church was crowded
with both white and colored mourners, and ministers of both races
conducted his funeral.
The marriage of Sarah Ann Price and Daniel Williams, Jr., is re-
corded in the Anne Arundel County Courthouse, Annapolis; the date
was October 31, 1843. A portion of their marriage certificate, the rest
torn off and lost, is in the possession of Pearl Barbour Marchant, a
granddaughter.
Publications Mentioning Dr. Daniel Hale Williams
The following is a list of the various published articles and bio-
graphical entries mentioning Dr. Daniel Hale Williams. The items dif-
fer and are often in flat contradiction; the inaccuracies are many.
Biographies of Eminent American Physicians and Surgeons, R. French
Stone, Indianapolis, 1894.
Physicians and Surgeons of America, Irving A. Watson, Republican
Press Association, Concord, New Hampshire, 1896.
An Era of Progress and Promise, 1863-1910, W. N. Hartshorn, Bos-
ton, 1910.
The Book of Chicagoans, A. N. Marquis, ed., Chicago, 1911.
Who's Who of the Colored Race, Franklin Lincoln Mather, ed.,
Vol. I, 1915.
The National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race, Clement Richardson,
Montgomery, Alabama, Vol. I, 1919.
Who's Who in America, A. N. Marquis, ed., Chicago, Vol. XI, 1920-
1921.
286 Dawiel Hale Williams
Who's Who in American Medicine, 1925, Lloyd Thompson and Win-
field Scott Downs, eds., New York, 1925.
Who's Who in Chicago, A. N. Marquis, ed., Chicago, 1926.
Another Daniel Who Dared, Rebecca Caudill, included in The Up-
ward Climb: A Course in Negro Achievement, Sara Estelle Haskin,
New York, 1927.
In Spite of Handicaps, Ralph W. Bullock, New York, 1927.
Who's Who in Colored America, Vol. I, 1927.
Journal, American Medical Association, Vol. XCDII, No. 10, p. 721,
September 5, 1931.
Dr. Dan Williams: I, His Life, Irene M. Gaines, //., His Place in Medi-
cine, U. G. Dailey, M.D., in The Crisis, Vol. 41, No. i, January
1932.
Negro Builders and Heroes, Benjamin G. Brawley, Chapel Hill, North
Carolina, 1937.
Daniel Hale Williams: Pioneer Surgeon and Father of Negro Hospi-
tals, reprint of address by Ulysses Grant Dailey, M.D., before the
National Hospital Association, August 18, 1941.
Daniel Hale Williams, Juliana Willis Rhodes, in Negro History Bul-
letin, May 1942.
Dictionary of American Biography, article on Daniel Hale Williams
by James M. Phalen, M.D., 1943.
Daniel Hale Williams, by Harold Farmer, in The Annals of Medical
History, 3d series, Vol. I, No. 3, May, 1939, Whole No. 103. Farm-
er's article wrongly ascribes a medical article by David H. Williams
to Daniel H. Williams.
Daniel Hale Williams, Mary E. Moxcey, in Rising Above Color, Philip
H. Lotz, ed., New York, 1943.
Notes by Chapters
CHAPTER I
The Wandering Barber Finds a Home
PAGE
3 I visited Janesville, walked its streets, saw the former
Anderson home on Glen Street, and Jefferson Public
School in its elm-shaded park.
Dr. Bert Anderson, the late Mara Franc Edwards, Mi-
nerva Guernsey King, Mary Louise Hall Walker (daugh-
ter of Eva Johnson Hall), the late Allan Burdick (son of
the postmaster at Edgerton) and EfEe Lord Williams fur-
nished contemporary information concerning Dr. Dan's
youth in Janesville. Further details were added by Richard
Lloyd Jones, Etta E. Loomis, Angie T. Roethe, Mary Eliz-
abeth Sutherland, Dr. Charles Sutherland, Grace S. Lord,
Lillie Smith Alexander, Emma L. Warren-Mallet, the late
Julia West Paul, and William B. Turner.
The files of the Janesville Gazette for the late 'yos and
early '8os, kindly sent me on microfilm by the publisher,
Robert W. Bliss, were excellent sources for events, persons
and weather.
Although a half dozen biographical dictionaries place
Daniel Hale Williams's birth date in 1858, 1 use 1856, which
is the date given in the U. S. Census records of Hollidays-
burg, Pennsylvania, for 1860 and of Janesville, Wisconsin,
for 1880; these agree on 1856, and the former was given
by his parents. Also when Dr. Dan registered officially
Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE with the Illinois State Board of Health as a physician, on
4 April 1 8, 1883, he gave his age as twenty-eight. This too
(Com.) points to 1856, making him at his registration twenty-
seven years and three months old, or in his twenty-eighth
year.
Dr. Dan's parents may have chosen his middle name
Hale for the Abolitionist, John Parker Hale, nominee of
the Free Soilers for the Presidency in 1852, or for a lawyer
named Reuben Hale who seems to have acted as inter-
mediary for members of the family in certain property
transfers in Lewistown.
I visited Hollidaysburg, saw Dr. Dan's birthplace, the
Diamond, and the location of the old canal and the Portage
Railroad. Reminiscences of early Hollidaysburg were told
by Charles Brown, Harriet Dennis Hollinger, and
Harry A. Jacobs. Mr. Jacobs gave the location of Dr. Dan's
father's barbershop on the Diamond, a fine situation to
which he moved from the earlier location on the docks.
Dr. Dan's birthplace at 315 Blair Street still stands,
though it has been added to and now almost touches the
street. Originally a square frame structure, solidly built, it
stood some distance back from the street on a plot 60 by
100 feet and cost, with its outbuildings, $600 in April 1849.
There were two rooms and a hall downstairs, and two
rooms upstairs. Before Dan was born, his father had sold
off 26 feet of the lot. The remaining property sold for $800
in 1866. We know the children had a dog, because a dog
tax was paid. They could watch the Conestoga wagons
lumber in with farm produce and deliver it at the new
market place which stood across Wayne Street to the east
and watch the engrossing stream of strangers coming to
the Exchange Hotel across Montgomery Street to the west.
Two blocks to the south lay the canal and its teeming
docks and above those towered gaunt, tawny Chimney
Rocks. A runaway slave hid among Chimney Rocks before
the Civil War and during it little Dan, aged seven, his
mother and sisters, and other women and children, spent
a cowering day there fearing the arrival of Southern
troops, which fortunately did not come. Directly back of
Dan's home was the Town Hall; Mr. and Mrs. Tom
Thumb came every year. A traveling circus came twice a
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 289
PAGE year. There were good swimming holes in the Juniata
4 River and wonderful Emancipation Day celebrations on
(Cont.) its banks.
The interesting history of Hollidaysburg, the canal and
the Portage Railroad is told in: A Pleasant Peregrination
through the Prettiest Parts of Pennsylvania, Peregrine Pro-
lix, 1836; History of the Early Settlement of the Juniata
V alley , Uriah James "Jones, 1856, with Notes and Exten-
sion by Floyd G. Hoenstine, 1940, Telegraph Press, Harris-
burg, Pennsylvania; History of the City of Altoona and
Blair County, James H. Ewing and Harry Slep, 1880; His-
tory of Huntingdon and Blair Counties., Pennsylvania,
J. Simpson Africa, Philadelphia, 1883; American Notes,
Charles Dickens, Carleton's New Illustrated Edition, New
York, 1885; Biographical and Portrait Cyclopedia of Blair
County, Pennsylvania, Samuel T. Wiley and W. Scott
Garner, 1892; A History of Blair County, Pennsylvania,
Tarring S. Davis, ed., 1931; A History of Blair County,
A Project of the Students and Teachers of the Social Sci-
ence Department of the Altoona Senior High School, 1938;
The Juniata Canal and Old Portage Railroad, Harry A.
Jacobs, published in mimeographed form by the Blair
County Historical Society, September 20, 1941.
DR. DAN'S FATHER
When Dr. Dan's father, Daniel Williams, Jr., moved to
Hollidaysburg, the town, the canal and the Portage Rail-
road were internationally famous. Engineers and govern-
ment officials and important people came from all over the
world to exclaim at man's genius in conquering the Alle-
gheny barrier by a series of inclined planes and cable cars.
Charles Dickens found it "very pretty traveling" and
Jenny Lind was so entranced with the view, so like her
own Sweden, that she burst into rapturous song to the
delight of the bystanders. Boatload after boatload of hu-
man beings, whole households, their belongings and their
cattle, went westward through Hollidaysburg. Machinery
was invented which swung the filled canal barges out of
the water and directly onto railroad trucks for their trip
over the wooden rails of the inclined planes surmounting
the Alleghenies, and at Johnstown they were swung down
again for the continued canal trip further westward.
Travelers were many and Dr. Dan's father did a thriving
290 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE barbering business. His sprightly advertisement appeared
4 in the Hollidaysburg Democratic Standard for Novem-
(Cont.) ber 7, 1846:
MONEY WANTED
LEWISTOWN MONEY TAKEN AT PAR!
South-west corner of Juniata and Montgomery streets
The subscriber having neatly fitted up his establishment, is
prepared to accommodate all who may give him a call, on
the most reasonable terms. He has a superior preparation
for effectively removing dandruff from the hair, which he
applies to his customers, gratis.
D. Williams, Jr.
Wigs, Curls, Braids, &c, &c, always on hand.
D. Williams, Jr., was the acknowledged leader of the
small colored group in the town's three thousand inhabit-
ants. He lent money to the preacher without much hope
of getting It back. (See the Minutes of the Baltimore,
Philadelphia, New York and Neiv England Annual Con-
ferences of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church
in America, published by Rev. T. Eato, Rev. Peter Ross,
and Rev. Sampson Talbot, for the Conferences, Zuille and
Leonard, Printers, New York, 1852.) He was the trustee
in whose name was placed the deed for the site of the
African Wesleyan Church. And when the free colored
people met over the years in state and national conventions
seeking freedom for their race and relief from their own
burdens, and when Hollisdaysburg could send only one
delegate, he was the one to go. At Syracuse in 1864 he
helped frame the National Equal Rights League and re-
turned to Pennsylvania to work valiantly organizing, try-
ing to bring about harmony, urging work and more work,
education and more education. (See the Democratic Stand-
ard of Hollidaysburg, Vol. Ill, No. 31, Whole No. 217,
December 8, 1847; also issues for April 21, June 23, and
November 17, 1847; August 8, 1855; July 8, 1863. Also the
Hollidaysburg Register, Vol. XXIX, No. 32, June 7, 1865.)
He helped with the printing and distribution of a Pre-
amble and Constitution, reassuring the faltering: "We have
seen the giant Slavery melt away in an incredibly short
time and may quite as reasonably hope to see the rights
of man acknowledged . . . the true interests of the coun-
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 2pl
PAGE try demand our recognition ... do not fear, eternal jus-
4 tice is on our side . . . we ask no special privileges . . .
(Cont.) only a fair chance in the race of life and recognition ac-
cording to our personal merits. To ask less is not manly
to ask more is foolishness." Schooling, schooling for old
and young Daniel Williams, Jr., and the others urged
schooling constantly. "We must get education. Those who
have not had early advantages should form day schools
and night schools and try to learn each other . . . we ut-
terly fail in our duty to our children if we neglect to give
them education. Far better it is for us to do with plainer
food and less finery and carefully cultivate the minds of
those who must take our places."
The League addressed an appeal to Congress: ". . . in
the name of God, we ask you not to allow us to be robbed
of the price of our blood, our sufferings, and that which is
ours by birth-right and taxation." Congress parried and
equivocated. League rallies were held up and down the
state, women joining with the men. Songs were written,
printed and fervently sung:
Are you a member of the League,
Contending for the right?
Have you already done your part,
Or 'will you start tonight?
Some songs rang with religious fervor; others saucily paro-
died popular tunes:
We've fought the Union's battles, yet
They will not give us suffrage
And as we think we've earned it quite,
At this we've taken umbrage.
They've given us a "Bureau," and
They think they're our promoters,
I think they'd benefit us more
By making us all voters.
In August 1866 the Pennsylvania League held its second
state-wide meeting at Pittsburgh. Forty-one auxiliary
Leagues were reported in the state; membership in the
churches had doubled through the League efforts. Daniel
Williams, Jr., had less than a year to live, but he was there
and working as hard as ever. He sat on a half dozen com-
292 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE mittees and was chosen one of three delegates to represent
4 the colored people of Pennsylvania at a national meeting
(Cont.) to be held in Nashville in the fall. The national meeting
was not held, however, and the following May Dr. Dan's
father died of consumption.
5 The active work of Dr. Dan's father and other Wil-
liamses in both national and state conventions of free
colored people before and after the Civil War is found in
the Minutes and Proceedings, and other publications of
those conventions: national, 1832, 1833, I ^35 I ^43, 1847,
1853, l8 55 l8<5 4; state, Pennsylvania, 1838, 1841, 1848,
1865, 1866, 1868; Ohio, 1849; Illinois, 1853, 1856, 1867.
Titles are lengthy and space forbids listing them. A synop-
sis and evaluation of the conventions is given in The Early
Negro Convention Movement, John W. Cromwell, The
American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers, No. 9,
1904.
6 Just when Sarah and Daniel Williams moved their brood
to the old Price home in Annapolis is not certain -or
whether they went initially for a visit or as a permanent
move, knowing Daniel Williams was fated to die soon. On
October 9, 1865, the barber arranged with Attorney Es-
sington Hammond in Hollidaysburg to "bargain and sell
or lease" the home and what remained of the original lot
on Blair Street. Six months later Lawyer Hammond made
the sale. So they might have gone in October 1865, when
Hammond was given power of attorney and when another
hard winter was approaching, or they might have gone in
April when the house was sold. The following August
when the barber attended the State Equal Rights League
meeting in Pittsburgh, he was listed as a delegate from
Hollidaysburg. In September when his daughters were
enrolled in St. Frances' Academy in Baltimore, their home
was given as Hollidaysburg. Perhaps the family was still in
Hollidaysburg, or perhaps they hoped to go back there
eventually. If so, they never did, for the barber died in
Annapolis.
The Hollidaysburg Register & Blair County Weekly
News- of May 15, 1867, tells of his death on Sunday,
May 5, in Annapolis. His age is given as fifty years,
one month and eighteen days, which would place his birth
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 293
PAGE in 1817, an obvious error. Two U. S. Census reports, taken
6 ten years apart, place his birth date in 1820. He was there-
(Cont.) fore only forty-seven when he died. A joint tombstone
erected in Annapolis over the graves of Dr. Dan's father
and his brother Price gives erroneous ages for both.
A number of photographs seem to date from this time.
There was a photographer's shop upstairs over the Holli-
daysburg barbershop. What more natural than a wish to
record this epoch as it ended? Sarah Williams, her Indian
tresses still raven black, unstreaked with gray, seems to
turn her face away from the future. Her husband, his
cheeks sunken, his eyes large and shining, faces you
squarely, undaunted. Young Dan, every feature a replica
of his father's, stands at his knee, his small hand on the
paternal shoulder, his gaze turned away, perhaps to the
window, to the Allegheny hills where he would like to
escape.
The late Caroline Parke told of Price Williams's activi-
ties as a young man.
Dan's sisters, Ida just older than himself, Alice just
younger, remained in St. Frances' Academy, Baltimore,
four years, a famous school founded by the Oblate Sisters
of Providence. Wealthy Southern planters sent their il-
legitimate mulatto daughters to genteel St. Frances' Acad-
emy for education. Sarah Price Williams sent her daugh-
ters there because, after her husband's death, she, along
with other friends in Annapolis, was converted to Ca-
tholicism. Alice had poor health and her record was mod-
est as to grades but ardent in religious aspects. Ida, who
was lame from an improperly set broken leg and always
wore a high orthopedic shoe, took a prominent part in
activities. At her graduation she sang a solo, played the
piano, and delivered the Farewell Address. Alice never
married, but Ida married William Cornell and had two
daughters. She became a dressmaker, as her mother had
been before her, taught younger women in Annapolis,
made costumes for a traveling Mikado company, and even
sent some of her fine sewing into the White House. The
Mother Superior of St. Frances' Academy kindly searched
out old records, handwritten in French, to show me, and
294 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE brought to my attention The Oblates* Hundred and One
6 Years, Grace H. Sherwood, 1931.
(Cont.) Annie who returned East with her mother married a
Mr. Clay and, after his death, Samuel Barbour, whom she
divorced some time following the birth of a daughter.
The Rockford cousins were four, all men of consider-
able property and important in community life: David,
John and James Williams, sons of Peter Williams of Co-
lumbia, Pennsylvania, and Reuben Armstrong, the wealth-
iest, who in 1870 owned property valued at $7000, a high
figure for those days. David and John had wandered far,
through the wilds of Michigan and Wisconsin, before
settling in Rockford, and after some years they wandered
still farther. David settled finally in Mexico City. John
trekked to New Mexico in '53 with the army; his son
Hugo Williams has a letter written him by Colonel
John C. Tidball, April 27, 1886, affectionately recalling the
rigors they endured together on that adventure. In Rock-
ford after the Civil War, John organized war widows*
relief and helped found Grand Army Post No. i. Reuben
finally went further west and settled in Arkansas.
The shoemaker to whom Dan was apprenticed was
C. M. C. Mason, whose daughter Anna confirmed the fact.
Sarah Jennings said William H. Butler, another Annapolis
boy, went at the same time as Dan to "Mr, Mason's Train-
ing Schools for Boys." Both Anna Mason and Dr. Dan's
niece, Ada Blanche Williams, say Dr. Dan "ran away."
Gaines, op. cit., says his mother sent for him and he
proudly traveled alone. Caudill, op. cit., tells the story of
the railroad pass and that his mother did not scold him.
And Ada Blanche Williams added the remark that he
could take care of himself.
7 Neither the Andersons nor Dan were in Janesville in
1870 according to the U. S. Census, nor was Dan in Edger-
ton then, or in Rockford. Allan Burdick remembered Dan
in Edgerton about 1873 a "d Dr. Bert Anderson said "Dan
went for the doctor the night I was born," which was in
1876. The years 1868-1873 are unaccounted for in Dan's
life, from the time he reached Rockford at about twelve
until he appeared in Edgerton, running his own barber-
shop, at seventeen.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS
PAGE Dr. N. C. Gilbert, who attended Dr. Dan in Ms last ill-
7 ness, said Dr. Dan told him he was a pilot on the Sault Ste.
(Cont.) Marie, also that he played baseball at the University of
Wisconsin. I have been unable to verify either statement,
and the University of Wisconsin has no record of Dan's
attendance there, though I have a photograph of Dan bear-
ing the name of a Madison photographer and apparently
taken when he was about sixteen or seventeen. Dr.
Charles L. Sutherland, a classmate at Chicago Medical Col-
lege, stated Dan told him he had worked on the boats and
assumed it was as a steward since he felt that would ac-
count for Dan's excellent table manners! A patient, Louise
Rainey, remembered Dr. Dan once remarked: "Lots of the
boys got their medical education working on the railroads;
I used to work on the boats." Caudill, op. cit., says he
played in an orchestra on boats, but places the event during
summer vacations at medical college. Those vacations are
otherwise accounted for.
I can find no foundation for the legend Dan was aban-
doned in Janesville in rags by his mother. There is no
evidence his mother ever went to Wisconsin. Mary Louise
Hall Walker lived near the Andersons as a child, when
Sally and Dan first came there, and remembered that
Sally "had a way of earning her living; it was not sewing."
The way, of course, was the hair goods trade.
Everyone from the late Allan Burdick, the earliest liv-
ing acquaintance of Dr. Dan that I met, onward through
his life, spoke of his meticulous grooming and polished
manners. The same was said of his uncle, Peter Wil-
liams.
Accounts of barbering in the early days and the Ne-
gro's role in that occupation are found in Early History
of Negroes in business In Philadelphia, a paper read by
Henry M. Minton, M.D., before the American Historical
Society, March 1913, and in The Tonsorial Art, a pam-
phlet by M. J. Vieira, 1877.
A contemporary account of the hair goods work Sally
Williams did may be found in Self-Instructor in the Art
of Hair Work, Dressing Hair, Making Curls, Switches,
Braids, and Hair Jewelry of Every Description, Compiled
jrom Original Designs and the Latest Parisian Patterns,
Mark Campbell, New York and Chicago, 1867.
296 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE Dan's sister Sally married a mulatto, Bhiford Turner,
7 whose family owned considerable property in the heart of
(Cont.) Portage. A nephew, William B. Turner, remembers how
the bride from the East taught him "gestures and dic-
tion" when he was a high school boy. Sally divorced Blu-
ford Turner and years later, some time after 1898, married
a Nesbit.
Who's Who, 1921 states Dan attended Janesville High
School; other biographical dictionaries say he was gradu-
ated, one says in 1873. Rosemary Enright, Attendance De-
partment, Janesville Public Schools, says he was not gradu-
ated; attendance records are not now in existence for those
years.
"Red Iron Ore" is from Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-
Boy, collected and edited by Franz Rickaby, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge, 1926, 1954.
8 The Harrisburg uncle, Harry Price, besides being a good
musician and a barber, was also a phrenologist. When bar-
bering he would run his hands over a customer's head to
feel the bumps and tell what sort of man he was. One day
a customer no sooner sat down and Harry Price started
work than the barber cried: "Why, you're a dishonest
man. You've stolen something!" At that moment the police
walked in and took their man, all lathered up as he was.
Harry Price left a large family of ten children. One
daughter married a white man. Another daughter, Vic-
toria Adelaide Nicholson, was an accomplished pianist,
the first woman of color to play the organ at the New-
England Conservatory of Music. A son died an army cook
in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from which distant place
his eight year old daughter returned East, saying her pray-
ers in Spanish. After Harry Price's death, his white wife,
Mary, continued for years in business at the house in
Harrisburg purchased by her father-in-law, Reverend
Price of Annapolis. M. J. Price & Son, Wigmakers, had
customers from Seattle to New York.
Dan loved playing the bass viol He urged Allan Burdick
to learn. The famous Anderson band numbered twenty
pieces winds, strings and drums all white men except
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 297
PAGE the Andersons and Dan. Old-timers remember it as "the
8 best I ever danced to."
(Cont.)
The early history of Janesville is from the History of
Rock County and Transactions of the Rock County Agri-
cultural Society and Mechanics Institute, Orrin Guernsey
and Josiah F. Willard, eds., 1856; The History of Rock
County, Wisconsin, Western Historical Co., Chicago,
1879; Picturesque Janesville, brochure, 1892; Janesville,
Wisconsin, Illustrated, brochure, Art Gravure & Etching
Co., Milwaukee, 1892; and Rock County, Wisconsin: A
New History, William Fiske Brown, Chicago, 1908, 2 vols.
City directories of the period were useful too.
9 Minerva Guernsey King told of her father's lending
books to Dan. Caudill, op. cit., gives the subjects which
were favorite with him.
The Janesville Classical Academy, run by the tall, spare
Reverend John P. Haire and his short, plump wife, a
graduate of the first class at Mount Holyoke, had none of
the dignity of the red brick Jefferson Public School set
in its elm-shaded square. The Academy was located down-
town in rented quarters over a drugstore in the Mitchell
Block. Only about fifty pupils attended, children of the
"best" families; they were of all grades, some still in the
lower branches of study.
10 The History of Rock County, Wisconsin, cited above
(Notes for page 8) gives the oculist's name as J. F. Hulli-
hin and says he was from West Virginia. I use data fur-
nished me by the late Mara Franc Edwards, preferring it
to the uncertain editing of the old volume.
12 The Gazette, in describing a ball at the end of January
1877, where "spacious Apollo Hall swarmed with beauty
and fashion of the city" and where "Anderson's orchestra
discoursed the music until 4:00 A.M.," said also that "Miss
Ida Williams appeared handsomely in white Paris muslin."
Her mother Mrs. J. P. Williams wore "pink silk en train."
14. Carrie Jacobs, in the years to come, when she was Mrs.
Bond would set the whole country to singing her songs
298 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE "I Love You Truly" and "The End of a Perfect Day." She
14 arid Ida Williams, her stepsister, were not very fond of
(Cent.) each other, or of the fact their widowed parents had mar-
ried. They chose separate schools.
Biographical notes on Dr. Simeon Lord may be found
in; R. French Stone, op. cit.; Portrait and Biographical
Album of Rock County., Wisconsin, published by Acme
Publishing Co., Chicago, 1889; Commemorative Biographi-
cal Record of the Counties of Rock, Green, Grant, Iowa,
and Lafayette, Wisconsin, published by Beers, 1901; For-
traits and Biographies, Including the Governor of Wis-
consin and the President of the United States, no author,
copyrighted by Chapman Bros., 1885.
CHAPTER II
A Medical Apprentice in 1878
15 The biographical dictionaries differ as to the date of
Dan's graduation from Haire's Classical Academy, also
called the Janesville Classical Academy; some give 1877,
others 1878. Both the late Mara Franc Edwards and Mi-
nerva Guernsey King told me that Dan was in attendance
with them and that they were graduated in the spring of
1877. Minnie Guernsey left to study in Boston in Septem-
ber 1877, a date confirmed by an item in the Gazette.
Presumably then Dan Williams also was graduated in the
spring of 1877, studied law the winter of 1877-78, and went
into Palmer's office the spring or summer of '78.
The Janesville Gazette for August 2, 1877, gave most of
its front page to the Emancipation Day speech of the local
Republican Congressman, the Honorable Charles G. Wil-
liams. Mr. Williams said in that speech, quite possibly quot-
ing Harry Anderson: "I heard a better answer to this [the
Negro] question in one of the barber shops of Janesville
than I should expect to find in all the books of the philos-
ophers. A colored man said: 'The white people pity us, but
pity won't buy bread. We have a harder row to hoe than
they, and what the colored men of this country need is to
obtain property and hold it.' "
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 299
PAGE Caudill, op. cit., states Dan studied law with a Janesville
15 lawyer, and Ada Blanche Williams confirmed the fact, but
(Cont.) neither gave the name of the lawyer. Dan's explanation of
why he hated law is from Caudill, op. cit.
1 6 Mary Louise Hall Walker told of Dan's driving her
mother, Eva Johnson Hall, to Mt. Zion with her carpet
rags. The case of Hopkins's gunshot wound was described
in the Gazette.
17 Mrs. John Siebert Taylor and the late Mrs. M. O. Mouat,
daughters of Dr. Palmer, told of Dan's study with their
father, as did Dr. Charles L. Sutherland, who told as well
of Pember and Mills. City directories confirm all three.
In September 1879 tne Gazette said Will Palmer had gone
to Chicago to "continue" his medical studies. This could
mean he had, been in Chicago the year before, 1878-1879,
or it could mean that he was continuing after his appren-
ticeship with his father. His sister, Mrs. Taylor, thinks
Will went in 1879. Hartshorn, op, cit., says Dan studied
with Palmer two years; R. French Stone, op. cit., says four
years. Two years seems correct by other data.
1 8 The old preceptor system is described in The Life of
Chevalier Jackson: An Autobiography, 1938; in The Doc-
tors Mayo, Helen Clapesattle, 1934, as well as in numerous
other medical biographies.
Biographical notes on Dr. Henry Palmer are found in
works cited for Dr. Simeon Lord, Notes for page 14.
20 I date Pember and Mills's coming to Palmer by the dates
of their leaving Milton College and by Janesville city di-
rectories.
Dan Williams was devoted to his preceptor. When
Henry Palmer died in 1895, he left an important post to
come back to Janesville for the funeral, and called on each
member of the family in turn to express his gratitude to
the man who had started him off so well. "All I am, I owe
to him," Dr. Dan said.
21 Dan's new clothes and his mustache are described from
a photograph.
300 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE Julia LeBeau Thompson and Emma L. Warren-Mallet
21 told of Harry Anderson's desire that Traviata and Dan
(Cont.) should marry.
22 The Illinois State Medical Register for 1877-1878, D. W.
Graham, A.M., M.D., ed., Chicago, 1877, lists the follow-
ing medical sects: Botanic, Eclectic, Homeopathic, Physio-
Medical, Regular, and Thompsonian.
The superiority of Chicago Medical over Rush is set
forth in a statement of Nicholas Senn found in Joy of Liv-
ing, 2 vols., Franklin Martin, Chicago, 1933. Description of
the college is from this work and from personal recollec-
tions of Dr. Coleman Buford and a manuscript speech of
the late Dr. William E. Morgan furnished me by Dr.
Buford.
The early history of Chicago Medical College is taken
from Dedication of the Montgomery Ward Memorial
Building, by various authors, Chicago, 1927.
25 John Jones is briefly spoken of in Black Metropolis, St.
Clair Drake and Horace Cay ton, New York, 1945. Further
details of the story of the Joneses are from the Chicago
Tribune, May 22, 1879, reminiscences of the granddaugh-
ter, Theodora Lee Purnell, and data furnished by Franklyn
A. Henderson from his personal files of historical material.
The Jones home on Ray Avenue (now 29th Place) was
identified for me by Mr. Henderson. The participation of
John Jones in the early Negro conventions is established
by the Proceedings of those conventions national for
1848 and 1853, and Illinois for 1853, l8 5<5 ar *d ^67. John
Jones was born in 1816 on a plantation in North Carolina,
son of a free mulatto mother and a German father, John
Bromfield. Though he was free, his mother feared he
might be reduced to slavery, and apprenticed him at an
early age to a man moving to Tennessee. This man in turn
bound him out to a tailor who refused him his liberty at
twenty-one. John (who now used his mother's name)
prayed the court for a writ of habeas corpus, was allowed
to return to North Carolina where he, secured proof of his
age and free status, and returning was allowed to go his
own way. In 1845, protected by his freedom papers, he
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 3OI
PAGE brought his bride Mary to Chicago, a slow seven-day trip
25 by stage and canal. They had $3.50 with which to start
(Cont.) life. They rented a one-room cottage and a shop 6J by 20
feet on a spot now the Clark Street entrance to the Sher-
man House. By pawning his watch and laying out his
money judiciously, and with $2 worth of groceries ob-
tained from a colored grocer on credit, the Joneses started
their tailoring business. Before the Great Fire of 1871 he
was worth $80,000. The fire destroyed much of his prop-
erty but he recovered enough to leave a good fortune to
his family when he died. He had to learn to read and write
after he came to Chicago; he managed to do this and be-
came a leader for Negro rights. His house was a rendez-
vous for Abolitionists, black and white, and a station on
the underground railroad, sheltering many fugitives on
their way to Canada. His freedom papers repose in the
Chicago Public Library.
26 For the story of Samuel F. Williams of Johnstown, see
his Four Years in Liberia, A Sketch of the Life of the Rev.
Samuel Williams with remarks on the missions, manners
and customs of the natives of Western Africa: Together
with an answer to Nesbtfs book, Philadelphia, King &
Baird, printers, 1857. Nesbit took a pessimistic view of
colonization. His book is Four Months in Liberia, or,
African Colonization Exposed, by William Nesbit of Hol-
lidaysburg, Pennsylvania, June 1855.
CHAPTER HI
Dan Goes to Medical School
28 The description of the opening of Chicago's medical
colleges in the fall of 1880 is from the Chicago Tribune,
Vol. XL, September 29, 1880.
Dan's timidity in meeting new white people was ex-
plained to me by W. E. B. DuBois, who was his friend.
The description of Dean Davis and his opening remarks
are based on Martin, op. cit.
29 A packet of Dan's letters to Harry Anderson were found
in Dr. Dan's effects after his death and were given to me
302 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE by his niece, A. Blanche Williams. Copies of excerpts of
29 other letters from Dan to Anderson were given rne by
(Cont.) Dr. Bert Anderson.
30 Advertisements of Goodwin's Froliques and Josh Whit-
comb are found in the Chicago Daily Inter '-Ocean, Vol. IX,
September 25-30, 1880.
It appears that $3.75 was a weekly rate, although Mrs.
Jones may have finally made it $10 a month. Later he says
he owes Mrs. Jones $8.75 and it will seem this covered a
month's room and board, since he also says he needs $1.25
for incidentals and that $10 will see him through a month.
The College catalogue stated: "The price of board and
lodging will vary from $4 to $6 per week. Vacant rooms
for those who desire to board and lodge themselves may
be had at prices ranging from $6 to f 10 per month."
33 The requirements, courses of study, faculty, lists of
students and graduates, etc., of Chicago Medical College
are taken from the Announcements of the school for the
years in question, kindly lent to me by the Northwestern
University Medical Library.
Additional material on Chicago Medical at this period,
its faculty, etc., and on Mercy Hospital can be found in
Dedication of the Montgomery Ward Memorial Building,
by various authors, Chicago, 1927; Martin, op. cit.; The
Medicine Man, Emilius C. Dudley, 1927; History of Med-
icine and Surgery, and Physicians and Surgeons of Chi-
cago, Chicago Medical Society, 1922; Sixty -second Annual
Report of Mercy Hospital, Chicago, January i, 1912.
Chicago Medical College indeed required "hard work
and much study." The schedule was heavy, the instructors
demanding, and the student's preparation poor. If Dan had
no bachelor's degree, neither did Frank Pember nor two
other Janesville youths then enrolled, Charles Sutherland
and Hugh Menzies. Only Will Palmer and James Mills of
Dan's home-town contemporaries were so fortified. Actu-
ally only fifteen per cent of Dan's class was equipped with
a preliminary degree. The usual prior education of a
medico of the early '8os was eight years of grade school
and no more.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 303
PAGE Theodora Lee Purnell told how medical students con-
34 tinually dropped in to visit Dan in her grandmother's
home.
36 Dan's despondency was added to by the poor health of
his sister Sally, who had divorced Bluford Turner and re-
turned East with her young daughter. When he failed to
get further word from home, he was sure she was going to
die. James Mills had been ill too, and, though now out of
danger, Dan felt his beloved friend had come very near
losing his life. Dan always expected the worst.
37 The smallpox epidemic is described in Martin, op. cit.
38 The failure of 20 per cent of Dan's first year class is
stated in the Chicago Medical Journal and Examiner for
May 1 88 1. A partial record of Dan's grades, all that was
available, was furnished me by the Registrar of North-
western University Medical Department. Dr. Charles
Sutherland stated Dan was rather below average as a
medical student.
I was disappointed not to discover more about Dan's
Aunt Charlotte. He mentions her twice in letters to Ander-
son, and with respect. But living descendants could re-
member only that she lived to a great old age and fright-
ened them almost to death when they were children by
getting up in the night and creeping about like a ghost,
tucking covers solicitously over them. No one knew
whether she was a Price or a Wilks.
Price and his wife had separated, despite their five chil-
dren. That was the end of the whirlwind romance that had
begun when Price had persuaded the red-haired, blue-eyed
Matilda Maria Agnes Maduro to elope with him from her
convent school near Poughkeepsie.
CHAPTER IV
The Barber Becomes a Doctor
41 Descriptions of prebacteriological medicine and surgery
and the introduction of modern surgery are drawn from
the following: How We Treat Wounds Today, Robert T.
304 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE Morris, 1886; The Rules of Aseptic and Antiseptic Surgery,
41 Arpad Gerster, 1887; Fifty Years a Surgeon, Robert T.
(Cont.) Morris, 1935; Mtartin, op. cit.; Dudley, op. cit.; American
Doctors of Destiny, Frank J. Jirka, 1940; A Surgeon's Life,
J. M. T. Finney, 1940; Transactions, Southern Surgical and
Gynecological Association, Vol. 24, pp. 609-611, 1911; The
Chicago Medical Journal and Examiner, 1880-1884.
42 I have drawn heavily on Martin, op. cit., for description
of Dan's first operation (Martin does not say whether or
not the patient recovered). The two men were contempo-
raries. Martin was graduated the spring before Dan en-
tered Chicago Medical and during Dan's first year was
serving as interne at Mercy Hospital. The two began at
this time a friendship that lasted for life.
46 There was no hospital in Janesville at this time. Births
took place in the home; perhaps apprentices were not
allowed to attend. Women were more prudish then. Dr.
Palmer, though he did some surgery, undoubtedly took
childbirth cases too. Specialization did not come in the
Midwest until much later. There is no evidence that Dan's
racial mixture had anything to do with his remark that he
could not see childbirth cases in Janesville.
47 The following receipt was found in Dr. Dan's papers
after his death:
"Chicago Aug 22nd 90
"Received from Dan'l H Williams one thousand dollars
payment in full of all demands against him for money
advanced to begin and complete his medical education and
in consideration of the above sum I hereby release him
from all obligations, [signed'] C. H. Anderson."
The handwriting, except for the signature, is in Dr.
Dan's hand. The sum seems much beyond anything that
Dan was borrowing to pay for his room, board and the
fees for his second and third years. The first year he
borrowed money at the bank for his fees. The second year
fees were $91 and the third year fin. He may have paid
only $60, or as much as $97.50, a year for board, depending
upon whether his rate was $3.75 a week or $10 a month.
Even at the higher rate, it appears he borrowed only about
$500 for the three years. The wording of the receipt
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 305
PAGE sounds a little strange, as though some sort of demands
47 were being made upon Dr. Dan at this date, if not by
(Cont.) Harry Anderson, always so good a friend, then perhaps
by George who was just now entering dental school be-
latedly at the age of thirty-five. The debt may have been
paid some time before this date. Dr. Bert Anderson thinks
his father also loaned Dr. Dan money while he was getting
started in practice, but the receipt does not mention this,
and Dr. Anderson was a young child when Dan went to
college and was only fourteen in 1890.
48 DeWolf s work as health commissioner is told by Dud-
ley, op. cit. An editorial in the Chicago Medical Journal
and Examiner for August 1884 says: "No! Chicago will
not have the cholera! She is protected by Vaccination'
from a great deal worse! She has her wash-pot, her cham-
ber-pot, and her drinking cup in the great lake at her feet,
and can look with a smile into the rheumy eyes of the
Tilth Plague!' "
Dudley always remembered Dan, and years later, finish-
ing an operation at St. Luke's before a group of visiting
Southern white doctors, he took occasion to say as he drew
off his rubber gloves: "Gentlemen, I recommend you stay
on for the next operation. It will be performed by the
famous Negro surgeon, Daniel Hale Williams." But the
visitors, loyal to their prejudices, all filed out. Dr. Dan told
the story to Dr. U. G. Dailey, and Dailey told it to me.
Accounts of Fenger are from Bulletin of the Society of
Medical History of Chicago, Vol. I, p. 99, March 1919,
"Christian Fenger: A Biographical Sketch, 1840-1902,"
Coleman Buford, M.D.; Vol. 3, p. 55, January 1923, "Chris-
tian Fenger As I Knew Him," L. L. Me Arthur, M.D.; and
A History of Medicine and Surgery, and Physicians and
Surgeons of Chicago, Endorsed and Published under the
Supervision of the Council of the Chicago Medical Society,
Chicago, 1922. Also letters from Dr. Coleman Buford.
American College of Surgeons records indicate Dr. Dan
served as interne or resident assistant to Mercy Hospital
April i to October i, 1883, but a letter dated March 14,
1947, written to me by Sister Mary Therese, R.N., Medi-
306 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE cal Director of Mercy Hospital, states that hospital records
48 show the internes for the year 1883-1884 were J. F. Pem-
(Cont.) ber, P. Dougherty, W. M. Kelly, and D. Scudder, and that
there is no record that Dan Williams served in this ca-
pacity at Mercy Hospital at any time. We know from his
letters, however, that he did assist in Mercy wards in an
unofficial capacity from April to October 1882.
Dan's beard is revealed in the class photograph sent me
by Dr. Charles Sutherland.
The Chicago Medical Journal and Examiner, March
1883, gives the prize winners of the Class of '83 and de-
scribes Commencement. The program was found in Dr.
James Mills's scrapbook kindly loaned me by his son, Dr.
James Mills, Jr.
CHAPTER v
Operating in a Dining Room
50 A letter from F. V. Cargill, American Medical Associa-
tion, states Dr. Dan secured a license to practice medicine
in the District of Columbia, March 1883 (day not given).
The Official Register of Physicians and Midwives Now
in Practice to Whom Certificates Have Been Issued by the
State Board of Health of Illinois 1877-1886, H. W. Rokker,
State Printer, Springfield, 1886, gives the following entry
for Dr. Dan: "Registered April 18, 1883, Address 3034
Michigan Avenue, Age 28, Certificate issued April 16,
1883, on basis of Chicago Medical College diploma, dated
March 27, 1883, Certificate filed for record April 18,
1883."
The experience of Morgan and Billings in starting prac-
tice is from Martin, op. cit.
Street addresses of the offices of Morgan, Billings and
Dr. Dan are found in the Medical Directory of Illinois for
1883.
51 Description of the colored colony in 1885 is drawn from
Drake and Cayton, op. cit. y and from The Colored Men's
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 307
PAGE Professional and Business Directory of Chicago, and Valu-
51 able Information of the Race in General, I. C. Harris, July
(Cont.) 1885.
Franklyn A. Henderson, who has done considerable re-
search on the early history of the colored colony in Chi-
cago, where his own family were among the first settlers,
states that Henry Hutchinson and George Revels were
two colored doctors in Chicago before the Civil War. I
have found no official record of Revels. H. C. Hutchin-
son, age forty-seven, 406 South Clark Street, registered
January n, 1878, under the Act of May 25, 1877, which
allowed physicians to continue to practice without certifi-
cate who had been practicing in Illinois ten years prior to
July i, 1877; Hutchinson had been practicing in Illinois
nineteen years then, or from 1859.
The late Mrs. George Cleveland Hall told me that Dr.
C. H. McAllister was the only colored doctor in Chicago
when Dr. Dan began practicing there but there seem to
have been three officially registered and one more not
officially registered. The Official Register of Physicians
and Midwives, etc., for 1877-1886, already mentioned,
states that McAllister was graduated from Jefferson Medi-
cal College in 1879, and was issued a certificate April 22,
1879, at the age of thirty-nine. This same volume lists
Woodson L. Simpson, who was graduated from Bennett
College of Eclectic Medicine and Surgery, 1882, age
twenty-eight, and Mary E. Green, also Bennett, 1883, age
thirty-seven. It does not mention J. Milton Williams who
is included with these other doctors in the 1885 Colored
Directory, op. cit.
The fight between the "regulars" and the "irregulars"
was bitter and continued for years. The Eclectics main-
tained a college in Chicago (Bennett Medical College) un-
til 1915 and the Homeopaths held out until 1922 when
Hahnemann Medical College closed its doors. The fight
was perhaps all the more bitter because the regulars them-
selves were confused and changing. The recognition of
disease as well as its treatment was not clear. Lavish over-
dosing with calomel brought rebellion of patients as well
as false prophets, herb doctors, steam doctors, and so-
called Indian doctors with secret cures presumably ob-
tained from the aborigines. The Eclectics scorned all min-
308 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE erals and claimed that the green vegetable tinctures they
51 extracted from roots and herbs would cure all ills; while
(Cont.) they found no panaceas, they did add many valuable drugs
to materia medica. And the Homeopaths with their in-
finitesimal small doses at least allowed a patient to recover
sometimes when the fashionable huge doses of mercury
did not. Out of all the controversy regular medicine
emerged finally secure against the "isms" and the "pathies"
because from time to time it pursued systematic introspec-
tion to eliminate its defects. See History of Medical Prac-
tice in Illinois, compiled and arranged by Lucius H. Zeuch,
M.D., issued by the Illinois State Medical Society, Chicago,
1927, Vol. I, p. 647.
Dr. Dan's office hours are from Harris, op. cit.
According to James Gordon, Dr. Dan roomed In the
home of Charles Poynter and Poynter, when the man was
old, "had the run of Dr. Dan's place up at Idlewild [his
summer home]."
52 Mrs. Jones's remarks about Dr. Dan were told by Theo-
dora Lee Purnell.
Dr. Dan's operation of Mrs. LeBeau was recounted by
her daughter, Julia LeBeau Thompson, who also told how
people called the young physician Dr. Dan, a fact also re-
ported by others.
53 Early operating in private homes, and the experiences
of Billings and Martin, are told in Martin, op. cit.
Dr. U. G. Dailey told of the horseplay among medical
students of those days.
The earliest biographical dictionary in which Dr. Dan's
name has been found R. French Stone, op. cit., 1894
states that Daniel Williams "has been Attending Physician
to the Protestant Orphan Asylum nine years" and that he
is "also Attending Surgeon to the South Side Dispensary,"
etc., Watson, op. cit., 1896, made the dates of the latter
position 1884-1892 and the former 1884-1893. Mather, op.
cit., stated nineteen years later that Dr. Dan took up the
Dispensary job in 1884 and the Orphan Asylum position
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 309
PAGE "on the retirement of Dr. H. P. Hatfield in 1885," and
53 adds that Dr. Dan was "Demonstrator of Anatomy at
(Cont.) Northwestern University Medical School four years."
Who*s Who in America, 1920-1921, gives the same infor-
mation as Watson. Who's Who in American Medicine,
1925, omits the Dispensary and Orphan Asylum connec-
tions, but makes him demonstrator in anatomy at North-
western, 1885-1888. Who^s Who in America, 1926, agrees
with the 1920-1921 volume of that publication. The obitu-
ary notice in The Journal of the American Medical Asso-
ciation, op. cit., omits reference to the Dispensary and the
Orphan Asylum and states he was "Demonstrator of Anat-
omy at his alma mater, 1885-88." A letter from the Refer-
ence Librarian of Northwestern University Medical
School, under date of January 5, 1944, states "The records
in our Dean's office show only the following information
about Dr. Williams: 'Served in South Side Dispensary,
1887-1893?*" Northwestern University Announcements
for these years do not list Dr. Dan as Demonstrator, but
list Frank Billings for 1882 and William E. Morgan for
1883-1886. Another source, a memorial brochure on Bill-
ings, states that Billings was Demonstrator 1882-1886,
which makes Billings overlap with Morgan several years.
Probably there were several demonstrators of anatomy
with one in charge of the others, and quite likely Dr. Dan
did serve among them. "Trying to place a person's rela-
tion to and in a medical school is difficult after years have
passed," Dr. Coleman Buford wrote me. "There are so
many departments and such large numbers in each depart-
ment and so many grades of teachers. ... In the old days
[there were] several persons of equal rank with none of
them [actually] the head of the department."
54 Several doctors, medical students under Dr. Dan, have
written me of their experience in his classes, among them:
Drs. Isaac A. Abt; James Alderson; Paul C. Boomer, who
instigated the sale of iodized table salt; Andy Hall, 1952
chairman of the Fifty Year Club of the Illinois State Medi-
cal Society; Frank C. Jones; Coleman Buford, who served
on the surgical staffs of a half dozen Chicago hospitals and
was Professor of Surgery at Chicago Polyclinic. Several
remember Charlie Mayo '88, one of the famous Minnesota
brothers, as being present.
3io Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE The Chicago City Railway Company has no record of
54 their medical staff in the early years. A newspaper article
(Com.) by Mrs. M. R. Rogers Webb, published in The Colored
American, Washington, D.C., November n, 1893, st ^tes
that Dr. Dan "is on the staff of physicians employed by
the Chicago City Railway Company." A letter from
E. Wyllys Andrews to Hoke Smith, Secretary of the In-
terior (NA), confirms the fact and states his high respect
for Dr. Dan's courtroom work.
The late Julia West Paul told of Dr. Dan's popularity,
his singing and guitar playing.
Dr. Bert Anderson, the only surviving member of Harry
Anderson's family, was only six when his mother died and
has little knowledge of the circumstances of either her
death or Tessie's. He remembered more about Traviata
and Bentley.
55 Clarence Eddy, educated from the age of eleven for a
musical career, was the director of the Hershey School of
Musical Art in Chicago and for seventeen years organist
and choirmaster of the First Presbyterian Church. He
played at the Vienna Exposition 1873, the Paris Exposi-
tion 1889, at the Chicago WorWs Fair in '93, the Pan-
American Exposition 1901, and at the St. Louis Exposition
1904. He was the author of many organ works. That he
accepted Traviata Anderson as a pupil is an indication of
her musical ability.
Jennie L. Avendorph and Emma L. Warren-Mallet
quoted Traviata's remark about her feeling toward Dan.
The Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop and his sister Vic-
toria Bishop Schuster gave the data on their father's life
and Dr. Dan's friendship with their family.
Dan's attendance at Stanton School is stated in Mather,
op. cit. The attacks of whites are recounted in Report on
Schools and Finances of Freedmen, J. W. Alvord, Inspec-
tor, etc., for the years 1866-1870. Dan's clothes are from
a photograph.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 311
56 The Right Reverend William Croswell Doane, D.D.,
LL.D., was the first bishop of the diocese of Albany of the
Episcopal Church; he served 1869-1913.
57 The Nina Pinchback dance incident was told by Chris-
tine Shoecraft Smith, who said it occurred before she met
Dr. Dan, which was in 1889.
The late Julia West Paul first told me of the Blake
affair. The history of the Blake family and of Kittie May
was told by Harriet L. Van Vranken, Henrietta Van
Vranken Americ, and Maymie Van Vranken Gibson, all
of whom confirmed Mrs. Paul's story. Harriette Kennedy
Brown told me her mother (a Williams) and her father,
David Kennedy, Dan's HolKdaysburg chum, knew Dr.
Dan had suffered a great blow.
Bismarck Pinchback's infatuation with one of the Blake
girls was told me by Mrs. Walter Pinchback.
St. Agnes School for Girls was founded by Bishop
Doane in 1870. It originally stood near the Cathedral on
Elk Street in Albany, but in 1932 was moved to the
suburbs.
59 Surmises as to why Dr. Dan did not marry are stated in
the article in The Colored American, November n, 1893,
entitled "Chicago's Pride," by M. R. Rogers-Webb.
Dr. Dan's attendance at the Ninth International Medical
Congress is determined by Who's Who in America, Vol.
II, 1920-1921. For Mills's trip to Europe and other facts
of his life, see Portrait and Biographical Album of Rock
County, Wisconsin, Acme Publishing Co., Chicago, 1889.
Persons and events connected with the Congress are taken
from the published Proceedings.
60 Changing Chicago is described in Architecture of Old
Chicago, Thomas E. Tallmadge, University of Chicago
Press, 1941. Tallmadge mentions that Patti sang "Home
Sweet Home" at the dedication of the Auditorium. That
Clarence Eddy played the organ is stated in Marquis'
Handbook of Chicago, A Complete History, Reference
312 Dmiel Hale Williams
PAGE Book and Guide to the City, A. N. Marquis & Co., 3d ed.,
60 1887. Dr. Bert Anderson said Traviata accompanied Patti
(Com.) on several occasions.
Who's Who in Colored America, 1927, and Dr. Bert
Anderson gave data about George Anderson. He was grad-
uated from the Chicago College of Dental Surgery in 1892,
at the age of thirty-seven, and did not marry until he was
fifty-three. His wife was the former Ella M. Murphy. He
practiced forty years in St. Louis and served as president
of the Mound City Dental Society. He died in 1938 at the
age of seventy-two.
Theodora Lee Purnell herself told me of Dr. Dan's gift
and her reaction to it.
6 1 James Gordon told anecdotes of Dr. Dan's friendliness
and popularity, as did Harriett Curtis Hall. "Widow Barr,"
mother of Elmer Barr and sister of Julia Barr (Mrs.
Louis B.) Anderson, was one he advised as to her in-
vestments.
Dr. Dan's ownership of real estate at this time was re-
counted by Marie Hudlin whose mother rented an apart-
ment in one of the two red brick buildings he owned in
the 2900 block on Armour Avenue, See also the Rogers-
Webb article, op. cit.
62 The late Louis B. Anderson told me how Dr. Dan at-
tended all the churches and James Gordon mentioned the
five-dollar bill at Old Bethel. Mrs. James R. White told
of his attending All Souls. The church, however, has no
record of membership.
Louis B. Anderson also told me of Dr. Dan's member-
ship in the Hamilton Club, as did others. The fact is also
mentioned in Watson, op. cit.
Dr. Dan's appointment to the Illinois State Board of
Health and dates of his tenure are shown in the Execu-
tive Register of the Governor and are quoted in a letter
from Margaret C. Norton, Archivist.
Work of the Board of Health during Dr. Dan's tenure
is taken from the Annual Reports of the Board, and from
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 313
PAGE The Medical Journal and Examiner, December 1888, arti-
62 cle by EL A. Johnson, "The Influence of the Work of the
(Cont.) Illinois Medical Practice Act upon Medical Education."
63 Historical aspects of disease in Illinois and methods used
against it are discussed in The Rise and Fall of Disease in
Illinois, Isaac D. Rawlings, M.S., M.D., in collaboration
with William A. Evans, M.D., D.P.H., Gottfried Koehler,
M.D., and Baxter K. Richardson, A.B., Vols. I and II, pub-
lished by the State Department of Public Health, 1927.
A list of health measures passed by the Illinois General
Assembly during the years 1889-1893 was given me in a
communication from Edward J. Barrett, Secretary of State
and State Librarian.
CHAPTER VI
First Interracial Hospital, 1891
66 James Gordon, only surviving member of the original
committee, told me the story of the founding of Provident
Hospital, gave me the names of those connected with the
task, and incidents related to it. The published annual re-
ports of Provident Hospital for 1891-1915 were also used.
The history of trained nursing in Chicago is drawn
from: Chicago Medical Society, History of Medicine, etc.,
op. cit.; A History of Nursing, Deborah MacLurg Jensen,
R.N., M.A., St. Louis, 1943; A History of Nursing,
M. Adelaid Nutting and Lavinia L. Dock, 2 vols., New
York, 1907; A History of Nursing From the Earliest Times
to the Present Day with Special Reference to the Work of
the Last Thirty Years, Nutting and Dock, 4 vols., New
York and London, 19123 Mercy Hospital Annual Report,
op. cit.
A few pupils of the Illinois Training School for Nurses
had been admitted to Cook County Hospital wards while
Dr. Dan was in Chicago Medical College, l?ut it was three
years after his graduation before the Illinois Training
School had adopted modern graded instruction. Mercy
Hospital had had no trained nurses when Frank Pernber and
Dan had cared for the obstetrical wards and did not ven-
Darnel Hale Williams
PAGE ture upon training them until 1889; the institution did not
66 yet have its state charter in December 1890. St. Luke's had
(Cent.) started nurses' training two years before Mercy, and
Wesley had only begun this very year (1890).
See Dailey, op. cit., for statement that Dr. Dan first had
the idea of a hospital "four or five years after graduation,"
which would be three or four years before Provident was
organized. Dr. Dan's own speech at Nashville (Publica-
tions No, 8) states: "Years before I was able to interest the
people of Chicago in a hospital . . ."
67 Difficulties of securing hospital staff appointments are
recounted in a manuscript copy of Dr. William Morgan's
speech at the opening of Mercy Hospital Clinic, furnished
me by Dr. Coleman G. Buf ord.
68 Account of Negro enterprise in Chicago at this time is
from Drake and Cayton, op. cit., and Harris, op. cit.
69 Lloyd Wheeler's niece, Mrs. James R. White, told of
the marriage of her uncle to Raynie Petit. His role in race
work is spoken of in Harris, op. cit.
Political data about Marshall, Denison, Theodore Jones,
John G. Jones and Morris are found in Negro Politicians:
The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago, Harold F. Gosnell,
Chicago, 1935.
70 The modest start of Chicago hospitals is given in Chi-
cago Medical Society, History of Medicine, etc., op. cit.
Christine Shoecraft Smith told of meetings held in the
flat of her aunt, Mrs. J. C. Plummer.
71 Indignation Jones's remark is quoted from Moxcey,
op. cit.
7* John M. Mallet, who attended one of the early mass
meetings, told of Edward H. Morris's resistance because
of his real estate interests and the late Robert L. Taylor
confirmed the fact.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS
315
PAGE
7 2
(Cont.)
73
74
75
76
77
Dr. Dan's remarks about foreigners caring for their sick
is from his Nashville speech. Publications No. 8.
Contributions are cited in the first Annual Report of
Provident Hospital.
A photostatic copy of the articles of incorporation was
furnished me by the Secretary of State of Illinois.
The incident of the old preacher's curse is mentioned in
Dr. Dan's Nashville speech (Publications No. 8). His
name is given in a radioscript (undated) prepared by
H. L. Fishel, which I saw in Dr. Dailey's files.
Lillie Smith Alexander told of the decorations and
booths at the opening party. James Gordon gave the other
details.
The two elderly ladies treated by J. M. Johnson were
Mrs. Nellie Grant and Mrs. Georgie Anne Davis.
Jesse Binga told me of his own contributions. The An-
nual Reports give the rest.
The interest of these doctors was more than perfunc-
tory. Isham and Billings each came twice that first year to
lecture to the student nurses, while Jaggard and Starkey
carne four times each.
James R. White, an early Provident doctor, told me of
the qualifications of Bentley and Wesley, which are con-
firmed in Who's Who in Colored America, Vol. I, 1927.
That Dr. Dan thought well of young Curtis was told me
by his sister, Harriett Curtis Hall, who related also how
the men scrubbed the operating room.
The late Mrs. George C Hall told me her husband got
his start in the red light district. Dr. James R. White said
this was one reason Hall was not acceptable on the staff,
but the main reason was his inferior schooling; this was
also said by the late James Hale Porter. Porter sym-
pathized with Hall.
3 1 6 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE Miss Marion Hull was principal of the training school
77 for nurses for the first year and, according to the Trus-
(Cont.) tees' Report, "deserves much praise for efficient work."
The student nurses too came in for praise. Their names
were Emma A. Reynolds, Lillian E. Haywood, Florence
Phillips, Bertha I. Estes, Ada L. Jones, Luella E. Roberson
and Lillie M. Davis. Not all seven were graduated at the
end of eighteen months, though they may have been grad-
uated later. In his Nashville speech, Dr. Dan says: "Only
seven years ago, Provident sent out its first class 'of three
graduate nurses." The Third Annual Report of Provident
says: "As the term of study in the Training School is
eighteen months, there have been but two graduating
classes, the first consisting of four, and the last of six
nurses. There are now seven pupil nurses . . ."
79 Data about the Ball was found in an invitation and a
clipping from The Appeal, February 27, 1892, both in
JNA.
Prevalence of accident cases from the stockyards was
related by Dr. Isabella Garnett Butler.
Material on Robinson is drawn from an article by Vic-
tor Robinson, M.D., in The American Journal of Clinical
Medicine, Vol. 29, No. 4, April 1922; also from A Group
of Distinguished Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago,
F. M. Sperry, compiler, Chicago, 1904, and The Medical
Fortnightly, St. Louis, Vol. XXXVI, No. i, July 10, 1909,
article by T. G. Atkinson.
Dr. H. W. Cheney told of Dr. Dan's taking the post-
graduate bacteriology course.
Dr. Dan's study with Robinson is mentioned in his pa-
per; see Publications No i.
80 The story of the South Side Medico-Social Society is
told in Martin, op. cit.
The development of the treatment for appendicitis is
drawn from the following: The Cyclopedia of Medicine,
Surgery and Specialties, George M. Piersol, editor in chief,
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 317
PAGE Vol. I, id ed., 1939, article on Appendicitis by J. Mont-
80 gomery Deaver, M.D.; /. B. Murphy, Stormy Petrel of
(Cont.) Surgery, Loyal Davis, M.D., M.S., Ph.D., New York, 1938;
The Doctors Mayo, Helen B. Clapesattle, Minneapolis,
1941; Western Medical Reporter, A Monthly Epitome of
Medical Progress, Vol. XI, Chicago, 1889, for Proceedings
of the Chicago Medical Society, November 4, 1889, paper
by J. B. Murphy on "Early Treatment of Perityphlitis."
8 1 Fenger's article and his remarks appear in the same jour-
nals in which Dr. Dan's article appears.
82 Dr. Dan's work on the Sanitary Board for the World's
Fair is mentioned in the article by Rogers- Webb, op. cit.
Zellie Ridgley Bennett told me of her visit with Dr.
Dan's sisters to the Fair. James Gordon told of the visit of
Frederick Douglass.
Various evidences of kinship between Dr. Dan and
Frederick Douglass exist. Dr. Dan's nephew, the late
Raphael D. Williams, told me his grandmother, Dr. Dan's
mother, called Douglass "cousin." According to Alice
Thornton Butler, Douglass referred to her and her sisters
as "my little kinsfolk" and took them in his arms when
their mother Mazie Price Thornton, a cousin of Dr. Dan
and a granddaughter of Ann Wilks Price, took them up
to the platform after one of Douglass's famous speeches.
Mrs. Butler told me Douglass visited often in the home of
Ann's daughter-in-law in Harrisburg and on one occasion
took one of the children, Jennie, home with him and
planned to adopt her, but Jennie grew homesick in Roch-
ester and returned to her mother. Ann Wilks Price, Dr.
Dan's grandmother, was born a slave, according to her
great-granddaughter, Blanche Thornton Parnall, and was
bought and freed by Henry Price, her husband. Sarah
Jennings, a great-granddaughter of Peter Shorter, kin of
Smith Price and Henry Price, states that the Prices
"bought their wives on the Eastern Shore," which was the
birthplace of Frederick Douglass. When Douglass, who
had Indian as well as white and African blood, published
his memoirs (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Writ-
318 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE ten by Himself, new revised ed., De Wolfe, Fiske & Co.,
82 Boston, 1892, pp. 70-71) he related, among other aneo
(Cont.) dotes of the 7ooo~acre Lloyd plantation where he was born,
the story of William Wilks. Wilks was supposedly the il-
legitimate son of Colonel Lloyd by a favored slave woman.
He looked so much like Murray Lloyd, the Colonel's legit-
imate son, and enjoyed so many favors that Murray con-
nived until Wilks, who had first been given a gold watch
and chain, was sent off to be sold at the auction block in
Baltimore. There, to everyone's surprise, Wilks outbid all
would-be purchasers and bought his own freedom. At the
time it was supposed, says Douglass, that the hand that had
presented the gold watch and chain had also provided the
purchase money, but Douglass goes on to say that he later
learned that Wilks had many friends in Baltimore and
Annapolis who had united to save him. It now appears that
these "many friends" were one man, Ann Wilks's husband,
Dr. Dan's grandfather. On March 14, 1832, Henry Price
manumitted a mulatto by the name of William "Wilkes,"
aged about forty, of "bright" complexion, raised on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland. All details fit in with Doug-
lass's anecdote. Undoubtedly Henry Price bought and set
free William Wilks because he was a close relative of his
wife. Undoubtedly, too, William and Ann Wilks were
relatives of Frederick Douglass and perhaps through their
white blood, rather than their Indian or African blood.
An account of Douglass's speech at the Fair may be
read in the Chicago Tribune for August 26, 1893.
83 Dr. Isabella Garnett Butler and Jessie Sleet Scales told
me of their training at Provident. Blanche Williams Stubbs
said her sister, Mabel Williams, trained there too.
Other Provident nurses in the early classes more than
fulfilled the dreams of Dr. Dan. Emma Reynolds, the occa-
sion for the founding of Provident Hospital, went on and
on and finally became an M.D. and practiced in New Or-
leans. Isabella Garnett became an M.D. too and with her
husband Dr. Butler established a community hospital for
the colored people of Evanston. Annie Schultz was another
to become an M.D. All these were members of the very
first classes, started on their way by Dr. Dan's vigorous
training.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 319
PAGE Hattie Curtis Hall told of bringing the lunch basket
84 when she was a little girl.
The late Louis B. Anderson told me of Judge Barnes's
influence in winning the support of George H. Webster.
CHAPTER VII
"Sewed Up His Heart!"
85 Date and details of the heart operation are taken from
Dr. Dan's official report. See Publications No. 4.
86 Authorities consulted concerning the operative history
of the heart and modern procedures include: American
Journal of Medical Sciences, January 1883, quoting from
Journal de Medecine de Paris, October 28, 1882; Chicago
Medical Journal and Examiner, Vol. 46, January-June
1883: "Heart Puncture and Heart Sutures as Therapeutic
Procedures," John B. Roberts, M.D.; Surgery, C. W.
Mansell Mollin, F.R.C.S., ist ed., 1891; The International
Journal of Surgery, August 1893; Annual of the Universal
Medical Sciences and Analytical Index: A Report of the
Progress of the General Sanitary Sciences throughout the
World, ed. Charles E. Sajous, M.D., Paris, and others, Vol.
Ill, 1896, article of J. McFadden Gaston, M.D., on "Tho-
racic Surgery"; British Medical Journal, 1896, Vol. II,
pp. i, 440, Turner; American Year Book of Medicine and
Surgery, George M. Gould, ed., Philadelphia, 1896, 1897,
1898; Lancet, London, 1897, Vol. I, pp. 1305-1306, also
Vol. 198, 1920, pp. i, 73, 134, "The Surgery of the Heart,"
Sir Charles Ballance, speech before the Royal Chirurgical
Society of England, December n, 1919, reprinted in three
installments; Medical Record: A Weekly Journal of Medi-
cine and Surgery, ed. George F. Shrady, A.M., M.D., New
York, 1897, Vol. 51, No. i, Whole No. 1365, pp. 304, 790;
Philadelphia Medical Journal, 1900, Vol. V, pp. 11770.,
"Wounds of the Heart with a report of seventeen cases of
suture," L. L. Hill, and May 3, 1902, article by Nieterl;
Medical News, Vol. LXXIX, No. 23, December 7, 1901,
p. 88 1, article by George Tully Vaughan, M.D.; A Manual
of Modern Surgery, John Chalmers DaCosta, 1896, 2d ed.,
320 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE 1898, also his Modern Surgery, 4th ed., 1903; Journal of
86 the American Medical Association, Vol. LII, No. 6, Feb-
(Cont.) ruary 6, 1909, p. 429; article by George Tully Vaughan,
M.D., "Suture of Wounds of the Heart"; Benjamin Merrill
Ricketts, M.D., F.A.C.S.; Surgery of the Heart and Lungs,
1904, Surgery of the Thorax and Its Viscera, Cincinnati,
1918, also numerous articles in periodicals (Ricketts's ap-
pearance at the International Society of Surgery is men-
tioned in programs in his personal scrapbook now in pos-
session of the Library of the Academy of Medicine, New
York City, his appearance before the Western Surgical
Association is reported in the Journal of the National Med-
ical Association, Vol. 4, No. i, January-March, 1912); The
Archives of Surgery, Vol. XI, 1925, "The Significance of
the Pericardium in Relation to Surgery of the Heart,"
Claude S. Beck, M.D., and Richmond L. Moore, M.D.;
Annals of Medical History, Vol. VIII, 1926, "The Opera-
tive Story of the Heart," Claude S. Beck, M.D., pp. 224-
233; Thoracic Surgery, Ferdinand Sauerbruch and Law-
rence O'Shaughnessy, 1937.
88 Dr. Coleman Buford told me of Morgan's receiving an
invitation from Dr. Dan to attend the operation, and of
his own presence and reaction. Names of other doctors
present are taken from Dr. Dan's official report. The
presence of Mabel Williams as surgical nurse was told by
her sister, Blanche Williams Stubbs.
The list of modern equipment lacking in Dr. Dan's day
was given me by the late Dr. Carl G. Roberts.
92 The newspaper account of the heart operation is in the
Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, July 22, 1893.
93 Dr. Dan's postoperative study of the case with his stu-
dents was recounted by Dr. J. W. McDowell, who said he
helped abstract Dr. Dan's notes for the published report.
It may have been McDowell who studied the Index Medi-
cus. Examination of the Index Medicus for the years 1887-
1899 reveals the change in editorship, the frequent lengthy
delays in publication, and the inconsistent, garbled state
of the indexing.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 321
PAGE The article in the Cyclopedia of Medicine, Surgery and
93 Specialties is by Arthur M. Shipley, 2d ed. rev., Vol. 3,
(Com.) 1944, Philadelphia.
94 Record of the case of Dalton's patient, Eugene Lud-
ringer, was given me by the Medical Director of the
St. Louis City Hospital. It was not possible to discover
what happened to him after his discharge from the hospital
or how long he lived.
For accounts of Dalton's operation, see "Proceedings of
the Mississippi. Valley Medical Association Meeting at Hot
Springs, Arkansas, November 23, 1894; Transactions of
the Medical Association of the State of Missouri at its 37th
Annual Session, Lebanon, Missouri, May 15, 1894; The
St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. LXVIII,
January-June 1895; Annals of Surgery, February 1895,
Vol. XXI, January-June 1895, p. 147.
Ricketts, in his voluminous but poorly arranged and
badly edited Surgery of the Heart and Lungs, 1904, in-
cluded, besides the cases of Dr. Dan and Dalton, the fol-
lowing which antedates both:
"Reed R. Harvey, during the year 1887, had a case of
stab wound in the left chest over the apex of the heart. He
removed a section of the sixth rib and the clots in the
pericardial sac and sutured the pericardium and cutaneous
structures. The patient is acting as a policeman in Shelby,
Ohio. (Personal communication)."
I assume that Ricketts is here referring to Robert Harvey
Reed, sanitary pioneer of Ohio, who led an active profes-
sional life from the time he acquired his M.D. in 1874 unt il
his death in 1907, and wrote and published voluminously.
If he had performed so important an operation it seems he
would surely have included it in his many publications; if
he did, I could not find it. Ricketts, who quotes this case,
in later editions dropped it along with Dalton's, and not
once but again and again gives the credit for priority to
Dr. Dan. In medical articles too numerous to mention and
in speeches all over the country, for over a decade, he re-
peatedly said what he stated in his Surgery of the Thorax
and Its Viscera, 1918, that "cardiorrhaphy was first done in
1893 by Williams, a Negro physician of Chicago, and the
patient recovered." Ricketts was a charter member of the
American College of Surgeons along with Dr. Dan.
322 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE In October 1892, the Chicago Clinical Review, Vol. I,
94 No. i, under the editorship of George H. Cleveland, M.D.,
(Com.) and Albert I. Bouffleur, M.D., published an article by
Bouffler concerning his case of April 18, 1891. He stated
that when confronted by a stab wound of the abdomen
that had penetrated upward and punctured the diaphragm,
he had taken one stitch in the diaphragm which at that
point coincided with the pericardial wall. He had thus
stopped a serious hemorrhage and saved his patient's life.
Bouffleur's operation was a transabdominal one, not tho-
racic, and he was not confronted with the problems of en-
trance into the thorax.
Argument as to priority has not usually been between
claimants for Dalton versus Dr. Dan, but between claim-
ants for Dr. Dan versus various European operators. Un-
fortunately neither Dalton's nor Dr. Dan's daring and suc-
cessful operations were reported at the nth International
Medical Congress in Rome in 1895, as far as I could find.
There Del Vecchio showed the healed wounds in the
hearts of dogs following suture and this gave new impetus
to European surgeons. Within a year three attempts were
made on humans. Cappelen of Christiania essayed to suture
a left ventricle on September 4, 1895, but in operating
accidentally cut a branch of the coronary artery, probably
with the needle. Two and a half days later his patient
died, with the presence of pericarditis and various bacteria
in the exudate. In March 1896, Farina of Rome again
essayed to suture a case and again his patient died within
a few days. On September 9, 1896, Rehn of Frankfort took
three sutures in the right ventricle. He did not suture the
pericardium but packed it with gauze and left in drains.
Infection developed and, while his patient eventually re-
covered, it was only after prolonged illness. In 1897 Par-
rozzani reported two cases: one, a suture of the left ventri-
cle, recovered; the other, a suture of the right ventricle,
died on the second day due to a cut in the mterventricular
septum.
The complete reversal of the medical profession's nega-
tivism in Dr. Dan's day was voiced at the 1914 meeting of
the American Medical Association when Dr. Axel Were-
lius of Chicago said: "No injury of the heart, no matter
how violent, should be considered hopeless." I have been
particularly happy to note the following headline in the
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 323
PAGE Ne<w York Times, November 26, 1946: "GIRL, 5, DOOMED
94 TO INVALIDISM AT BIRTH, DANCES ON WAY HOME AFTER HEART
SURGERY."
95 George Albert Cotton has been declared several times
to be Dr. Dan's first heart case. His name of course does
not agree with Dr. Dan's official report. I interviewed Cot-
ton. His account indicated he was operated on in the sec-
ond building occupied by Provident Hospital. He spoke
persistently of the elevator; there was no elevator in the
three-story flat building occupied 1891-1895 where the
first operation was performed in July 1893. Cotton did not
know the date of his operation nor even his own age. His
brother, Henry Cotton, engineer at Provident for a num-
ber of years, told the late Dr. Roberts that he (Henry) was
born in 1869 an d his brother Albert more than two years
later, that the family moved to Chicago in the year of the
Fair, 1893, that he (Henry) went to the Dakotas two or
more years later, and that the operation was performed
on Albert while Henry was living in the Dakotas. There-
fore, undoubtedly Dr, Dan operated on Cotton after his
return to Chicago from Washington in 1898.
For Dr. Dan's later operations on the chest, see Publica-
tions No. 12.
Fuller's operation is reported in the Journal of Surgery,
Gynecology, and Obstetrics, 1916, Vol. XXII, p. 747, "Sur-
gical Repair of a Stab Wound of the Pericardium."
That operations on the heart are still hazardous was
stated by Dr. N. C. Gilbert, Professor of Medicine and
Chairman of the Department of Medicine, Northwestern
University Medical Department, and Senior Attending
Physician at St. Luke's Hospital, Chicago. Dr. Gilbert at-
tended both Dr. Dan and his wife.
Statistics on heart operations were given by Dr. Myra
Logan.
The incident of Cornish's return was related by the
nurse, Jessie Sleet Scales, who was present.
324 Daniel Hale Williams
CHAPTER VIII
A National Task
PAGE
97 As Republican Postmaster General ten years before,
Gresham had driven the Louisiana Lottery from the mails.
He was himself spoken of as presidential timber, but his
convictions against the protective tariff had led him to
abandon his leadership of the Republican Party and throw
his support to Cleveland. He was a great prize for the
Democrats and for that reason was wanted in the Cabinet.
See Dictionary of American "Biography, Vol. VII, 1931.
Gresham's suggestion that Dr. Dan apply is recounted
by Dr. Dan at a committee hearing, see Senate Document
185, Vol. 8, 55th Congress, ist Session.
See NA for the applications of Dr. Dan and others, their
recommendations, correspondence and other data on Dr.
Dan's injury and illness (Lillie Smith Alexander said ampu-
tation was advised), the Annual Reports of Freedmen's
Hospital from 1891-1898.
In addition I drew on Howard University Catalogues
for 1894, 1895, and 1896; and on Howard University Medi-
cal Department: A Historical, Biographical and Statistical
Souvenir , Daniel Smith Lamb, 1900; on House of Rep-
resentatives Report No. 776, Part III, 55th Congress, 2nd
Session; on Senate Document 185, op. cit.; on Black Re-
construction, W. E. B. DuBois, New York, 1935, and other
miscellaneous material in NA. Several photographs were
useful.
Personal reminiscences of this period were furnished by
Harriett Shadd Butcher, Zellie Ridgley Bennett, Rebecca
West, the late Dr. William A. Warfield, Anna Evans Mur-
ray, Mary Church Terrell, Dr. Henry W. Furniss, Dr.
Duvall E. Colley, Dr. Daniel Smith, and the former nurses
Katherine Gibson Brooks, Elizabeth Tyler Barringer,
and the late Edith M. Carter.
99 There had been a scattering of colored doctors in the
country even before the American Revolution. Now a few
were beginning to undertake surgery - Nathan F. Mossell
in Philadelphia, Ferdinand A. Stewart and R. F. Boyd in
Nashville, John E. Hunter in Lexington, Kentucky. You
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 325
PAGE could count them on the fingers of one hand and all were
99 neophytes; there was no one of a caliber to recommend
(Com.) Dr. Dan. Some history of the Negro doctor in America
may be gathered from: The Negro in Medicine, John A.
Kenny, Tuskegee, 1912 (brochure); Who's Who in Phila-
delphia: A Collection of Thirty Biographical Sketches of
Colored People, Charles Frederick White, African Meth-
odist Episcopal Book Concern, 1912; Negro Year Book,
1912, Monroe N. Work, ed.; Journal of Negro His-
tory, Vol. I, p. 104, "Historic Background of the Negro
Physician, Kelley Miller," 1916; Southern Workman, Vol.
63, pp. 140-142, May 1934, "The Negro Physician," H. A.
CalHs; The Negro Professional Man and the Community,
Carter G. Woodson, The Associated Publishers, Washing-
ton, 1934; Negro Builders and Heroes, Benjamin Brawley,
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1937; The Negro College
Graduate, Charles S. Johnson, Chapel Hill, North Caro-
lina, 1938; The Negro, Too, in American History, Merl R.
Eppse, National Education Publishing Co., 1938.
102 Traviata Anderson Bendey's illness was told me by her
brother, Dr. Bert Anderson, and others, and is mentioned
in the Rogers- Webb article, op. cit.
104 For data on Jeremiah Rankin see Dictionary of Ameri-
can Biography, Vol. XV, 1935.
105 Description of Dr. Dan's quarters is from a photograph
furnished by Dr. Dan's niece, Pearl Barbour Marchant.
no The first four internes were J. Seth Hills, J. W. Mitchell,
E. D. WilHston and William A. Warfield. These served
in the autumn of 1894 and early winter of 1895. When Dr.
Dan made his first Annual Report in July 1895, the internes
then serving were Jackson B. Shephard, William A. War-
field, James C. Erwin, Henry W. Furniss, and Charles I.
West. Tenure was for one year. Dr. Dan made it clear
that future applicants were to be chosen by competitive
examination, the number depending upon the needs of the
hospital.
in A copy of Dr. Dan's circular letter soliciting enrollment
of student nurses is found in BTW.
326 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE The five dollars a month was not pay for services, Dr.
112 Dan told the student nurses. As with the internes, the
training given and the profession acquired were an ample
equivalent, but this sum should enable any young woman
without pecuniary resources, he said, to enter upon her
professional career free from debt.
116 Dr. Dan argued well enough on the virtues of the
trained nurse, but he might have argued even better could
he have peered only a few years into the future. Freed-
man's first two classes alone sent trained graduate nurses
to seven different states in the United States outside of the
District of Columbia, one to Nicaragua and another to
Canada. Within a half dozen years, graduates were ex-
tending this training to others. Three graduates were su-
perintendentsin Kansas City, Charlotte, and St. Louis.
Four were head nurses in New York City, at Tuskegee,
in Baltimore and in Washington, D.C. Three were school
nurses at Clarke University, Atlanta; at Slater School,
Winston, North Carolina; and at Edward Waters Uni-
versity, Jacksonville. All over the country the stirring in-
fluence of the new colored trained nurse was felt. By 1902
Freedmen's no longer had to have a white superintendent;
Sarah Fleetwood, graduate in the first class, came back to
take over the job.
117 Dr. Shadd's young daughter, Hattie, hated Dr. Dan how-
ever. He gave her a framed quotation on Friendship; it
was long and, worst of all, it was in Latin. And her father
made her memorize every word of it.
CHAPTER IX
"Snatched from the Womb"
118 The account of the operation on the dwarf is drawn
from Dr. Dan's published report. See Publications No. n.
The late Edith M. Carter, student nurse at the rime, added
other details.
119 The quotation concerning eclampsia is from Transac-
tions of the Gynecological Society of Boston, 1891, Vol.
1 6, p. in, and from Obstetrics, New York, 1900, Vol. 2,
p. 92.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 327
PAGE The brief historical remarks on the Caesarean section
119 are drawn from the Bulletin of the Society of Medical
(Cont.) History of Chicago, Vol. IV, January 1935, No. 4, p. 414;
"An Inquiry into the History of Caesarean Section," Ken-
neth L. PickrelL
120 Drs. U. G. Dailey and N. C. Gilbert both told me Dr.
Dan observed Kelley's operations. Dr. Dan could watch
Kelley operate because he was fair-skinned, and for the
same reason he could take Warfield with him. A darker
young man, named Kinniebrew, who wished to enroll at
Johns Hopkins at this time, was refused and finally took a
job as a janitor and picked up what information he could
while dusting. (Letter from the late Dr. Carl Roberts.)
The routine Dr. Dan followed in preparing his hands
for the operation is taken from reminiscences of the late
Dr. John A. Kenney, interne at Freedmen's soon after Dr.
Dan left; see NMA Jnl, Vol. 33, No. 5, pp. 203-214, Sep-
tember 1941.
121 Dr. William S. Halsted of Johns Hopkins, in love with
the head nurse whose hands suffered from immersion in
the antiseptic solutions, saw the heavy rubber gloves
brought from Germany by Dr. William H. Welch for
autopsies, and had thin ones made for his nurse, later his
wife. Assistants began to use the gloves too and finally
surgeons did; from being a protection for the hands, these
gloves became an aseptic protection for the patient. (A
Surgeon's Life, Dr. J. M. T. Finney, 1940.)
122 The German farmer's case of tumor is taken from an
old clipping furnished by Dr. Dan's niece, Pearl Barbour
Marchant, and from Dr. Dan's own report; see Publica-
tions No. 7.
The operation on young Daniel Murray was recounted
by Dr. H. W. Furniss and confirmed by the lad's mother.
123 The second Caesarean section, with the 1 8-pound tumor,
is described from Dr. Dan's official report. See Publications
No. ii.
124 Dr. Dan's costume is from a photograph.
328 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE The late Edith Carter, former student nurse, told of
125 Dr. Dan's uncanny diagnostic ability. The modern damage
suit is taken from the New York Times, April 25, 1947.
Dr. Smith reported Dr. Dan's Caesarean operations at
the meeting of March 9, 1898; see Transactions of the
Medical Society of the District of Columbia, Vol. Ill, Janu-
ary-December 1898, pp. 67-69. For Johnson's remark, see
Transactions, Vol. I, March i896~January 1897, p. 61,
meeting of April 22, 1896. Will Mayo had performed a
similar successful operation in the fall of '95, though he
had attempted the vaginal route first and had only per-
formed a Caesarean section after his initial attack had
failed. That same fall, John B. Murphy, in removing a
fibroid tumor, found to his surprise that his patient was
pregnant and had then to remove the uterus and foetus
as well as the tumor. (For Mayo's case see The Doctors
Mayo, H. B. Clapesattle, 1943, p. 302. For Murphy's case,
see his paper "Fibromyoma Complicating Pregnancy; Fi-
broma of Vaginal Wall," Transactions, Chicago Patho-
logical Society, from December 1895 to April 1897, Vol.
II, p. i.) There was no doubt that Dr. Dan stood, as Frank-
lin Martin said, at the top of the medical profession, not
only in Chicago, but in the nation abreast of the ablest
and sometimes ahead of them.
127 Dr. Dan's participation in the Medico-Chirurgical So-
ciety is found in The First Negro Medical Society: A His-
tory of the Medico-Chirurgical Society of the District of
Columbia, 1884-1939, W. Montague Cobb, A.B., M.D.,
Ph.D., Washington, 1939.
The early history of the NMA and Dr. Dan's role in it
was told me by the late Dr. John A. Kenney. See also Ken-
ney's brochure, The Negro in Medicine, Tuskegee, 1913,
and Forty Cords of Wood, J. Edward Perry, M.D., Lin-
coln University Press, 1947. The American Medical Asso-
ciation had ruled that national membership should be de-
pendent upon state membership, and many state societies
tried to hold back the rise of colored doctors by excluding
them from the benefits of membership. The idea for the
national organization did not originate with Dr. Dan, but
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 329
PAGE with I. Garland Penn, Negro Commissioner in charge of
127 the Negro Exhibit at the Cotton States and International
(Cont.) Exposition the same man who invited Booker Washing-
ton to give the address that launched him upon natipnal
political leadership of the race. The National Medical
Association was formed in Atlanta in the closing days of
the Exposition. Dr. R. F. Boyd of Nashville was the first
president.
128 Dr. Duvall E. Colley (the former student barber) and
William E. Cobb told of the Sunday clinics. Mr. Cobb was
an ardent attender and perhaps as a result educated his son
to be a doctor. At this writing Dr. W. Montague Cobb,
Ph.D., M.D., is editor of the Journal of the National Medi-
cal Association.
130 Use of a wash boiler for sterilizer is told in Kenney's
article, NMA Jnl, Vol. 33, No. 5, pp. 213-214, September
1941.
CHAPTER X
Dr. Dan's Job in Jeopardy
131 Dr. Dan told of Douglass's remarks to him in his Nash-
ville speech. See Publications No. 8.
Date of Gresham's death is from the Chicago Tribune
and the New York Times, May 28, 1895; Douglass's from
the Dictionary of American Biography.
132 Hoke Smith's resignation from the cabinet is told in the
Dictionary of American Biography.
The characterization of the presidential campaign of
1896 is from The Rise of American Civilization, Charles
and Mary Beard, new edition, New York, 1936.
The Washington Bee throughout the winter and spring
of 1897 commented continuously on the Freedmen's strug-
gle, which may be traced in detail in NA.
1 34 Dr. Henry Furniss, Kate Brooks Gibson, the late Caroline
Parke, Katie Johnson, and Mrs. Clarence Evans furnished
the social items, while the Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop
told of Dr. Dan's visit to New York and Armonk.
330 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE The Reverend C. M. C. Mason's story is told in Men of
135 Maryland, Rev. Geo. F. Bragg, Jr., D.D., Baltimore, 1925.
136 The Board of Medical Examiners of Maryland confirmed
the fact Warfield failed to pass the Maryland examination.
137 The hearing on Freedmen's Hospital is recorded in de-
tail in Senate Document No. 185, op. cit. Contemporary
issues of Harper's Weekly proved good sources for data
on the committee members, while Harriet Shadd Butcher
described Purvis and told Lynch's story. His political
standing was described by Emmett J. Scott.
142 According to Scott, the three important Negro political
leaders at this time were Lynch, Senator Blanch K. Bruce,
and James B. Mathews. Mathews had been associated with
Dr. Dan's father in the early Negro conventions, and both
he and Bruce were friends of Dr. Dan. Not so, Lynch.
144 Dr. DuBois remembered the European trip of Dr. Dan
and Dr. Bentley because both men married shortly after
and people teased them for stingily taking honeymoons
sans the brides. Katie Johnson remembered the trip too.
Attempts to discover the exact dates or the itinerary were
unsuccessful. Passports were not required at that time to
Western Europe and the State Department has no record
of issuing Dr. Dan a passport to Russia, which was re-
quired, and examination of the Proceedings of the Twelfth
Medical Congress held in Moscow August 7 (19) -14 (26),
1897, failed to reveal the presence of Dr. Dan. Nor could
any record of a leave of absence from Freedmen's be
found, but a reference to his return in June appears in a
statement of Warfield to the Board of Visitors, June 27,
1898. A niece, Ada Blanche Williams, thinks he went to
give some addresses; and since his official report on his
famous heart operation had come out in March and was
causing a stir this may have been the case, but details are
wanting.
CHAPTER XI
Alice Johnson
i47 Bertie Brooks Lewis told of the children's admiration
of Miss Alice, and Dr. Ralph Stewart gave her ad-
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 331
PAGE dress in Southwest Washington; it was confirmed by
147 Garnet C. Wilkinson, First Assistant Superintendent of
(Cont.) Schools.
The following persons contributed data to the story of
Isabella and Alice Johnson; Bertie Brooks Lewis, Rebecca
West, the late Caroline Parke, Anna Evans Murray, Sarah
Fleetwood, Nancy Atwood, Mrs. Clarence C. Evans,
Charlotte Bishop Ridgley, Zellie Ridgley Bennett, Dr.
Henry Furniss, Mrs. Dwight Holmes and the late Sarah
Meriwether Nutter. Christine Shoecraft Smith and the late
Caroline Parke told me Alice's father was Jewish. Mrs.
Daniel Murray, one of Alice's closest friends, gave his name
and profession. The facts of his life and background are
from the following: The History of the Jews in Richmond
from 1769 to 1917, Herbert T. Ezekiel and Gaston Lichten-
stein, 1917; The Recollections of a Virginia Newspaper
Man, Herbert T. Ezekiel, 1920; American Jewish Histori-
cal Society Papers, Vol. 9, p. 161; Jewish Encyclopedia,
Vol. V, p. 319; Sir Moses Ezekiel: An American Sculptor,
Henry K. Bush-Brown, in Art and Archaeology, Vol. XI,
No. 6, June 1912, pp. 2275.; American Art and American
Art Collections, 1889, Vol. II, pp. 803-808; Art and Archae-
ology, May 1917, article by Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull; New
York Times, November 22, 1908, October 21, 1921; Amer-
ican Art News, March 31, 1917; Belles, Beaux and Brains
of the '6os, T. C. DeLeon, 1909.
148 According to the U. S. Census taken in Richmond
July 14, 1860, Alice was ten months old; her mother, Isa-
bella, was twenty-three. They were living with Jane
Johnson, fifty, presumably the grandmother, in a dwelling
occupied by six other families one white, four black, and
one other mulatto like themselves. Jane too was mulatto
and both Jane and Isabella are listed as "washwoman."
While Isabella could read and write, Jane could not. If
Isabella's age is correct as given, she was seven years older
than Moses Ezekiel, who was then about three months
short of sixteen. Twenty-three may not be correct for
Isabella, since an illiterate mother might not have kept ac-
curate count during her child's earliest years. On the other
hand, Moses had had the status of a man almost four years,
having worked as a bookkeeper in his grandfather's store
since he was twelve. In the mores of the South at that
32 Daniel Hale Williams
AGE time, a lad's sex experiences, especially with a girl of black
48 or mixed blood, could begin early.
Alice Johnson's mother must have been as beautiful as
her daughter. Several mentioned her loveliness. Rebecca
West spoke of her as slight, dainty, a lady with a sweet
voice; the late Caroline Parke said she looked "Spanish";
Bertie Brooks Lewis said she had "a face like a cameo."
49 Alice Johnson's age, birthplace, residence while attending
Howard University, her school record and her release from
school "to go to England" are recorded at Howard Uni-
versity.
:5O Garnet C. Wilkinson, First Assistant Superintendent of
Schools, Washington, D.C., stated Alice Johnson was first
appointed to teach at Mott School on October 9, 1877, and
was last appointed for the school year 1897-1898.
[52 Alice Parke Shadd's genealogy was told me by her
daughter, Harriet Shadd Butcher.
Details concerning Mott School are from the Commis-
sioner's reports of the period.
[53 Clarence Cameron White told me the Remenyi incident.
[55 The poem "To Dan" is found in The Complete 'Poems
of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by W. D. Howells, New-
York, Dodd, Mead and Company, copyright 1905. It was
called to my attention by Louise V. Mingo, who used to
recite it.
[56 Description of the welcoming reception is from JNA.
157 I visited the house at 3301 Forest Avenue (Giles Ave-
nue), also later residences of Dr. Dan and Alice on Forest
Avenue and Forty-second Street.
CHAPTER XII
Betrayal
:59 The report of the Joint Select Committee was ordered
to be printed March 22, 1898. It forms House of Repre-
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 333
PAGE sentatives Report No. 776, 55th Congress, 26. Session. The
159 report of the Board of Visitors is dated June 24, 1898, but
(Cont.) the Evening Star of June 28, 1898, says the report was sub-
mitted to the Secretary of the Interior "today." The Sen-
ate resolution, the Secretary's reply, and text of the Visi-
tors' report, etc., are taken from Senate Document No. 332,
55th Congress, 2d Session.
For years there had been plain evidence that procedures
for the administration of Freedmen's Hospital were loose.
Four years before Dr. Dan's advent on the scene, an in-
vestigating committee from the Interior Department had
declared "the surgeon in chief is emphatically an autocrat
with over $50,000 public moneys annually at his disposal
without any checks, balances or accountability." No cor-
rection of the situation had been made, either by Congress
or the Department of the Interior. Freedmen's, k seemed,
was always being investigated and nothing done about it.
During Dr. Dan's regime and despite a change of the party
in power, the situation continued unaltered. Appalling
ignorance existed in the Interior Department of what was
going on in the hospital. Almost two years before he re-
signed, an official of that office wrote Dr. Dan and asked
him whether or not a Board of Visitors set up by the In-
terior Department five years before he took office was
functioning. "Having heard doubts expressed," wrote the
official, "whether the Board was actually in existence, I
wish you would write me concerning what action it has
taken, especially lately." In other words, the Interior Office
asked its own appointee whether or not it was supervising
him in accordance with its own established procedures.
And then, once more, the matter was dropped and for-
gotten.
162 That Warfield enjoyed special tutelage under Dr. Dan
was told by Rebecca West, Dr. J. W. McDowell, and is
cited by Warfield himself in an article by the late Dr.
John A. Kenney, NMA Jnl, Vol. 33, No. 5, pp. 203-214,
September 1941.
Warfield is listed in the Illinois Register of Physicians for
1898 at Dr. Dan's Chicago address.
334 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE The sworn testimony of Warfield, Miss Ebersole and
162 Cordoza is in NA. Also the stenographic report of Dr.
(Com.) Dan's appearance with Judge Wilson before the Visitors,
July 20, 1898. The report is certified as "correct" by the
stenographer, but is not notarized and not signed by either
Dr. Dan or Judge Wilson. Portions are jumbled and in-
complete.
166 A memorandum of James H. Parker, secretary to Secre-
tary of the Interior Garfield, in June 1908, NA, states Dr.
Dan fainted at the hearing, but implies it was from a sense
of guilt at being f ound u out. Parker had his own reasons for
distorting the picture. See p. 244.
171 The supplemental report of the Board of Visitors to the
Secretary of the Interior, consists of fourteen typewritten
pages, dated July n, obviously an error since the report
states that Dr. Dan's testimony of July 20 is included, as
well as the testimony of Warfield, Miss Ebersole and
Cordoza. This report mentions the presentation of the
Bausch & Lomb receipts by Dr. Dan but summarizes the
various testimonies in a way unfair to Dr. Dan. No recom-
mendations for disposal of the matter are made.
McMillan's recommendation for District authority Is
found in Senate Document No. 1439, 55th Congress, 3d
Session, ordered to be printed December 21, 1898.
172 Alice wrote to Sarah Fleetwood, her first schoolteacher,
now a trained nurse and soon to be the Superintendent of
Nurses at Freedmen's: "That cruel, malicious attack upon
my dear husband's administration of the hospital failed in
its object. Among my most cherished possessions are many
letters from officials with whom my husband's duties
brought him in contact, assuring him that the high opinion
they held of him was in no way affected."
CHAPTER XHI
Destroying Myths
173 Dr. Charles Kahlke told of Chislett's moving out when
Dr. Dan came back.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 335
PAGE Dr. Dan's neighbors included various important medical
173 men. William Morgan was at 3100 Michigan Avenue, less
(Cont.) than a block off. J. B. Murphy lived a few doors away,
Lester E. Frankenthal had his office in the next block, and
Otto L. Schmidt, Dr. Dan's former classmate, was in the
one beyond. In the same building with Dr. Dan were
F. O. Higbee, E. Stillman Bailey and Charles H. Kahlke.
Appointments at Provident Hospital, committee, staff
and Board, are taken from published reports of the
hospital.
174 James Gordon told me Clarence Darrow was a patient
of Dr. Dan and in Clarence narrow for the Defense, 1941,
Irving Stone tells of Darrow's and Wheeler's Sunday bi-
cycle rides.
The baseball games item is from JNA.
Dr. and Mrs. James R. White told of Jenkin Lloyd
Jones's continued support of Provident Hospital.
Letters of Kohlsaat and Webster to Dr. Dan were found
in his papers after his death; others from these men are in
NA.
William F. Taylor, the druggist, told me of the cable
cars.
Published reports of Provident Hospital state that gifts
were as follows: Kohlsaat $5000 for the lot; Armour
$20,000 for the building; Field $2500, Pullman $5000, and
Young $500 for the adjoining properties for the nurses*
home. Webster's $2500 apparently was for furnishings.
175 Description of Dr. George C. Hall, his appearance, his
personality and his actions was given me by Drs. James R.
White, U. G. Dailey, the late Spencer Dickerson, and the
late Carl G. Roberts, among others. Emmett Scott, the late
T. Arnold Hill, Dr. Herbert Turner, Dr. J. W. McDowell
added details. The late John Hale Porter, who admired
Hall, told me of Hall's determination to get an allopathic
diploma to secure his position. Others giving a favorable
Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE picture of Hall were Alexander L. Jackson, Dr. Homer C.
175 Cooper, and Tomietta Stokes Beckham, but I felt their
(Cont.) testimony was outweighed by that of others. Hall's educa-
tional background is given in Mather, op. cit. He received
his Illinois license in 1888.
176 Dr. James R. White told the recruiting incident and of
Dr. Dan's appointment as major. Washington colored
newspapers also spoke of Dr. Dan's appointment as colonel.
It has been impossible to verify either appointment from
| War Department records.
177 The^moster of Provident Hospital Internes gives the
dates and names of all internes.
Helen Brown (Mrs. James R.) White told of Hall's
attempt to get White to leave Chicago. Dr. White told of
Dr. Dan's encouragement of young doctors, as did others.
David McGowan told of Dr. Dan's service to the Old
Folks Home, and Louise V. Mingo told of his speech at the
fund-raising meeting. The Broadax, August 12, 1899, gives
the address 610 West Garfield, and says there are eleven
rooms and thirteen inmates.
178 Dr. Dan himself described the insurance scheme in a
letter to Booker T. Washington (BTW). The Broadax,
Vol. VI, No. 7, December 8, 1900, states Dr. Dan has taken
charge.
1 80 Dr. Dan is incorrect in giving the figure 12 million. The
Census for 1900 gave 8.8 million Negroes.
For Dr. Dan's medical papers see Publications.
184 Dr. Kahlke told me of his friendship with Dr. Dan.
185 Col. Phalen told me of his reaction to Dr. Dan and to
Murphy and Dr. Frank Van Kirk also. Col. Phalen is the
author of the article on Dr. Dan in the Dictionary of Amer-
ican Biography.
186 Dr. James Milk, Jr., and his brother Wallace Mills told
of visits of Dr. Dan to their home and kindly sent me their
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 337
PAGE father's scrapbook containing many items about Chicago
1 86 Medical College and Dr. Dan.
(Cont.) In 1906 Dr. Dan and Mills were two of twelve who at-
tended their class reunion, enjoying "intimate pipe smok-
ing and reminiscence." In 1913 Dr. Dan was on the recep-
tion committee for the reunion and banquet held at the
Congress Hotel.
Alice's remarks are in a letter to Sarah Fleetwood, Feb-
uary 22, 1901. The trolley car incident was related by Mrs.
J. Carlos Davis.
187 Description of Alice's costume was given by Christine
Shoecraft Smith, who told me of the loss of the baby, as
did the late Mrs. William T. Child. It was a case of tubal
pregnancy, according to John Mallet, chauffeur for Dr.
Otto Schmidt, in whose car he heard the case discussed.
Mallet said DeLee took care of Alice.
1 88 Mrs. Brace's visit is in The Broadax, Vol. IV, August 12,
1899; the talk at the Phillis Wheatley Club, same paper,
Vol. V, No. 13, January 20, 1900. The clipping about the
Evening with Shakespeare is from JNA.
189 Dr. Hall himself told the late Dr. Carl Roberts he was
left standing in the entry and resented it.
That old friends noticed little change in Dr. Dan was
apparent from conversation with the late Julia West Paul
and Julia LeBeau Thompson, but Dr. U. G. Dailey gave a
new picture, as stated here.
CHAPTER XIV
Moses to Negro Medicine
191 The late Dr. John A. Kenney in NMA Jnl, Vol. 33,
No. 5, speaks of the brutal use of Negroes for experimental
and teaching surgery.
The statement that bad conditions in Negro medical care
prevailed fifty years ago should not be construed to mean
conditions are good today. See Medical Care and Plight of
the Negro, W. Montague Cobb, M.D., PhD., published
338 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE by the National Association for the Advancement of
191 Colored People, August 1947. Also Dr. Cobb's article
(Cont.) "Racial Integration in Medicine," published May 1953 in
NAIRO Reporter., a publication of Intergroup Relations
Officials, P.O. Box 163, New York 25, N.Y.; available also
as a reprint from Committee for the Nation's Health, Inc.,
2212 M Street, N.W., Washington 7, D.C. Also the Negro
Year Book 1952, Jessie P. Guzman, ed., "Health and Medi-
cal Facilities," pp.
192 Booker Washington's speech, made September 18, 1895,
and reported widely in the press, pleased some whites
and displeased some colored people for sentences like
these: "As we have proven our loyalty to you in the past,
in nursing your children, watching by the sickbed of your
mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear
dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future in our hum-
ble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no
foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives if need
be in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, com-
mercial, civil and religious life with yours in a way that
shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that
are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet
one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."
The last sentence was quoted frequently.
The long correspondence of Dr. Dan with Booker T.
Washington and Emmett J. Scott is in BTW; a few letters
are in NA; and one was photostated for me by the late
Dr. Bertha Van Hoosen who had presented it to the Li-
brary of the Woman's Medical College, Chicago. Dean
Charles H. Thompson of Howard University Graduate
School sent me copies of three letters.
The late Dr. John A. Kenney, long on the Tuskegee
staff, told me of early medical care at the Institute.
In the spring of 1913 Tuskegee got the hospital and
clinic center offered by Dr. Dan fifteen years before.
George Hall was invited by Booker Washington to give
the dedicatory address.
194 Hubbard's visit to Dr. Dan is told in Meharry Medical
College, A History, Charles Victor Roman, Nashville,
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 339
PAGE J 934- That Boyd and Stewart were instrumental is shown
194 in Irene M. Gaines's article, op. cit. Date of the appoint-
(Cont.) ment is determined from a letter of Alice Williams to
Sarah Fleetwood.
The dedication inscription is carved over the entrance
to Meharry College, which I visited. The history of Me-
harry, its hospitals and clinics, is taken partly from Roman,
op. cit., and partly from Annual Announcements and re-
ports of Central Tennessee College, Walden University,
and Meharry Medical College for the years 1885 to I 9 I 5-
195 That Dr. Dan received only travel money and con-
tributed that to the school was told me by Professor
Emeritus John H. Holman.
Dr. Dan's brilliance as a clinical instructor was told me
by Drs. Buford, Roberts, Dailey, and many others. A letter
from the late Dr. M. O. Bousfield says Dr. Dan "loved to
teach and give them [his internes] a chance to learn and
do. Surgeons are not always generous on this score."
196 A sketch of Boyd's life is found in Kenney's brochure,
op. cit. Dr. Dan's operations in the basement room are
mentioned by Gaines, op. cit.
Recollections of Dr. Dan's visits were given me by Tillie
Lloyd, Registrar, Professor Emeritus John H. Holman,
Drs. W. A. Reed, J. A. McMillan, and F. A. Stewart, Jr.,
and Annie Stewart, supplemented by letters from W. H.
Compton and Drs. E. A. Kendall and G. Hamilton-
Francis.
197 The account of the meeting at the Phillis Wheatley Club
is taken from Dr. Dan's speech. See Publications No. 8.
203 Dr. Dan's travels for the benefit of Negro doctors were
recounted to me by Drs. Dailey and Perry. Also see
Dailey, op. cit., and Perry, op. cit.
204 Warfield's charges against Curtis and West are found
inNA.
34 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE The Dallas incident was told me by Dr. J. Carlos Davis;
205 the Indianapolis incident, by Drs. J. H. Ward and Law-
rence A. Lewis.
206 The guilty journal was The Medical Journal, Charlotte,
North Carolina. The incident is told in detail by W. E. B.
DuBois, "Possibilities of the Negro, the Advance Guard
of the Race," The Booklovers Magazine, Vol. II, No. i,
July 1903.
For some of the results of hospital and nursing care, see
the report of Hulda M. Lyttle, R.N., quoted in Roman,
op. cit.; also The Health and Physique of the Negro
American, W. E. B. DuBois, nth Atlantic Conference,
1906.
The Negro Year Book 1952, Jessie P. Guzman, ed.,
records 132 Negro hospitals, but some are very small. Only
45 have 50 beds or more. In 1949, 9000 Negro nurses were
integrated into the American Nurses Association with a
total membership of 506,050; in that year there were 3076
Negro student nurses. The same volume estimates that in
1948 there were 3753 Negro physicians in this country.
This is not the number there should be and is indicative of
the educational and economic restrictions still operating
against colored people. There are 3681 Negro persons in
the country per each Negro doctor, nearly five times the
ratio of total population to total physicians.
The late Dr. Kenney in NMA Jnl, Vol. 33, No. 5, gives
a brief history of the rise and fall of Negro medical schools.
CHAPTER xv
History-Making Operations
207 These cases and the remarks he made are described by
Dr. Dan; see his Publications No. 12.
212 Advice against operating on the spleen may be seen in
John De J. Pemberton's article in The Cyclopedia of Medi-
cine, Surgery and Specialties, rev. ed,, 1946.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 341
PAGE Dr. Dan was a careful student. He always related his
213 own experience to that of others. Before writing his paper,
he told his listeners, he had examined thirty-three Eng-
lish and American surgical works. All of them advised
against invasion of the chest. However, when he looked
into the French and Italian writers on the subject, he
found they urged immediate interference and their re-
sults, he said, showed the wisdom of their course. He him-
self had had twenty-six cases in eleven years and had
operated on exactly half of them. All the thirteen not
operated had died, while of the thirteen operated only two
had died. So he sided with the French and Italian doctors.
Mrs. J. B. Beckham (nee Tomietta Stokes) told me of
the case of the Irish boy. She was a probationer nurse at
the time and later became assistant to the Superintendent
of Nurses.
2 14 Dr. Dailey told of the Rhode Island brakeman.
Accounts of Dr. Dan's services were given me by Mrs.
Avendorph, Jessica and Archibald Anderson, Eloise Carey
Bishop, Mrs. Richard Rainey, Mrs. William T. Child,
Lillie Smith Alexander, Harry Branch, Dr. Marie Fellowes,
Marguerite Leftlet Banks and her daughter, Helen Harris,
and by Emma L. Warren-Mallet.
Jesse Binga is authority for the Mitchell "Red Devil. "
216 Mrs. Richard Rainey repeated to me Dr. Dan's remark
he could not charge his people much. In a letter to Booker
T. Washington (BTW) in 1907, Dr. Dan said his income
was $10,000 a year.
Both Dr. Dailey and Dr. Smith told me they came to
Chicago to study because Dr. Dan was there. The reac-
tions to the great man are Dailey's.
217 Dr. Booker told me about the student parties.
Dr. Fellowes told of her experience with Dr. Dan. Dr.
James White told of Dr. Dan's advice and of Wilberforce's
following it, while Dr. Roberts furnished details of Wil-
342 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE berforce's later life. Dr. Dan's influence on McKissick was
217 told me by Dr. Monroe A. Majors and confirmed by Dr.
(Com.) Dailey.
The late Dr. Kenney told me his story. Conditions un-
der which he operated in the South are recounted in NMA
Jnl, Vol. 33, No. 5. His Appreciation was published in
The Student, July 20, 1907. His gift of the hospital to
Newark is described in a brochure, The Community
Hospital, A Brief History, 1939.
219 Dr. Dailey told me of his relationship to Dr. Dan. Dr.
McDowell and the late Dr. Roberts added comments.
222 That Murphy wore out his assistants is stated in /. B.
Murphy, Stormy Petrel of Surgery, Loyal Davis, M.D.,
M.S., Ph.D., New York, 1938.
CHAPTER XVI
Alice Tries to Be a Good Wife
223 Alice wrote Booker Washington about a Miss Kelley
who had achieved a position at the Art Institute but who
longed to use her talent for her race, and Miss Kelley was
invited to come to Tuskegee as "instructress in drawing"
(BTW).
Bishop Ransom told me of his pioneering work and of
his relationship to Dr. Dan and AHce, and of Alice's work
for him.
BTW reveals Alice's attempts to get the Tuskegee prin-
cipal to lecture, and other lecturers are found in a little
brochure of the Settlement furnished me by Bishop Ran-
som. It was the age of formality. Alice Williams began her
letters to Booker Washington: "My dear Sir" and ended
them primly "Mrs. Daniel H. Williams." Later she did
unbend to say "My dear Mr. Washington." She referred
to her husband as "Doctor." "Doctor is well," she wrote,
"and sends warmest regards to you and Mrs. Washington."
Mary Church Terrell told me of her lecture. Mary
Church Terrell is a remarkable woman who has brought,
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 343
PAGE said the late Carrie Chapman Catt, her friend and co-
223 worker in the suffrage cause, honor to her college, her race,
(Cont.) and her sex. After her graduation from Oberlin in 1884,
Mrs. Terrell spent three years studying in France, Ger-
many, Switzerland and Italy. When she spoke at the great
Congress of the International Council of Women in Berlin
in 1904, she was the only delegate from the United States
who spoke in three languages and she was "eloquent in all
three." In this country she has addressed students of most
women's colleges and many men's colleges. She is a prolific
writer whose work has appeared in many leading maga-
zines and newspapers. At this writing (summer 1953) she is
still active at ninety and is spearheading the movement to
extend civil rights in Washington, D.C., restaurants. In
1948 she won her long campaign to open the doors of the
Washington branch of the American Association of Uni-
versity Women to qualified members regardless of race or
color.
224 The quotation from Barrow's speech is from Irving
Stone, op. cit. y p. 170.
225 The Reverend Father Olds, of St. Augustine's Church,
Washington, D.C., wrote me that church records show
Sarah Price Williams died July 24, 1900, aged seventy-five,
of paralysis. I use U. S. Census records and her sampler
for her age, which was seventy-two. A newspaper clipping
says Dr. Dan had to leave immediately after the funeral.
A niece, Ada Blanche Williams, showed me the sampler,
found in Dr. Dan's possessions after his death.
Dr. Dailey said Alice called Dr. Dan "Hale."
226 Emma George and Harriet George Stewart told me of
the sisters' move to Pierce Place.
Among those giving me these impressions of Alice were
Mary Church Terrell, Edith Fleetwood, Estelle Arnold,
Eloise Carey Bishop, Harriet Curtis Hall, Rebecca West,
the late Julia West Paul, the Reverend Shelton Hale Bis-
hop, Dr. J. W. McDowell, and Dr. Arthur J. Booker.
The June 1904 reception is described in JNA. Emmett
J. Scott related the event to the Republican National Con-
vention.
344 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE Julia LeBeau Thompson said the Forest Avenue neigh-
227 borhood deteriorated and Eloise Carey Bishop told of the
moving away of her family and of the Williamses. The
addresses on East 42nd Street appear on clippings in JNA
and on Alice Williams's stationery (BTW).
John Mallet told of the hate fence.
The 1903 and 1907 items about Sir Moses are from De
Leon, op. cit., and the 1908 item is from the New York
Times, November 22, 1908. Christine Shoecraft Smith told
me of the photograph, and Harriett Curtis Hall told of re-
marks about Alice's parentage.
Sir Moses died in Rome in March 1917. After the war his
last statue, one of Edgar Allan Poe, was brought to Amer-
ica and presented to the city of Baltimore, The sculptor's
body was buried in Arlington Cemetery among his Con-
federate comrades.
228 Theodora Lee Purnell told me of Alice's exit from the
Whist Club.
Louise V. Mingo told of Alice's jealousy of Mrs. Carey,
her feeling for Mrs. Wilberforce Williams, and of the
luncheon party and the boat ride.
As Alice again became a recluse from society, she kept
up with certain people. She exchanged the latest books
with Julia LeBeau Thompson, upon whose mother Dr.
Dan .had operated on the dining room table at the be-
ginning of his career. She did embroidery with Mrs.
George Hancock, one of Dr. Dan's first supporters in the
matter of Provident Hospital. She continued in the Worn-
en's Aid Society, and when the others paid the dues of
twenty-five cents a month, she never failed, people noted,
to lay down a dollar. She kept up her old friendship with
Julia Barr Anderson and Mrs. Pedro Tinsley with whom
she had worked so hard for the Institutional Church Set-
tlement. She wrote back East to Caddie Parke, Maggie
Vaughan, and her matron of honor, Fanny Middleton, She
told Fanny she was very lax to allow her daughter, then
in normal school, to go unchaperoned to the theater with
a dental student. She made gifts for her nieces, the daugh-
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 345
PAGE ters of Dr. Dan's sisters and brother, and was more appre-
228 ciative than once she had been of the little gifts they sent
(Cent.) her. At Christmas time she packed two big barrels and
sent them to Washington. She talked of adopting the
daughter of Annie,, Dr. Dan's sister, but dropped the idea.
When Dr. Dan's friend, J. Carlos Davis, the dentist, moved
to Mexico to escape discrimination, she kept in touch with
Emma Rose, his wife. "We are so interested in Mexican
affairs," she wrote, "because of your presence there." She
never failed to write letters of condolence when a friend
lost a mother and they were letters her friends kept. "I
know only too well," she wrote Emma Rose Davis, "what
it means to lose a good mother." When Sarah Fleetwood
died, her first schoolteacher, she wrote Edith how much
she had admired her mother, "my ideal," she said, "of all
that is beautiful in woman so gentle, so refined, so cul-
tured."
229 The late Mrs. T. G. Nutter, daughter of Mary Robinson
Meriwether, and the late Dr. Roberts told me of Dr. Dan's
affair with the French woman. Dr. Dailey confirmed their
account.
230 Alice's visits were mentioned by Christine Shoecraft
Smith and in BTW. Louise V. Mingo told of the surprise
party.
CHAFTER XVII
Break with Booker T. Washington
231 The full title of The Voice was The Voice of the Col-
ored People. It was commonly called The Voice.
232 Dr. J. Max Barber told me of the prairie chicken dinner
and the argument over Booker Washington. The reaction
of the young Negro intelligentsia is discussed by W. E. B.
DuBois in Dusk of Dawn, 1940; and by Ray Stannard
Baker in his article "An Ostracized Race," American Maga-
zine, Vol. LXVI, No. i, May 1908. Mrs. Samuel J. Evans
furnished a photograph of Dr. Bentley.
This is the sort of remark made by Booker Washington
which angered young Negro intellectuals: "The oppor-
Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE tunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth in-
232 finitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an
(Cant.) opera house. . . . There is as much dignity in tilling a field
as in writing a poem."
That Madden and Bentley joined the DuBois camp was
stated to me by DuBois, also by Barber. That Wheeler
remained in the Washington camp is -apparent from BTW.
These files tell the story of the newspaper dealings, the
Freedmen's Hospital tragedy, and Booker Washington's
choice of Hall over Dr. Dan. Details were added by Em-
mett Scott, DuBois and Barber.
Young Max Barber fought a losing fight with Booker
Washington, who never forgave him for his criticism in
The Voice. After an initial success in which he built the
circulation to 17,000 in three years, Barber and The Voice
fell into sore straits. In 1906 came the Atlanta riots when
infuriated white mobs burned, killed and laid waste in the
Negro section of the city. At no little personal risk, Barber
had sent a dispatch to the New York Tribune presenting
the Negro side of the tragic affair with unusual outspoken-
ness. He had had to flee for his life. But he had re-entered
the city, recovered the files of subscribers and brought
them to the owners, a Chicago publishing company. Then
the panic of 1907 and the subsequent use of scrip brought
about a financial crisis which forced the publishers to put
The Voice on the market. T. Thomas Fortune, maneu-
vered out of The Age in New York by a stooge represent-
ing Booker Washington, came to Chicago and bought The
Voice but, for some reason, made nothing out of the ven-
ture and soon returned East. Barber managed to get a job
is editor of The Conservatory an anti- Washington paper
in Chicago. But Booker Washington, through Dr. Dan,
Louis B. Anderson and others, got control of The Con-
servator. Louis Anderson called young Barber into his
office and told him 'he had "made a mistake" in giving but
a few lines to Washington's recent speech. And so, Barber
was again without a paper. Short of funds, lecturing here
and there, he traveled east. In Philadelphia he got a job as
principal of the Berean Manual Training School, with a
staff of seven or eight teachers to direct. "But the long arm
of Washington reached out and plucked rne out of that
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 347
PAGE job, too," says Barber. "I was told I would have to go, or
232 the financial support given the school by a white real estate
(Cont.) man, a friend of Washington's, would be withdrawn."
Thoroughly discouraged after months of eking out an exist-
ence with porter jobs and the like, Barber turned to den-
tistry and gave up journalism.
233 History of jurisdiction over Freedmen's Hospital is re-
counted in Letter of the Secretary of the Interior, Febru-
ary 21, 1906, House of Representatives Document No. 549,
59th Congress, ist Session.
That Warfield's political power emanated from family
connections is common talk in the Negro colony. That he
was mediocre in his management of Freedmen's was told
me by various doctors including J. W. McDowell, the late
John Kenney, by early nurses, and by Mae Irwin who
served as Superintendent of Nurse Training at Freedmen's
for some years. It is noticeable that both Dr. Dan and
Booker Washington are careful not to mention his name
anywhere in their lengthy correspondence.
237 Dr. Dan's care of Scott was told by Scott, also in BTW.
Scott said he inserted the item in The Student.
238 Hall's status as a surgeon was given by Dailey, Scott,
Roberts and others. He himself told Roberts he chose
surgery for the money in it. His remark to Curtis was told
by James White; his avoidance of surgical risks, by his one-
time assistant, Dailey.
The Birmingham surgeon who took the knife out of
Hall's hand was Dr. Ulysses Grant Mason.
240 Both DuBois and Barber said The Age was bought by
white money to silence Fortune and give support to
Booker Washington.
W. E. B. DuBois had attacked Booker Washington in
the Boston Guardian for buying up the Negro press, and
the New York Post had attacked DuBois for not being able
to prove his accusation. All that was needed was the file
of Booker Washington's correspondence with Dr. Dan,
now in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.
348 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE Dr. Dan was ill-fitted for the role he was now playing; he
240 was too honest for intrigue. He urged Booker Washington
(Cont.) to buy the Conservator outright and operate it, but the
politician preferred his undercover methods. At the same
time Washington complained piously about newspaper
owners and editors who "seem to depend almost wholly
upon graft rather than upon strictly business principles for
success." "The main difficulty," Washington said, "seems
to be that our people have such little business ability that
it is almost impossible for them to carry any business en-
terprise to success, however much they are helped." Con-
trast this typical disbelief of the dictator in the abilities of
others with Dr. Dan's faith in the potentialities of Negroes.
"All they need is the chance," Dr. Dan said over and over.
In 1890 T. Thomas Fortune, distinguished editor and
founder of the New York Age, contemporary of Dr. Dan
and Booker Washington, had attempted to meet the men-
ace of threatening withdrawal of Federal protection of the
civil rights of Negroes. He issued a call, accepted by 141
delegates from twenty-one states, to come and found a na-
tional civil rights body. The National Afro-Ajnerican
League was, in a sense, the forerunner of a body of opin-
ion that was obscured for a time by the Booker Washing-
ton philosophy and arose resurgent in the later Niagara
Movement, and continued into the present in the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People. That
T. Thomas Fortune and The Age should fall under the
Tuskegee ax was tragic.
Letters of Secretary Garfield to Dr. Dan, dated Novem-
ber 25, 1907, and March 25, 1908, concerning appointments,
were found in Dr. Dan's effects and given me by his niece,
Ada Blanche Williams.
*44 The Howard University plan, Purvis's plan, together
with various letters of Warfield and memoranda of Parker,
are in NA.
245 Accounts of the August 1908 meeting of the NMA are
from files of the New York Post and the New York Age,
also personal account of Dailey, A letter from Dr. Dan to
Scott (BTW) says he spent $75 on slides.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 349
PAGE Scott described to me Hall's tactics in ridiculing Dr. Dan
247 before the NMA. The 1905 incident was told by Dr.
Dudley Turner to the late Dr. Roberts who repeated it
to me.
248 Dr. Dan's movements in the fall of 1908 are revealed in
various letters to Scott (BTW). The operation upon Dun-
ton is told in The Age, December 3, 1908.
Mrs. E. P. Roberts, daughter of Warren Logan, Treas-
urer of Tuskegee Institute, grew up on the Tuskegee
campus and remembered Mrs. Hall's visits with her many
trunks, cosmetics, etc.
250 Freedmen's threatened loss of license was related by Mae
Irwin, former Superintendent of Nurses.
Dr. Dan never again asked Booker Washington to assist
in anything. When President Theodore Roosevelt, before
leaving office, organized a "distinguished army medical re-
serve corps" of "scores of the most famous doctors in
America," including a dozen in Chicago, Dr. Dan was ex-
ercised that no Negro was appointed and that he himself
had been left out of a list of men with whom he constantly
associated professionally. He did not write Booker Wash-
ington, but he did write Emmett Scott and asked if he
thought it was possible to get Booker Washington to act
in the matter. He said, "Our men are the best of soldiers
in time of need and should be represented in every depart-
ment, especially in the killing department. I mean by this,
that they should have protection and safe care by their
own during and after the fight wherever that may be."
Scott, while sympathetic, could only report that "it seems
inopportune to take up this matter just as this time."
251 The Charity Ball invitation, listing committees, is in
JNA.
The twenty-fifth anniversary banquet is described in
The Age, May 28, 1908. The cup I saw at Provident
Hospital.
252 The late T. Arnold Hill repeated to me Hall's accusa-
tion that Dr. Dan was undecided about race. Mrs. Hall's
remark was made to me directly.
The fire bell incident was told me by Dr. Booker.
350 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE The late Dr. Roberts, Dr. Dailey and Mr. Max Gethner
253 told me of Hall's tactics to gain power. Miss Lyon (Mrs.
McMurdy) made her derogatory remarks directly to me.
Dr. Booker witnessed Alf Anderson's mischievous treat-
ment of Dr. Dan's affairs. Mrs. Ed Wright and Mrs. Rich-
ard Rainey, late patients of Dr. Dan at Provident, told of
neglect of his service, as did Dr. Booker.
254 Dr. Barber told of the Bentleys' rejection of the Halls;
Theodore Lee Purnell told of the Jones's rejection. The
late Robert L. Taylor told the Sigma Pi Phi story as I give
it here; the late Dr. Bousfield gave Hall's version.
255 The last clinic at Mercy Hospital is described in NMA
Jnl, April-June 1910, Vol. II, No. 2. The first clinic at
Hubbard Hospital is described ibid., April-June 1911. Dr.
G. Hamilton-Francis told of unveiling the portrait.
The remark about keeping Provident "alive" is in Hart-
shorn, op. cit.y item on George C. Hall.
256 Wesley's qualities were described by Dr. White, who
told of the discrimination in interneships, as did Dailey;
examination of the Roster of Internes confirmed the fact.
Wheeler's misfortunes were related by Mrs. White. His
appointment at Tuskegee and his death are revealed in
BTW.
257 Hall's upward climb at Provident may be traced in the
published reports of the hospital.
Authentication of Dr. Dan's appointment to St. Luke's
is given in a letter from the office of the Medical Director.
Hall's campaign to prove Dr. Dan's appointment an act
of disloyalty was described by Drs. White, Dickerson,
Roberts, Dailey and Herbert Turner.
The description of Webster's appearance and tempera-
ment was given by the late Dr. Roberts.
258 Minute books of the Provident Board of Trustees for
1912 have been lost and with them the account of Dr.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 351
PAGE Dan's resignation. Dr. J. Carlos Davis, Dr. Turner and
258 others said he offered no explanation or defense. That is
(Com.) true of the press notices which appeared. The Broadax,
Vol. XVII, No. 32, May n, 1912, states: "At a meeting
of the Board of Trustees of Provident Hospital during the
week, Dr. Daniel H. Williams tendered his resignation."
Next week, May 18, a two-column-wide photograph of
Dr. Dan was run with the caption: "Dr. Daniel H. Wil-
liams, eminent physician and advanced surgeon one of
the main founders of Provident Hospital, who resigned
last week as a member of its board of Trustees." NMA
Jnl, Vol. 4, No. 3, July-September 1912, said simply that
"Dr. Daniel H. Williams has resigned from the Board of
Trustees and the medical staff of Provident Hospital."
CHAPTER XVIII
The Record Made Straight
259 The description of Idlewild and Dr. Dan's life there is
from a personal visit and talks with residents: Harry
Branch, the white man who originally owned the territory,
Ada Blanche W. Z. Williams, Dr. Dan's niece who in-
herited his property there, Mrs. Richard Rainey, young
Daniel Rainey, Marguerite Banks, Mrs. Ed Wright, Mrs.
Robert Hal Riffe, the late Dr. Roberts, Mrs. Edwin Eisner,
postmistress for many years, Charles Grace, J. S. Royster,
Dr. Isabella Garnett Butler, Mattie Herron, Dr. Ralph
Stewart, Mattie Martin Gates, and Irene McCoy Gaines.
In nearby Baldwin I consulted Robert Smith, Fred Brad-
ford and Herbert Smith. I corresponded with Helen Ches-
nutt.
Fuller's letter was found in Dr. Dan's personal papers
after his death, as were warm letters from Billings, Martin,
Kohlsaat, and Webster.
260 Descriptions of the historic first convocation of the
American College of Surgeons, held in the Gold Room of
the Congress Hotel, Chicago, may be found in the New
York Times of November 13, 1913, the Chicago Tribune
of November 14, the New York Age of November 20,
352 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE and the Bulletin of the Chicago Medical Society, Vol. XIII,
260 No. 12, December 1913. The last-named publication gives
(Cont.) the names of the Chicago men inducted. Dr. Dan's certif-
icate of membership may be seen at Provident Hospital.
Twelve hundred of the most noted surgeons of the United
States and Canada were received into charter member-
ship and made Fellows, 103 from Chicago. That night
Dr. Dan wrote Emmett Scott: ". . . this recognition will
ease the way . . . perhaps it may be possible to assist
others." But the American College of Surgeons discrimi-
nated against the Negro surgeon for many years, despite
the precedent set by its original Regents. Dr. Dan remon-
strated about the situation to his friend, Franklin Martin,
but was unable to effect the acceptance of other Negroes.
Hall charged that he was keeping Negroes out.
261 Dr. Dan's success at St. Luke's was told rne by Dr. S. C.
Plumrner, Dr. Arthur R. Elliott, Dr. Rufus J. Collins, Dr.
James Tweedie Campbell, Dr. Louis Schmidt, Dr. N. C.
Gilbert and W. H. Zabel, Chief Pharmacist.
Presentation of the bust is recounted in The History of
the St. Luke's Hospital School of Nursing, Marie Georgette
Merrill, Chicago, 1946. This item was furnished me by
Carrie E. Bullock, R.N.
Mrs. Richard Rainey recounted the proposal to name a
ward for Dr. Dan.
The Provident Hospital doctors named told of their ex-
periences with George Hall.
Bentley, because of his light skin color, his office on
State Street, and the professional honors that came to him
from whites, was subjected to much of the same talk of
disloyalty that Dr. Dan suffered. He held out until 1917
and then resigned.
262 Fall-off in patients is revealed in the published reports.
When Jeanette Lyon, HalFs ally, capped her career by
marrying Judge McMurdy and retiring, Provident suf-
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 353
PAGE fered a constant change of Superintendents of Nurses.
262 Evelyn Kimmel, a capable woman, unsusceptible to cajol-
(Cont.) ery, was the third to succeed Miss Lyon. One day, accord-
ing to hospital rule, she charged Hall fifty cents for a
urinalysis for an outside private patient. He was enraged.
To the late Dr. Carl Roberts standing nearby he exclaimed
"I'll get rid of her," and within a matter of months, he did.
Hall worked like a Trojan to save Provident. Perhaps
he would have done so even had his own fate not been
tied up with the only hospital in the city that offered him
an arena. Mrs. Hall, as chairman of the Women's Auxil-
iaryentirely colored now since there was no one to
maintain the contacts that had made it originally inter-
racialworked vigorously too. She brought in $4000 or
$5000 a year. To fill gaps on the Board of Trustees, Hall
brought in some capable and respected men along with
some who were mediocre. A. L. Jackson, his choice for
chairman, reinforced the group with outstanding grad-
uates from Harvard, his alma mater. This made a good
Board and it resulted eventually, after Hall's death, in the
third and greater Provident Hospital. The i65-bed plant
with good equipment serves 7500 bed and 8000 clinic
patients a year. The policy Dr. Dan inaugurated of provid-
ing the highest type of education for colored doctors and
nurses is now an established tradition. If white internes
are seldom admitted it is because there are still so few
opportunities elsewhere for the colored interne. The by-
laws prohibit discrimination and during World War II
Jewish refugee doctors were admitted to residencies when
they could not find opportunities elsewhere that would
permit them to qualify for licenses. However motivated by
a desire for personal place and power, Hall gave an ag-
gressive leadership in the civil field on behalf of the
Negro. He led the drive for the Y.M.C.A., helped bring
in the Urban League, was the first Negro to sit on the
Library Board, and his work on the Riot Commission of
1919 was said to be important and skillful.
John Mallett said Dr. Dan walked the corridors at night.
Drs. Smith, Dailey, Roberts and Turner told of Dr.
Dan's continued interest in Provident.
354 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE After all his children had grown and left home, Harry
262 Anderson married again. His third wife was the former
(Com.) Julia Settles.
Dr. Bert Anderson told of his own reaction to Dr. Dan
and his refusal to allow Dr. Dan to put up a tombstone.
Reaction of the various relatives was told me in person.
263 Hall's putting down his bag to fight was told by the late
Dr. Roberts.
Items about Dr. Annie B. Schultz were told by Dr. Rob-
erts and Mrs. Ed Wright.
It was Emmett Scott who said Dr. Dan "threw himself
on you."
264 The birthday dinner was held January 18, 1913, at the
home of Mrs. Rita Carter on Rhodes Avenue. According
to the reporter, Alice Williams never appeared to better
advantage, looking, people said, "like a bit of rare china,"
Wilberforce University conferred the honorary degree
of LL.D. on Dr. Dan in June 1909; Howard University,
the degree of M.S. in June 1925. This was confirmed by
the officers of these schools.
The cup, presented June 1919, may be seen at Provident
Hospital.
Irene McCoy Gaines, his secretary, also Dr. Dailey, said
Dr. Dan made many speeches in his sixties.
For his speech, "The Malingerer," see Publications
No. 13.
265 Account of Hall's and Booker Washington's dealings is
found in BTW, where appear also the letters of Robert
White.
266 The faithfulness of Dr. Kenney and Emmett Scott is
apparent in BTW, and was also voiced to me in person.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 355
PAGE Dr. Kenney told of Dr. Dan's operation on his wife. Dr.
266 Dan's letter about Kenney 's brochure was published in
(Com.) NMA JnL
267 The incident at Camp Funston was told by Emmett
Scott, also by Dr. Booker. A letter from Dr. James Mills,
Jr., tells of Dr. Dan's attending his father's funeral.
The story of the commissioning of the six hundred col-
ored officers is told in Official History of the American
Negro in the World War, Emmett /. Scott, 1919.
268 Harriet Hollinger told of Dr. Dan's visits to Moses
Brown's sons, and Harriette Kennedy Brown told of her
husband's visit to Dr. Dan. The Wisconsin trip was told
by Victoria Bishop Schuster.
David Kennedy was the child of a mulatto and a Tus-
carora Indian woman. As a baby he was toted pick-a-back
by his Indian grandmother. His mother died and his
father grieved so much he went off and, though Negroes
were not being accepted, managed to enlist in the North-
ern forces in the Civil War. David was just the age of Dan
Williams and the two little boys became firm friends. They
were playing alone together in the deserted schoolyard of
the little Negro schoolhouse late one evening when word
was brought David that his father had been killed. The
kind white Condron family, the family for whom the
Condron Opera House was named, brought up David.
When he was grown he married Harriet Powell, grand-
daughter of Thomas Williams, Dan's father's Lewistown
cousin. It was to David Kennedy that Dr. Dan confided
how brokenhearted he was over Kittie May Blake.
269 By 1915 Dr. Dan had withdrawn almost completely
from the colored medical fraternity. On a few occasions
he momentarily emerged from his isolation. In 1918 he
attended a dinner honoring Dr. James White on his re-
turn from service in France. In 1919, despite Hall's pres-
ence, he brought himself to attend and to speak at a din-
ner given for his old disciple and friend, Wilberforce
Williams. Wilberforce was going abroad for the Young
350 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE Men's Christian Association, to lecture to colored soldiers.
269 Hall could hardly stomach the acclaim given the departing
(Cont.) doctor. "I hope the damn nigger drowns/ 7 he growled to
Carl Roberts. But Wilberforce came safely home, and
when he did, in January 1922, Dr. Dan again emerged
from seclusion to attend a birthday dinner at his friend's
home. Hall was not invited, but others susceptible to his
influence were. The group was largely a medical group.
On the table reposed a fine young suckling pig. The occa-
sion was festive and the talk grew animated. Dr. Dan was
led to remark that funds had been offered him from a
wealthy white source with which to start another hospital,
but it was specified the new hospital should be entirely
staffed with colored doctors. "So," said Dr. Dan, "I re-
fused the money, for how could we staff it?" His remark
was quietly, almost carelessly made, according to Roberts,
Dickerson and White; he apparently expected no reaction
to it. But it was repeated outside and, as the weeks and
months passed, was so exaggerated and embroidered that
there was a new cry of "Disloyal!" Naturally there was
keen disappointment that such an opportunity had been
lost; more outlet was needed then as now for the pent-up
abilities and energies of the circumscribed colored profes-
sion. The late Dr. Carl Roberts judged there were then ten
or eleven men at Provident who were ready to head de-
partments. But, even if his opinion was correct, and if Dr.
Dan had pulled them all out to staff a new hospital, the
new hospital would still have lacked a number of needed
specialists and Provident would have been stripped of all
but George Hall, for Provident would allow no man to
serve on two staffs. There would have been no real gain for
the race and Dr. Dan would have been subject to the accu-
sation that he had started another hospital to ruin Hall and
Provident together. As a matter of fact, the late Dr. John
Kenney said: "I don't know where he could have got all
the men necessary for a completely colored staff; I myself
had the problem in Newark." And Dr. Dailey says; "Dr.
Williams's remark was true. At that time we had no real
specialists in internal medicine, no neurologist, no urolo-
gist, no obstetrician, and our specialists in eye, ear, nose
and throat were only in embryo. But it was certainly an
impolitic remark and was such as Dr. Williams was rated
to make, but it was true."
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 357
PAGE Christine Shoecraft Smith told of the diabetes and the
269 wood chopping, and Mrs. Beaudreau told how Dr. Dan
(Cont.) insisted on being driven to his office when he was too
weak to get there otherwise.
At sixty Dr. Dan removed a giant pyosalpinx; see Pub-
lications No. 14.
Dr. Dan's visits to Bailiff's resort at Benton Harbor were
told by Hettie Mitchem Turner and confirmed by C. O.
Bailiff. The late Dr. Roberts told how Hall made the place
unpleasant for Dr. Dan.
271 Alice Williams paid her last visit to Washington in 1917.
By this time she had learned to drive well and enjoyed it,
as she did the resumption of her china painting. When
young Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop, Dr. Dan's name-
sake, married Eloise Carey in 1919 she presented them
with some of her handiwork, a sugar bowl and cream
pitcher. Soon after she fell ill.
The nature of Alice Williams's illness was ascertained
from Dr. Gilbert.
Mrs. William T. Childs and Julia LeBeau Thompson
paid tribute to Alice's fortitude, as did Dr. Gilbert and
others. Estelle Arnold told of Alice's rejection of a minis-
ter and Mrs. Thompson told of the reading of Tennyson's
poem.
After her death, Dr. Dan was anxious, said Hugo Wil-
Uams, that each of her friends should have something be-
longing to her. To her physician he gave a quantity of her
fine Haviland.
272 Not until he was sixty-nine, in 1925, did Dr. Dan admit
he needed help with his office patients. He asked young
Dr. Leon Tancil to assist him. The arrangement was con-
genial and when Tancil married, Dr. Dan invited him to
bring his bride, daughter of Mary Church Terrell, the
noted race leader, to live with him. The house on West
42nd Street was larger than he needed since Alice had
died. He had Mrs. Croker to care for him, but he wanted
358 Daniel Hale Williams
PAGE company, six months of the year he would be in Idlewild.
272 The young couple accepted, but not without misgivings.
(Cont.) Mrs. Tancil (now Mrs. Beaudreau) writes of those days:
"We had heard that Dr. Dan was difficult to get along
with, but we found he was not nearly so grouchy as we
were made to believe. . . . We were all like a family there
and despite his reputation of being odd, we did not find
him so. He used to joke about the way I ordered him
around, he said no one ever had ordered him as I did, but
he liked it. As he grew forgetful, he would sometimes
accuse Dr. Tancil or Mrs. Croker of mislaying his books
or something, but he never accused me." Dr. Dan grew
weaker but was stubborn about giving up. Kahlke saw him
at an Eastern medical meeting and thought he looked very
ill, but Dr. Dan brushed aside Kahlke's anxious queries. At
home he was less and less able to stand noise or bustle of
any kind. The radio bothered him, the TancuY two dogs
bothered him, and finally the young couple, finding them-
selves confined to an almost hospital atmosphere, decided
they must move out if they were to have a normal social
life. The parting came after three years and was friendly.
But now Dr. Dan was lonely indeed. He wandered back
and forth between his own home and that of his old
friends, Mary Lizzie and Wilberforce. And then his be-
fuddled state led him into difficulties even with those old
friends. He asked Mary Lizzie to have one of his chairs
upholstered, forgot he had done so, and stormed and re-
fused to pay the bill. In April 1929 he spent several weeks
in Dailey's private sanitarium and by then Dailey con-
firmed the fact his mental faculties were impaired, as well
as his speech. J. Carlos Davis thought his friends should
ask the court to appoint a conservator and spoke to
Louis B. Anderson about it, but Anderson refused to do
anything for fear people would say he was after Dr. Dan's
money.
Dr. Dan went off to Washington, bought a house at 1214
Park Road and took his aged sister Annie and his sister
Alice to live with Mm. Florence had died in 1914, Sally
in 1915, and Ida still earlier. Dr. Charles West cared for
him, and Lily Waring Moore, an old friend of his wife's,
nursed him. In May 1930, his brother Price's daughter,
Ada Blanche Zaratt, came from Puerto Rico and took
charge of Dr. Dan. She took him to Chicago and on to
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 359
PAGE California for the winter, where he suffered another stroke
272 and had to be brought back to St. Luke's. Somewhat bet-
(Cont.) ter and back in his apartment at 5942 South Michigan
Avenue, he received friendly calls from Dr. N. C. Gilbert.
Long before, Gilbert had delighted to listen to Dr. Dan's
tales in the smoking room; now there was little he could
do for the great man medically. W. H. Zabel, St. Luke's
Chief Pharmacist for so many years, came too. As summer
approached, Dr. Dan begged to be taken to Idlewild to
die, and his niece complied with his request.
On November 12, 1930, a codicil was added to Dr. Dan's
will, giving all chattel property as well as the real estate
and house in Idlewild, together with one half of the resid-
uary estate, to his niece "in consideration of her giving
up her own home and affairs to live with me and to care
for my remaining years." The signature, a trembling,
childlike scrawl, bears no resemblance to Dr. Dan's former
signature. The will is on file in the Probate Court, Chicago.
The late Dr. Minton showed me Dr. Dan's letters to him
about sending his books to Mercy Hospital, Philadelphia.
Billings's letter making the dinner appointment was
found in Dr. Dan's papers, along with several others ex-
Eressing admiration and friendship, after his death. Dr.
udwig Hektoen, who was at the dinner, related the en-
gagement to the Provident Hospital drive for funds, and
the late Dr. Roberts told of Billings's refusal to assist Provi-
dent after Dr. Dan's resignation and of his later acceptance
of the chairmanship of the fund committee.
Dr. Dailey told of receiving the files and chair.
273 Obituaries appeared in the Chicago Tribune, New York
Times, Chicago Defender, NMA Jnl, AMA Jnl, Time and
many other papers.
The tribute in the Lake County Star is from the edition
of August 7, 1931.
360 Dmiel Hale Williams
PAGE Herbert Davis, editor of the Star, said when I called on
273 him that Dr. Dan's generosity was unbounded, that he edu-
(Cont.) cated many a boy in the neighborhood, first requiring him
not to tell, and that he offered to equip a hospital in Bald-
win if the townspeople would furnish the building, which
they failed to do. Fred Bradford was one Dr. Dan offered
to educate; he offered to set up a trust fund for his com-
plete medical education, but Fred's mother did not want
him to leave home. When Fred's brother Andy fell in a
dead faint with a ruptured stomach ulcer, Dr. Dan came
and stayed twelve hours by him without leaving, and vis-
ited him daily, sometimes two and three times a day, for
six weeks; he saved his life and sent no bill. In gratitude
the Bradfords came and put up rose trellises for Dr. Dan.
At Christmas time he sent gifts to many. To Mrs. Eisner,
the postmistress, besides personal gifts for herself and her
husband, he sent clothing for all the needy children round-
about together with a little gift. Mrs. Eisner addressed
them and mailed them out. "We remember Dr. Dan," said
Mr. Davis, "with something akin to reverence up here."
274 Harry Branch's museum at Idlewild Terrace displays
Dr. Dan's photograph along with some of his instruments
and his razors, and displays his "card" in I. C. Harris's
Directory of Colored Chicago, 1885.
On November 26, 1930, Mrs. Croker, his former house-
keeper, a member of Father Eckert's parish, who had long
been eager to have Dr. Dan baptized into the Catholic
Church, sent for her priest. The rite was performed in
Dr. Dan's room. In the year before his first stroke, Dr.
Dan gave his religion as "Unitarian" in Who's Who in
American Medicine 1925, Lloyd Thompson and Winfield
Scott Downs, eds.
Father Eckert told me Mrs. Croker called him to come
and baptize Dr. Dan and gave the date and place and said
Dr. Dan was not able to walk.
The late Dr. Roberts said few colored people attended
the funeral. W. H. Zabel, who attended, said the church
was packed.
NOTES BY CHAPTERS 361
PAGE Various persons spoke of the wreath incident at the
274 cemetery, including Drs. Spencer Dickerson and Wil-
(Cont.) Ham A. Lew-is.
James Gordon told me of the failure to give recognition
to Dr. Dan at the third Provident building, of his protest,
and of the belated restitution. Members of the staff paid
for the portrait, the National Medical Association fur-
nished the bronze plaque. I visited Provident lobby and
saw these souvenirs.
Persons Consulted
The thanks I have attempted to voice in my Acknowledgments I re-
peat here to these many persons who so patiently provided me with
the detail without which this book could not have been written. They
are, however, in no way responsible for the use I have made of their
information.
Isaac A. Abt, M.D., James Alderson, M.D., Leonard Alexander,
Lillie Smith Alexander, Henrietta Anieric, Archibald Anderson,
Daniel Herbert Anderson, M.D., Jessica Anderson, Louis B. Anderson,
Retta M. Arnett, R.N., Estelle L. Arnold, Mrs. George Arthur, Char-
lotte Atwood, Nancy Atwood, Jennie L. Avendorph.
C. O. Bailiff, J. Max Barber, D.D.S., Elizabeth Tyler Barringer,
R,N., Mary Terrell Tancil Beaudreau, Mrs. Beauduit, Tomietta
Stokes Beckham, R.N., Zellie Ridgley Bennett, L. L. Berry, Jesse
Binga, Eloise Carey Bishop, the Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop, Jennie
Blackburn, Arthur J. Booker, M.D., P. C. Boomer, M.D., May Boston,
M. O. Bousfield, M.D., Harry Bowser, Fred Bradford, Harry Branch,
Melesenah Maine Brinkley, Kate Gibson Brooks, R.N., Charles R.
Brown, Edith M. Brown, Eva Lucas Brown, Harriette Kennedy
Brown, Coleman G. Buford, M.D., Carrie E. Bullock, R.N., Allan
Burdick, H. W. Burnard, M.D., Mrs. Burrus, Harriet Shadd Butcher,
Alice Thornton Butler, Isabella Garnett Butler, M.D.
M. Blaine Caldwell, James Tweedie Campbell, M.D., Charles W.
Cansler, Archibald J. Carey, Jr., Edith M. Carter, R,N., Helen M.
Chesnutt, Mrs. William T. Quids, Mrs. Robert Church, Elizabeth
McCard Clark, Montague Cobb, M.D., William E. Cobb, Berta Cornell
Coleman, Duvall E. Colley, M.D., Mrs. Duvall E. Colley, Rufus J.
3 64 Daniel Hale Williams
Collins, M.D., W. H. Compton, Anna J. Cooper, Homer P. Cooper,
M.D., Norman Croker, M.D., Mary Cromwell, Otelia Cromwell,
Alice Williams Cuffee, Mrs. William N. Cummings.
Ulysses Grant Dailey, M.D., Herbert Davis, J. Carlos Davis, D.D.S.,
Mrs. J. C. Davis, Clara Demmey, Jessie Williams DePriest, Oscar
DePriest, Spencer C. Dickerson, M.D., Lillie Doughty, Frederick
Douglas, Kathleen Brown Douglas, W. E. Burghhardt DuBois.
Reverend Joseph Eckert, Mara Franc Edwards, Frances Middleton
Elam, Arthur R. Elliott, M.D., Mrs. Edwin Eisner, Carrie Ridgley
Evans, Mrs. Samuel J. Evans, Lillian Evanti, B. A. Everett, M.D.
Marie Fellows, M.D., Edith Fleetwood, Virginia Powell Florence,
G. Hamilton Francis, M.D., Chester A. Franklin, Clara Belle Williams
Franklin, D. Peter French, Henry W. Furniss, M.D., Sumner A.
Furniss, M.D.
Irene McCoy Gaines, Alamanda Williams Garnett, Josephine Wil-
liams Garnett, Charles H. Garvin, M.D., Mattie Martin Gates, Emma
George, Max P. Gethner, M.D., Maymie Van Vranken Gibson, N. C.
Gilbert, .D., Roscoe C. Giles, M.D., James G. Gordon, Charles Grace,
Helen Williams Ramsay Gray, Mabel Mason Greene.
Andy Hall, M.D., Harriett Curtis Hall, Mrs. Henry Hall, John B.
Hall, M.D., Nina Bamen Hall, Theodocia Brewer Hall, Beatrice Fitz-
gerald Hawkins, Ludwig Hektoen, M.D., Franklyn A. Henderson,
Mattie Herron, T. Arnold Hill, J, Seth Hills, M.D., Harriet Dennis
Hollinger, John Hamilton Holman, M.D., Lucy Messer Holmes, Wil-
liam R. Houston, Marie Hudlin, Mary G. Hudson, Beatrice Ridgley
Hume, Grace E. Hunte, John E. Hunter, M.D.
Reverend G. Lake Imes, Mae Irwin, R.N.
Alexander L. Jackson, Harry A. Jacobs, Francis Jamison, D.D.S.,
Sarah Jennings, Charles S. Johnson, Joseph L. Johnson, Katie Johnson,
E. Kinckle Jones, Frank C. Jones, M.D., Richard Lloyd Jones.
Charles E. Kahlke, M.D., Mrs. B. Lane Kelly, Charles Kelly, John
W. Kelly, E. A. Kendall, M.D., John A. Kenney, M,D., Minerva
Guernsey King.
Roscoe Lane, Helen J. Lattimore, Eva Hunt LeVere, Bertie Brooks
Lewis, Carrie Lewis, Charles A, Lewis, M.D., Julian Heath Lewis,
M.D., Lawrence A. Lewis, M.D., Tillie Lloyd, Myra Logan, MJD.,
Etta E. Loomis, Grace S. Lord.
Selim W. MacArthur, M.D., J. W, McDowell, M.D., Charles
McElroy, Harriet Layton McFadden, David A. McGowan, J. A. Mc-
Millan, M.D., Jeannette Lyons McMurdy, Philip McMurray, M.D.
Monroe A. Majors, M.D., Emma Lawrence Warren Mallet, John
Middleton Mallet, Pearl Barbour Marchant, Mrs. E. H. Mars, Anna
A. Mason, James S. Mills, Jr., M.D., Wallace C. Mills, Louise V.
PERSONS CONSULTED 365
Mingo, Henry M. Minton, M.D., Mrs. Henry M. Minton, Harry E.
Mock, M.D., C. E. Moreland, Del Gratia Scott Moreland, Mrs. Norris
Morgan, Mrs. Clifton Moss, N. F. Mossell, M.D., Eloise Palmer Mouat,
Anna Evans Murray.
Sarah Meriwether Nutter.
Caroline Parke, Mrs. E. H. B. Parker, Blanche Thornton Parnall,
Julia West Paul, Howard Marshall Payne, M.D., Katie B. Payne,
Clarena Harris Pendleton, J. Edward Perry, M.D., James M. Phalen,
M.D., Lorraine Pinchback, Samuel Craig Plummer, M.D., James Hale
Porter, Theodora Lee Purnell.
Daniel Rainey, Louise Rainey, Bishop Reverdy Ransom, W. A.
Reed, M.D., Curtis W. Reese, Juliana Willis Rhodes, Mary W. B.
Richardson, Lottie Bishop Ridgley, Mrs. Robert Hal Riffe, Carl
Glennis Roberts, M.D., E. P. Roberts, M.D., Mrs. E. P. Roberts,
Mamie Roberts, Angie T. Roethe, J. S. Royster.
Jessie Sleet Scales, R.N., Louis Schmidt, M.D., Victoria Bishop
Schuster, Emmett J. Scott, Howard D. Scott, James Scott, Mary Scott,
Blanche V. Shaw, Christine Shoecraft Smith, Daniel Smith, M.D.,
Reginald Smith, M.D., Robert Smith, Anna Pounder Sorrell, Annie
Stewart, F. A. Stewart, Jr., D.D.S., Harriet George Stewart, Ralph
Stewart, M.D., Elizabeth Ramsey Still, Agnes Thornton Stives,
Blanche Williams Stubbs, Frederick Stubbs, M.D., Charles L. Suther-
land, M.D., Mrs. Orion Sutherland, Florence Prettyman Suydam.
Elizabeth Palmer Taylor, Robert L. Taylor, William F. Taylor,
Mary Church Terrell, Gardner Thomas, Charles H. Thompson, Julia
LeBeau Thompson, Herbert Turner, M.D., Hettie Mitcham Turner,
William B. Turner.
Reverend Irvin W. Underbill.
Bertha Van Hoosen, M.D., Frank W. Van Kirk, M.D., Harriet L.
Van Vranken.
Mary Louise Hall Walker, J. H. Ward, M.D., William A. Warfield,
M.D., Lula G. Warlick, R.N., Esther Watson, Fannie West, Howard
D. West, M.D., Rebecca West, Lola Brown Whipple, Clarence Cam-
eron White, Helen Brown White, James R. White, M.D., Melesenah
White, Walter White, Ada Blanche W. Z. Williams, Hugo Williams,
O. B. Williams, M.D., Raphael Dumas Williams, Sadie Fitzgerald
Wilson, Maude Hall Winnett, M.D., W. W. Wolf, M.D., Carter G.
Woodson, Howard D. Woodson, Louis T. Wright, M.D., Lucille F.
Wright.
William J. Yerby.
William H. Zabel.
Publications of
Daniel Hale Williams, M.D., F.A.C.S.
1. "Several Cases of Inflammation Starting in the Caecum and Vermi-
form Appendix," read at meeting of Gynecological Society of
Chicago, March 17, 1895.
Transactions of the Gynecological Society of Chicago for
the year 1893-1894, Vol. 2, pp. 130-135.
American Journal of Obstetrics, 1893, Vol. 28, pp. 260-281.
2. Annual Report, Freedmen's Hospital, July i, 1895.
3. Annual Report, Freedmen's Hospital, July i, 1896.
4. "Stab Wound of the Heart and Pericardium. Suture of the Peri-
cardium. Recovery. Patient Alive Three Years Afterward." By
Daniel H. Williams, M.D., Surgeon, Freedmen's Hospital, Wash-
ington, D.C.
New York Medical Record, March 27, 1897, Vol. 51, pp.
437-439, illustrated.
5. Annual Report, Freedmen's Hospital, July i, 1897.
6. "Uterine Fibroids," letter dated December i, 1897, from Daniel H.
Williams to Dr. E. Stillman Bailey, read as part of report by
Bailey on "The Medical Treatment of Uterine Fibroids," at the
Section of the Medical Diseases of Women of the Clinical Society,
regular monthly meeting held December 18, 1897.
Clinique, Chicago, 1898, Vol. 19, pp. 23-24.
7. "A Case of Intestinal Obstruction Following Ventro-Fixation."
Discussion of paper by Albert Goldspohn, at meeting of the Chi-
cago Gynecological Society, March 21, 1900.
American Gynecological and Obstetrics Journal^ 1900, Vol.
16, p. 573.
8. "Surgical Cases: An Unusual Case of Molluscum Fibrosum; Hernia
of Bladder; Fibromatous Pregnant Uterus," By Daniel H. Wil-
PUBLICATIONS 367
Hams, M.D., Chicago (3034 Michigan Ave.), presented at clinical
meeting of Chicago Medical Society, Wednesday, December 20,
1899.
Chicago Medical Recorder, 1900, Vol. 18, pp. 43-47.
Obstetrics (New York), 1900, Vol. 2, pp. 70-72 (Fibrorna-
tous Pregnant Uterus).
The Philadelphia Medical Journal, February 17, 1900, Vol. 5,
pp. 404-405 (An Unusual Case of Molluscum Fibrosum).
9. "The Need of Hospitals and training Schools for the Colored
People of the South." By Daniel H. Williams, M.D., Attending
Surgeon, Provident and Cook County Hospitals.
Reprint of paper read before the Phillis Wheatley Club at
Nashville, Tennessee, January 23, 1900. 5 pages, illustrated. Na-
tional Hospital Record, Detroit. No date.
ID. "Ovarian Cysts in Colored Women, with Notes on the Relative
Frequency of Fibromas in Both Races." By Daniel H. Williams,
M.D., of Chicago, 111., Attending Surgeon to the Cook Co. and
Provident Hospitals. Read at regular meeting of the Chicago
Medical Society, December 26, 1900.
Chicago Medical Recorder, 1901, Vol. 20, pp. 47-57, 100-
101.
The Philadelphia Medical Journal, December 29, 1900, Vol.
6, pp. 1244-1248.
11. "A Report of Two Cases of Caesarean Section under Positive In-
dications with Terminations in Recovery." By Daniel H. Wil-
liams, M.D., Attending Surgeon to the Cook County and Provi-
dent Hospitals, Chicago, 111. Read before Chicago Gynecological
Society, January 18, 1901.
American Journal of Obstetrics, 1901, Vol. 45, pp. 315-322,
400-403 (illustrated).
12. "Penetrating Wounds of the Chest, Perforating the Diaphragm,
and Involving the Abdominal Viscera. Case of Successful Spleen
Suture for Traumatic Haemorrhage." By Daniel H. Williams,
M.D., of Chicago, Attending Surgeon to the Cook Co. and Provi-
dent Hospitals. Read before Chicago Medical Society, June 16,
1904.
Annals of Surgery, 1904, Vol. 40, pp. 675-685 (illustrated).
Illinois Medical Journal, 1904, Vol. 6, pp. 384-386 (last 5
pages of article).
Chicago Medical Recorder, 1904, Vol. 26, pp. 586-591 (illus-
trated).
13. "The Malingerer." By Daniel Hale Williams, M.D., LL.EX,
F.A.C.S., Chicago. Read at 9th Annual Meeting, Surgical Associa-
368 Daniel Hale Williams
tion of the Chicago and North Western Railway, Rochester,
Minnesota, December 10-11, 1915.
The Railway Surgical Journal, 1915-1916, Vol. 22, pp. 445-
448 (last paragraph is abridged).
Neiv York Medical Journal, April 8, 1916, Vol. 103, pp.
684-686 (omits discussion).
14. "Unusually Large Pyosalpinx." Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, with
pathological report by Mr. Kenneth Hallock. Read at regular
meeting of Chicago Gynecological Society, January 21, 1916.
Surgery, Gynecology, Obstetrics, 1916, Vol. 22, pp. 741-
742-
Index
Abbreviation: DHW for Daniel Hale Williams
ABOLITIONISTS, 5, 9, 26
Afro-American, Baltimore, 265
Age, The, New York, 231, 240
Allis Chalmers Machine Shop, 70
All Souls Unitarian Church, Chi-
cago, 62
All Souls Unitarian Church, Janes-
ville, 12, 20, 225
Altgeld, John, Governor of Illinois,
65
American College of Surgeons, 260
American Dermatological Society,
*79.
American Medical Association, 23,
177* *9 6
American Public Health Associa-
tion, 64
Amherst College, 231
Anderson, Alfred (Alfie), 4, 55,
*53-*54 z6z
Anderson, Archibald, 214
Anderson, Charles Henry (Harry),
3-4, 7-9, 12-13, 20-21, 29, 31-32,
35-37> 44-47' 54~55i *57, 189, 199,
262
Anderson, Dr. Daniel Herbert
(Bert), 4, 45, 55-56, 157, 262
Anderson, Ellen (Byron), second
wife of Charles Henry Anderson,
4, 13, 16, 38, 45, 54, 55. *<>*
Anderson, George, dentist, 4, 12, 46,
60
Anderson, Harry. See Anderson,
Charles Henry
Anderson, Jessica, 214
Anderson, Julia (Settles), third wife
of Charles Henry Anderson, 189,
262
Anderson, Louis B., 39, 214, 225, 269
Anderson, Tessie, 4, 54-55, 102
Anderson, Traviata (Vytie, 'Viata),
first wife of Charles E. Bentley,
4, 21, 32, 38, 45, 55, 61, 75-76, 102,
144
Anderson's String Band, 3, 8, 13, 16
Anderson's Tonsorial Parlor and
Bathing Rooms, 3, 7, 9, 199
Andrews, Dr. Edmund, 41-44, 63,
221
Andrews, Dr. E. Wyllys, 54, 80, 99,
221
Annals of Surgery, 94, 213
Annapolis, Maryland, home of an-
cestors of DHW, 5-6, 21, 131;
DHW's childhood in, 55-56;
Price Williams buried there, 131;
Sarah Price Williams buried there,
225
Antoine, Dr. Felix, 241
Apollo Hall, 8
Appendicitis, history of, 80-8 1;
DHW reads his first paper on, 81
Armour, P. D., 70, 73, 84, 174
Arnett, Bishop B. F., 69
370
Daniel Hale Williams
Associated Charities, 107
Aunt Charlotte, DHW's aunt, 32, 38
Avendorph, Jennie, 228, 268
Avendorph, Julius N., 157, 174, 185*
189, 214, 268
Avendorph, Julius N., Jr., 268-269
BACON, DR. JOSEPH B., 99
Bailey, Dr. Stillman, 179
Baker, Henry, 136
Baltimore, Garnett, 151-152
Baltimore, Maryland, DHW a shoe-
maker's apprentice in, 6
Baptist Church, 19
Barber, J. Max, dentist, 231-232,
237
Barnes, Judge, 84
Barnes, Dr., surgeon, 121
Barnett, Ida B. (Wells), 83, 146
Barr, Dr. Elmer E., 77, 88, 91
Bateman, Newton, President, Knox
College, 62
Beckett, Mr., District Property
Clerk, 168
Beckham, Tornietta Stokes, 214
Bee, Washington, D.C., 132, 138,
162, 171
Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, 1 1
Beffel, J. M., 179
Bellevue Hospital Medical College,
60
Benjamin family, 56, 58
Bentley, Dr. Charles E., 55, 61, 72,
76, 98, 144, 173, 223, 232, 254, 256,
258, 261, 273
Bentley, Florence (Lewis), second
wife of Charles E. Bentley, 189,
223, 232, 254
Bentley, Traviata (Anderson), first
wife of Charles E. Bentley. See
Anderson, Traviata
Bernhardt, Sarah, 152
Bethel African Methodist Episcopal
Church, 62, 70, 73, 82, 251
Billings, Dr. Frank, 50, 53, 76, 80,
187, 261, 272
Billroth, Dr. Theodor, 87
Binga, Jesse, 71, 75
Bishop, Rev. Hutchins, 55-56, 136,
152, 268
Bishop, Rev. Shelton Hale, 56, 136
Blackever, James, roi
Blackstone's Cowmientaries, 16-17
Blake, Mr. and Mrs. Adam, 56-58
Blake, Kittie May, 57-58, 65, 102
Bliss, Cornelius, Secretary of the In-
terior, 132-134, 144-145, 159-161,
166, 172
Block, Dr., 86-87
Board of Incorporators, Freedmen's
Hospital, 140-142, 144
Board of Visitors, Freedmen's Hos-
pital, 159, 161-162, 164-167, 171,
235-236, 243-244
Bond, Carrie (Jacobs), 14, 186
Booker, Dr. Arthur J., 217, 254
Botanic sect of medicine, 22
Boyd, Dr. R. F., 194, 196
Broadax, Chicago, 234
Brown, John, Abolitionist, 27, 52
Brown, Bishop John M., 69
Brown, Moses, 268
Brown, Dr. Robert W., 127
Bruce, Mrs. Blanch K., 188
Buford, Dr. Coleman, 54, 88, 91,
260, 272
Bur dick, Blanche, 14
Byford, Dr. Henry T., 76, 77
CAESAREAN OPERATIONS, early, 60;
performed by DHW: on dwarf,
1 1 8-1 22 ; complicated by 1 8-pound
tumor, 124-125; discussion of, by
Washington doctors, 126; discus-
sion of, by Chicago doctors, 184
Calloway, Preacher, 74
Camp Funston, 267
Cappelen, Dr., surgeon, 93, 95
Carey, Bishop Archibald, 214
Carey, Mrs. Archibald, 215
Carey, Dorothy, 215
Carey, Eloise, 215
Carey, Madison Davis, 214, 215
Carter, Edith, 123, 125, 272
Cedar Hill, home of Frederick
Douglass, 131
INDEX 371
Centennial Exposition, 149
Central Tennessee College, 194
Charity Organization Society, 83
Chase, Calvin B., 138
Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 231, 259
Chicago & Northwestern Railway
Surgical Association, 264
Chicago College of Dental Surgery,
55
Chicago Correspondence University,
6 *
Chicago Historical Society, 25
Chicago Medical College, 22-24, 28,
33~35, 40-43, 47-48, ?o, 74, 7^, 79,
86
Chicago Medical Recorder, 179, 213
Chicago Medical Society, 81, 177-
180, 2ii
Chicago Surgical Society, 95
Chislett, Dr. Howard, 173, 272
City Railway Company of Chicago,
54, 137
Civil Service Commission, 134, 144-
/45
Civil War, 3, 6, 26, 105, 108
Claflin University, 248
Cleveland, Grover, President, 97,
100, 132-133, 142-143
Clinical Society of Chicago, 179
College of Physicians and Surgeons,
22
Colley, Dr. Duvall, 115, 129
Colored American, newspaper,
Washington, D.C., 101, 161
"Colored American, The," poem by
Paul Laurence Dunbar, 135
Compton, W. H., 197
Congregational Church, First, 104
Congressional Committee to investi-
gate charitable and reformatory
institutions in District of Colum-
bia, 132-144, 159
Conservator, Chicago, 54, 234, 240,
248
Cook County Hospital, 22, 25, 36,
41, 185, 257
Cooke, John F. T 135
Cordoza, Harry, 165-166
Cornish, James, 85, 88-93, 95-96,
207-208, 260
Cotton, George Albert, 95
Cotton States Exposition, 191
Cow Town, 1 08, 135
Cox, Betty (Mrs. John R. Francis),
151, 155
Croker, Dr. Fred, 259
Croker, Margaret (Mrs. Fred), 259,
272, 274
"Crossing the Bar" (Alfred Tenny-
son), 271
Crushed extremities, treatment of,
by DHW, 214, 246
Culbertson, Dr. Carey, 260
Curl, Connie, 73
Curtis, Dr. Austin M., 77, 84, 133-
134, 144-145, 160-161, 163-164, 1 66,
172, 204, 219, 222, 238, 242, 260
Curtis, Mrs. Austin M., 74, 133, 145
Curtis, Hattie, 84
Gushing, Dr. Harvey, 183
DAILEY, DR. ULYSSES GRANT, 219-
223, 247, 261-262, 270, 272
Dalton, Dr. H. C., 94
Darrow, Clarence, 73, 174, 224-225
Darwin, Charles, 9
Davis, Herbert, 273
Davis, J. Carlos, dentist, 268
Davis, Dr. Nathan Smith, dean,
Chicago Medical College, 23, 28-
29, 33, 59
Davis, Dr. Thomas A., 185
Davison, Dr. Charles, 185
Delaware Indians, 5
DeLee, Dr. Joseph B., 180, 184,
187
Denison, Franklin A., 69
Dental College, Howard University,
114
Department of the Interior, 104,
106-107, 132, 145, 159, 164. See also
Secretary of the Interior
DePriest, Jessie (Williams), 262
DePriest, Oscar, 225
Derrick, Bishop W. B., 155, 267
DeWolf, Oscar, 48, 63
372
Daniel Hale Williams
Dickerson, Dr. Spencer, 219, 261-
262, 272
District [of Columbia] Board of
Commissioners, 102-103, 107, 144
Doane, Bishop William Croswell,
56-57
Dockery, Alexander M., Congress-
man from Missouri, 137
Doty, Henry, 45
Douglass, Frederick, 82, 99, 131, 192,
199
DuBois, W. E. B., 231, 273
Dudley, Dr. E. C, 48
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 135, 155
Dunton, Lewis M., president, Claflin
University, 248
Dwarf, Caesarean operation on, per-
formed by DHW, 118-122
EBERSOLE, SARAH C., 111-112, 114,
125, 1 60, 164-165
Eckert, Father, 274
Eclectic medicine, 22, 51, 77, 175
Eddy, Clarence, 55, 61
Edwards, Mara Franc (Frankie),
n, 13
Eighth Illinois Regiment, 176
Eisendrath, Dr. Daniel N., 175
Elliott, Dr. Arthur, 261
Emancipation, 15, 26, 66, 108
Emergency Hospital, Chicago, 101
Episcopal Church, 56
Equal Rights League, 6, 135, 268
Evans, Anna (Mrs. Daniel Murray),
i5 151
Ezekiel, Jacob, 148
Ezekiel, Moses J., 148-150, 152, 154,
227
FAULKNER, CHARLES J., Senator from
West Virginia, 137, 139-140, 142-
*43
Fellowes, Dr. Marie, 217
Fellows, Dr. C. Gurnee, 185
Fenger, Dr. Christian, 35, 48, 76, 79-
82, lor, 214
Field, Marshall, 174
Fifer, Joseph W., governor of Illi-
nois, 62, 65
Fisher, Cora, 147
Fisher, Sally, 147
Fisk University, 194
Fitz, Dr. Reginald Heber, 80-8 1
Fleetwood, Sarah, 187
Flexner, Dr. Abraham, 195
Forbes, George, 231
Fortune, T. Thomas, 231, 240
Francis, Dr. G. Hamilton, 200, 272
Francis, Dr. John R., 109, 116, 127,
241
Freedmen's Bureau, 7, 55, 105
Freedmen's Hospital, 97-99, 101-
106, 122-123, 126, 131, 151, 153,
179-180, 192-193, 204, 232-236,
240-241, 249, 258, 271; history of,
105-106; reforms instigated by
DHW, 108-117, 128-130; investi-
gated by Congressional commit-
tee, 132-144, 159-172. See also
Board of Incorporators and Board
of Visitors
Free Negro Conventions, 5, 56, 71
Fuller, Dr. William, 88, 95, 259-260,
272
Furniss, Dr. Henry (Harry), 135,
'53
GAINES, REV. GEORGE W., 69
Garfield, James A., President, 99
Garfield, James Randolph, Secretary
of the Interior, 234-237, 240-244
Garfield Hospital, 118
Garnett, Isabella, 83-84, 272
Garrison, William Lloyd, 5
Gazette, Janesville, 16, 20, 186
General Theological Seminary, 56
George, Judge Albert, 188
Gethner, Dr. Max, 252-253, 255, 272
Gibson, Kate, 112
Gilbert, Dr. N* C., 261, 271
Giles, Dr. Roscoe, 262, 272
"God Be With You 'Til We Meet
Again" (Jeremiah E. Rankin), 104
Goldspohn, Dr. Albert, 1183
Goodwin's Froliques, 30
Gordon, James G., 62, 66, 75, 174,
274
Graceland Cemetery, 274
Graham, Dr. Neil F., 127
Grand Opera House, 30
Gray's Anatomy, 17
Green, Mollie, 73
Greene, Dr. F. C., 73
Greenhill, Smith Price estate, 5
Gresham, Judge Walter Q., 74, 97-
98, 102, 131, 133, 142-143
Guardian, Boston, 231
Guernsey, Minerva, 10, 20
Guernsey, Orrin, 8, 10, 16, 199
Gunsaulus, Rev. F. W., 69-70, 74,
223
Gynecological Society of Chicago,
80, 183-184
HADLEY, C. O., 254
Haire, Rev. John, 9-11, 20, 29
Haire, Mrs., 20
Haire's Academy. See Janesville
Classical Academy
Hale, Dr. J. H., 201, 272
Hall, Dr. Andy, 54
Hall, Mrs. Benjamin, 16
Hall, Dr. George Cleveland, 75, 77,
88, 101, 175-177, 189-190, 218-219,
236-243, 245-258, 260-265, 267,
269, 274
Hall, Theodocia (Brewer) (Mrs.
George Cleveland Hall), 189, 228,
236-237, 245, 248, 250-252, 254
Halsted forceps, 163
Halsted gloves, 121
Hamilton Club, 62, 74, 84
Hampton's Nursing, 167
Hancock, R. M., 70
Hanna, Mark, 133, 145
Harrison, Richard B. (Dick), 188,
225
Harvard University, 231
Harvey Medical College, 76, 175
Haskett, Dr. W. A., 62
Hatfield, Dr. Marcus J., 37, 40, 51
Hay, Dr. Walter, 77
Hayes, Rutherford B., President, 9
INDEX 373
Heart operation, world's first suc-
cessful, performed by DHW, 85-
95
Hepburn, Dr. J. Charles, 257
Hippocratic Oath, 49
Hirsch, Rabbi Emil, 73, 223
Hohenlohe, Cardinal Gustavo von,
149
Holland, Milton M., 155
Hollidaysburg, Pa., home of DHW's
parents and of DHW, 4-7; Rev-
erdy Ransom has church in, 224;
DHW visits, 268
Hollister, Dr. John H., 40
Holman, Dr. John Hamilton, 200,
272
Home Forums, u
Homeopathic medicine, 22
Hood, Dr. Thomas B., dean, How-
ard University Medical School,
104, 127
Howard University, 98-100, 103-
106, 109, in, 114, 117, 128-129,
138-139, 141-143, 149, 151-152, 160,
195, 200, 233, 244, 264, 272
Hubbard, George W., dean, Me-
harry Medical College, 194-196,
^54
Hull House, 250
Hullihan, Maggie, 10-11
Hullihan, Mr., 10-11
Humbert, King of Italy, 150
Hunter, Dr. J. E., 241, 246
Hyde, Dr. J. Nevins, 179
IDLEWILD, life of DHW in, 259, 269-
270, 273
Illinois Charitable Eye and Ear In-
firmary, 41
Illinois Medical Journal, 213
Illinois State Board of Health, 62-
65,68
"I Love You Truly" (Carrie Jacobs
Bond), 1 86
Incorporators, Board of. See Board
of Incorporators
Index Catalogue, 93
Index Medicus, 93-94
374
Daniel Hale Williams
Ingersoll, Colonel Robert, n, 15,
152, 271, 274
Institutional Church and Social Set-
dement, 223-224
Interior Department, 233, 236, 243.
See also Secretary of the Inte-
rior
International Medical Congress, 59-
60
Inter-Ocean, Chicago, 92, 94
Irving, Sir Henry, 152
Isham, Dr. Ralph N., 74, 76-77, 99
JACKSON, DR., 272
Jackson, Alice (Smith) , 45, 75
Jacobs, Carrie. See Bond, Carrie (Ja-
cobs)
Jaggard, Dr. W. W., 76, 120, 175
Janesville, Wis., life of DHW in,
3-21; DHW visits, 1 86
Janesville Classical Academy, 3, o-
15, 20, 29
Jefferson High School, attended by
DHW, 7
Jenifer, Rev. John T., 69
Jenner, Edward, 37
Jewell, Dr. James S., 33, 40
Johns Hopkins University Hospital,
1 20, 136, 139, 182
Johnson, Alice D., meets DHW,
136-137; marriage to DHW, 146,
155; described, 147; parentage
and birth, 148; studies at Howard
University, 149-150; goes to Eu-
rope, 149; teaches at Mott School,
151; her suitors, 151-152; engage-
ment to Garnett Baltimore, 152;
friendship with Henry Furniss,
153; courted by DHW, 153; death
of her mother, 154. See also Wil-
liams, Alice (Johnson)
Johnson, Dr. Frank S., 74
Johnson, Isabella, mother of Alice
D. Johnson, 148-154, 228-229
Johnson, Dr. James Tabor, 123,
126
Johnson, J. M., 75
Johnstone, Margaret E., 261
Jones, Rev. Jenkin Lloyd, 12, 15, 20,
62, 69, 71, 73, 174, 271
Jones, John, 25-26, 62, 69
Jones, Mrs. John, 21-22, 25-27, 29-
32, 34, 40, 45, 47, 51-52, 69, 254
Jones, John G. ("Indignation"), 71-
7*
Jones, Theodore Wellington, 69-70,
256
KAHLKE, DR. CHARLES, 184
Kelly, Dr. Howard, 120, 122, 180,
182-183
Kendall, Dr., 272
Kennedy, David, 268
Kenney, Dr. John A., 217-218, 238,
241, 245, 266, 272
Kimber's Anatomy and Physiology,
167
Knight, Rev. R. E., 69
Knox College, 62
Kohlsaat, Herman H., 73-74, 84, 92,
174-175
LADIES' WHIST CLUB, 228
Lake County Star, Baldwin, Mich.,
273
Lamb, Dr. D. S., 178, 181
Langston, Nettie. See Napier, Net-
tie (Langston)
Lattimore family, 56
LeBeau, Julia, 52
LeBeau, Mrs., mother of Julia Le-
Beau, 52
LeDroit Park, 108
Lee, Lavinia (Jones), 26
Lee, Robert E., 149
Lee, Theodora (Thedy), 26, 40, 52,
60-61
Lewis, Florence. See Bentley, Flor-
ence (Lewis)
Lewis, Dr. Lawrence A., 205
Lewis, Mr., Superintendent of Char-
ities, District of Columbia, 168
Liberia, 26
Library of Congress, 238
Lincoln, Abraham, President, 62
Lincoln Hospital, 246
INDEX 375
Lind University, 22
Lister, Lord Joseph, 42, 44
Listerism, 60
Liszt, Franz, 149
Littleton's Tenures, 16-17
Lord, Ida (Williams), wife of Jim
Lord, 12-14, 20, 272
Lord, Jim, 14
Lord, Dr. Simeon, 14
Lucas, Sam, 225
Lundy, Benjamin, 5
Lynch, John R., 138, 142-144, 160
Lyon, Jeannette. See McMurdy,
Jeannette (Lyon)
Lyons, Judson W., 226
MCARTHUR, DR. L. L., 80
McCard, Dr. Harry, 241
McDowell, Dr. Ephraim, 42, 180
McDowell, Dr. J. W., 93, 226, 261,
272
McGowan, Mrs. David, 74
McKinley, William, President, 143
McKissick, Dr. Andrew, 217, 272
McMillan, Dr. J. A., 201, 272
McMillan, James, Senator from
Michigan, 134, 137-138, 144-145,
159, 161, 171
McMurdy, Jeannette (Lyon), 253,
257
McMurdy, Judge Robert, 257
McVicker's Theater, 30
Madden, James, 69, 73, 157, 173, 232,
256, 258
Mallet, John, 187
Maxim's Hall, 152
Marshall, Colonel John R., 69
Martin, Dr. Franklin, 53, 59, 80,
100
Martin, Thomas S., Senator from
Virginia, 137-138, 144
Mason, Rev. C. M. C, 6, 135
Mason, Edith, 135, 155
Mathews family, 56
Matthews, Professor Shailer, 223
Mayo, Dr. Charles, 54
Mayo, Dr. Will, 80-8 1, 183
Mayo needle, 211
Medical Record of New York, 93-
94.
Medical sects, Botanic, 22; Eclectic,
22, 51, 77, 175; Homeopathic, 22;
Thompsonian, 22
Medical Society of the District of
Columbia, 126-127, 179
Medico-Chirurgical Society of the
District of Columbia, 127
Meharry Medical College, 194-196,
200-201, 217, 254-255, 272
Menzies, Dr. Hugh, 186
Mercy Hospital, Chicago, 24-25, 37,
41-42, 45-46, 48, 70
Mercy Hospital, Philadelphia, 272
Meriwether, Mary (Robinson), 152,
230
Meriwether, Sarah, 155
Methodist Episcopal Church, 12
Meyer Opera House, Janesville, 8
Meyer's Kowversations-Lexikon, 181
Michaelis, Dr., surgeon, 120
Middleton, Fannie, 155
Millionaire Row, Chicago, 25, 47
Mills, Dr. James S., 20, 23, 25, 34, 48,
59, 1 86, 267
Milton College, 20
Mingo, Louise, 229
Minnesota State Medical Society, 81
Minton, Dr. Henry M., 241, 272
Modjeska, Helena, 8
Mollin, Dr. C. W. Mansell, 87
Montezuma, Dr. Carlos, 223
Morgan, Dr. William E., 50, 67, 88
Morris, Edward H., 72, 178
Moton, Major, 250
Mott School, 147, 151-153, 226
Murphy, Dr. John B., 60, 81, 126,
185, 222, 253
Murray, Daniel, 122, 146
Murray, Daniel, Jr., 122
NAPIER, JAMES CARROLL, Nashville
banker, 226, 255
Napier, Nettie (Langston), wife of
James Carroll Napier, 151, 226
National Archives, 98
National Association for the Ad-
37 6
Daniel Hale Williams
vancement of Colored People, 272-
273
National Association of Colored
Graduate Nurses, 245
National Association of Trained
Nurses, 250
National Dispensatory, The, 17
National Medical Association, 127-
128, 191-192, 196, 201, 217, 245-
H7. 2 5*
National Soldiers' Home, 108
NefT, Dr. James F., 257
Negro hospitals and medical schools,
206
Negro National Hospital Associa-
tion, 274
New York Medical Record. See
Medical Record of New York
Niagara Movement, 232, 235-236, 273
Ninth Battalion, 176
North Carolina Medical Journal, 206
Northway, Stephen, Congressman
from Ohio, 137-139
Northwestern Pathological Labora-
tory, 179
Northwestern University, 22, 49, 79,
157, 219, 221, 257; Medical School,
261, 271
OAKMERE, home of DHW, 270, 273
Oberlin College, 152
Obstetrics, 119
Ochsner, Dr. Albert J., 182-183
Odontographic Society, 76
Olcott family, 56
Old Bethel. See Bethel African
Methodist Episcopal Church
"Old Boston," former slave, 114
Old Folks Home, 178
Oregon Indian Medicine Co., 63-64
Osborne, Dr., surgeon, 121
PAGE, THOMAS NELSON, 227
Palmer, Elizabeth. See Taylor, Eliza-
beth (Palmer)
Palmer, Dr. Henry, 9, 16-22, 24, 38,
44, 46, 59, 128
Palmer, Mrs. Potter, 225
Palmer, Dr. Will, 17
Parke, Alice, 151-152
Parke, Caroline (Caddie), 136-137,
147, 149, 151-155* 16*. 187, 229
Parker, James, 235-236, 244
Parrish, Mabel (Williams) , cousin of
DHW, 83, 88, 262
Parrozzani, Dr., surgeon, 95
Patti, Adelina, 61
Paul family, 56
Pember, Dr. Frank, 20, 23, 25, 34,
45-46, 48, 1 86
Pennsylvania State Canal, 6
Pensions, Commissioner of, 108
Perry, Dr. J. Edward, 201-204, 272
Peterson, Dr. Reuben, 183
Petit, Sarah Raynie. See Wheeler,
Sarah Raynie (Petit)
Phalen, Dr. James M., Colonel, U.S.
Army, Ret., 185, 272
Philadelphia Medical Journal, 179
Phillis Wheatley Club, Chicago, 188;
Nashville, 197
Physicians of the Poor, 107
Pilot, The, Philadelphia, 39
Pinchback, Bismarck, 57
Pinchback, Nina, 57
Pinchback, P. B. S., lieutenant gov-
ernor of Louisiana, 57
Pitney, Mahlon, Congressman from
New Jersey, 137
Plaza Assembly Rooms, 245
Plummer, Mrs. J. C., 70
Plummer, Dr. Samuel C., 261
Plymouth Congregational Church,
40, 48, 69
Post, Washington, D.C., 160
Post Graduate Medical School, 99-
100, 182
Presbyterian Church, Third, 73
Presbyterian Hospital, Chicago, m
Price family, 5-6, 8, 21, 25-26, 32, 38,
131-132, 276-277
Price, Rev. Henry, grandfather of
DHW, 5, 12, 15, 21, 61, 276-277
Price, Mary, wife of DHWs uncle,
Henry H. Price, 21
Price, Nina, 175
INDEX
377
Price, Sarah Ann. See Williams,
Sarah Ann (Price)
Price, Smith, great-grandfather of
DHW, 5
Protestant Orphan Asylum, 51
Provident Hospital, Chicago, world's
first interracial hospital, 80, 82-85,
94, 9<$~97 I00 ' !<>9i iii-iii, 135.
142, 157, 173, 177, 193, 197, 199, 209,
211, 213, 219, 223, 232-233, 236, 238,
243, 251-252, 255-259, 262, 264, 269,
274-275; first building, reasons for
establishment, 66-68; campaign,
69-73; contributors, 73, 75; incor-
poration, 73; opening, 75; staff, 76-
77; ladies' auxiliaries, 73, 78; organi-
zation, 74; first annual report, 78;
benefit charity ball, 79; second
building, contributors, 174-175;
third building, 272, 274
Provident Hospital Association, 73-
74, 256
Pullman, Florence, 73, 84
Purvis, Dr. Charles B., 98-100, 103-
107, in, 114, 117, 126-127, 132-133*
138, 140, 142-144, 160, 162, 1 68, 205,
244, 258
Purvis, Robert, 98
QUINE, DR. WILLIAM E., 34, 40, 65
RAINEY, DANIEL, 215
Rainey, Mrs. Richard, 215, 273
Rankin, Rev. Jeremiah Eames, presi-
dent, Howard University, 104, 117,
129, 138, 141-142, 144, 155
Ransom, Rev. Reverdy, 223-225, 271
Rauch, Dr. John R., 62-63
Rea, Dr. Robert Laughlin, 34-35, 41,
48
Reed, Dr. W, A. (Nashville), 200-
201, 272
Reed, Dr. Walter A. (Washington,
D.C.), 164
Rehn, Dr., surgeon, 93, 95
Remenyi, Edward, 152-153
Reyburn, Dr, Robert, 123, 126-127
Reynolds, Emma, 66-68, 75, 77
Reynolds, Rev. Louis H., 66, 68-69
Ricketts, Dr. Benjamin, 94
Ridgley, Zellie, 82
Roberts, Dr. Carl Glennis, 261-262,
269, 272
Roberts, Dr. John B., 86-87
Robinson, Dr. F. Byron, 79, 81, 99
Rockford, Illinois, DHW in, as a
child, 6
Rockford College, 60
Roger Williams University, 194
Roman, Dr. C. V., 241
Roosevelt, Theodore, President, 193,
226-227, 231, 250
Roosevelt Hospital, 139
Ross, J. W., 172
Rough Riders, 193
Royal College of Surgeons, 87
Rush Dispensary, 76
Rush Medical College, 22-23, 25, 33
Russo-Turkish War, 19
ST. AGNES CONVENT SCHOOL, 57
St. Anne's Churchyard, Annapolis,
131
St. Anselm's Roman Catholic
Church, 274
St. Louis Municipal Hospital, 201
St. Luke's Hospital, Chicago, 25, 41,
70, 185, 218, 257, 260-261
St. Mark's Methodist Episcopal
Church, 245
St. Philip's Church, 56, 136
St. Stephen's African Methodist
Episcopal Church, 66
St. Thomas's African Episcopal
Church, 52
San Juan Hill, 193
Sauerbrach, Ferdinand, 95
Schmidt, Dr. Louis, 261
Schmidt, Dr. Otto, 80, 187
Schroeder, Dr. William E., 185
Schultz, Dr. Annie Beatrice, 263
Scott, Emmett J., 234-237, 239-240,
248-249, 265-268
Scottish Rite Masons, 146
Secretary of the Interior, 99, 101,
io8~no, 115, 129, 132, 139, 141, 143,
378
Dmiel Hale Williams
Secretary of the Interior (continued)
160-161, 235, 240, 242-244, 249-250.
See also Bliss, Cornelius; Garfield,
James Randolph; Smith, Hoke
Secretary of War, 267
Senn, Dr. Nicholas, 59, 87, 211,
*53
Settles, Julia, third wife of Charles
Henry Anderson. See Anderson,
Julia (Settles)
Shadd, Dr. Furman L., 104-105, 109,
117, 127
Shawnee Indians, 5
Sigma Pi Phi, DHW resigns from,
254
Sleet, Jessie, 83, 272
Smiley, Charles H., 75, 135, 156, 256
Smiley, Mrs. Charles H., 135, 157
Smith, Alice. See Jackson, Alice
(Smith)
Smith, Christine (Shoecraft), 227,
230
Smith, Hoke, 102, 109, no, 115-116,
129-130, 132, 141. See also Secre-
tary of the Interior
Smith, Dr. Reginald, 216, 262
Smith, Dr. T. C., 125-126
Snead, Dr. W. J., 200
Society of Clinical Surgery, 183
Sons of the Covenant, 149
South Side Dispensary, 24, 53, 76
South Side Medico-Social Society,
80
Spanish- American War, 156, 177, 207
Spleen operation, performed by
DHW, 210-212
Stanton, Elizabeth (Cady), 11
Stanton School, of the Freedmen's
Bureau, attended by DHW in An-
napolis, 7, 55
Star, Washington, D.C., 39, 102, 159,
162
Starkey, Dr. Horace, 76
Stewart, Annie, 255
Stewart, Dr. Ferdinand A., 194, 196,
200, 241, 254-255, 272
Stewart, Ferdinand A,, Jr., 255
Stewart, Jerry, 256
Sunday Forum, DHW attends, 224-
225
Surgery of the Thorax and its Vis-
cera (Benjamin Merrill Ricketts),
94
Surgical Association of the Chicago
& Northwestern Railway, 264
Surgical operations performed by
DHW, heart, 85-95; Caesareans,
118-122, 124-125, 126, 184; tumor
on back of German farmer, 122,
178-179; tumors in women, 170-
183; thorax, 207-213; spleen, 210-
212; crushed extremities, 214
TAFT, WILLIAM H., PRESIDENT, 249
Tait, Lawson, 79
Tancil, Dr. Arthur W., 127
Tanner, John Riley, governor of
Illinois, 177
Taylor, Elizabeth (Palmer), daugh-
ter of Dr. Henry Palmer, 17
Taylor, Robert L., 185
Tennyson, Alfred, 271
Terrell, Mary (Church), 223
Terry, Ellen, 152
Thomas, Rev. J. F., 69
Thompsonian sect in medicine, 22
Thorax operations performed by
DHW, 85-95, 207-213
Tibbs, Mary Lizzie. See Williams,
Mary Lizzie (Tibbs)
Tiffany, Dr., surgeon, 211
"To Dan" (Paul Laurence Dunbar),
155-156
Topp, Sadie (Williams), 56
Topp family, 56
Trotter, Monroe, 231
Tumor operations performed by
DHW, on German farmer, 122,
178-179; on women, 179-183
Turner, Dr. Herbert, 262
Twkegee and Its People (Booker T.
Washington), 236
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial In-
stitute, 146, 191-192, 218, 231-240,
248-251, 256, 265, 267
Tuskegee Student, The> 218, 237-239
Tyler, Elizabeth, 112-114, 272
Tyler, John, President, 148
UNION COLLEGE OF LAW, 69
Unitarian Church, 12, 15. See All
Souls Unitarian Church
United Brotherhood and Fraternal
Insurance Company, 178
VAN CLEVE, JOHN, 1 1
Van Hook, Dr. Weller, 185
Van Kirk, Dr. Frank W., 186
Van Kirk, W. T., 8
Van Vranken family, 56
Vesalius, Andreas, 1 28
Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, 150
Virginia Military Institute, 227
Voice, The, Atlanta, 231-232
WALDEN UNIVERSITY, 195
War Department, 268
Ward, Dr, J. H., 205
Warfield, Dr. William A., 136, 153,
160, 162-164, *66, *^9, 172, 204-205,
219-220, 222, 233, 244, 250, 258,
260
Warren, Mrs. Lewis, 157
Washington, Booker T., 146, 191-
194, 223, 231-246, 248-251, 258,
264-267
Washington, Mrs. Booker T., 245,
248
Watts, Dr. Samuel R., 127
Webster, George H., 84, 174, 257,
*58
Wells, Ida B. See Barnett, Ida B.
(Wells)
Wesley, Dr. Allen A., 7(^-77, 98, 177,
256, 258
Wesley Hospital, 70
West, Dr. Charles I., 145, 204, 235,
241-242, 272
Wheatland, Dr. Marcus F., 241
Wheeler, Lloyd, 69-70, 72, 173-174,
191, 232, 256
Wheeler, Sarah Raynie (Petit) , wife
of Lloyd Wheeler, 26, 69, 74
Whltcomb, Josh, 30
INDEX 379
White, Clarence Cameron, 153, 271
White, Dr. James R., 177, 272
White, Robert, 265
Wilberforce University, 264
Wilder, Dr. J. R., 123, 127
Willard, Frances, 84
Williams, Alice, sister of DHW, 21,
82, 103, 134, 225-226, 276-277
Williams, Alice (Johnson), wife of
DHW, 172, 178, 185-188, 214, 225,
250, 269, 274; meets DHW, 136-
137; marries DHW, 146, 155;
described, 157, 187, 227; wel-
comed in Chicago, 157-158; loss of
baby, 187; busy life, 188; work for
Institutional Church and Social
Settlement, 223; objects to DHW's
giving free rent to his sisters, 226;
unfortunate effect on DHW, 226;
social life, 226-227; personality,
228; ideas on religion, 229; asks
Mary Meriwether's advice, 230;
last illness and death, 271. See also
Johnson, Alice D.
Williams, Annie, sister of DHW, 6,
276-277
Williams, Dr. A. Wilberforce, 177,
217, 228, 262-263, 272
Williams, Burt, 225
Williams, Daniel, grandfather of
DHW, 5, 12-13, 15. 2 7 J z? 6 - 2 ??
Williams, Daniel, Jr., father of
DHW, 4-7, 13, 102, 131, 271, 276-
277; work for Equal Rights
League, 6, 135, 268; at Syracuse
Convention of Free Negroes, 71
Williams, Dr. Daniel Hale, de-
scribed, 3-4, 13, 17, 48, 53-56, 104,
189-190, 217; life in Janesville,
Wis., 3-22; birth and ancestry, 4-
5; life in Hollidaysburg, Pa., 4-7;
apprenticed to a shoemaker, Balti-
more, 6; death of father, 6-7; at-
tends Hollidaysburg grade school,
7; attends Jefferson High School
in Janesville, 7; attends Stanton
School in Annapolis, 7, 55; works
as a barber, 7, 9, 20; sings tenor,
3 8
Daniel Hale Williams
Williams, Dr. Daniel Hale (contin-
ued)
plays guitar and bass viol, 7-8, 54;
attends Janesville Classical Acad-
emy, 9-15; influenced by Ingersoll,
11, 15; becomes a Unitarian, 12; in-
fluenced by Jenkin Lloyd Jones,
12; studies law, 16-17
Becomes an apprentice to Dr.
Henry Palmer, 17-20; strings up
telephone wires, 21; attends Chi-
cago Medical College, 22-49; ear ty
medical practice in Chicago, 50-
54; serves at Protestant Orphan
Asylum, 51; appointed to staff of
Chicago Medical College, 53; ap-
pointed to staff of South Side Dis-
pensary, 53; appointed to staff
of City Railway Company, 54;
friendship with Hutchins Bishop,
56; ordered off dance floor at Sara-
toga Springs, 57; falls in love with
Kittle May Blake, 57-58; buys real
estate, 59, 61; appointed to Illinois
State Board of Health, 62-65
Founds Provident, first interra-
cial hospital, and starts training
nurses and internes, 66-79; interest
in surgery begins, 79; studies bac-
teriology, 79; writes first medical
paper, 80; performs world's first
successful heart operation, 85-95;
high opinion of DHW held by
his white medical contemporaries,
90-100, 184, 260-261; suffers in-
fected leg, 101-103; appointed sur-
geon-in-chief of Freedmen's Hos-
pital, 104; his reforms at Freed-
men's Hospital, 108-117, 128-130;
famous operations at Freedmen's,
118-122 (Caesarean on dwarf), 122
(tumor on German farmer; wrist
of Daniel Murray, Jr.), 124-125
(Caesarean complicated by 18-
pound tumor); his uncanny diag-
nostic powers, 125; his operations
discussed by Washinpon doctors,
126; helps found Medico-Chirurgi-
cal Society, 127; helps found Na-
tional Medical Association, 128;
Sunday clinics, 128-129
Wins out in investigation of
Freedmen's by Congressional com-
mittee, 132-144; plays tennis, 135;
loves bicycling, 136; goes to Eu-
rope, 144, 154; resignation from
Freedmen's Hospital, 145; courts
Alice Johnson, 153; operates on
her mother, 154; marriage, 146,
154; welcome home to Chicago,
156-157; accused and exonerated
concerning his administration of
Freedmen's, 159-172; betrayed by
Warfield, 162-172; resumes medi-
cal writing, 178 (for complete list
of published articles, see p. 366);
opinion on tumors in colored
women, 180-183; appears before
various Chicago medical societies,
178-184; loss of baby, 187
Tries to interest Booker T.
Washington in a medical center
in the South, 192-193; agrees to
operate surgical clinic at Meharry
Medical College, 195; advice on
how to set up a new hospital, 197-
200; operates in homes and hospi-
tals from Lakes to Gulf, 202-204;
bucks color line in Dallas, St.
Louis, Indianapolis, 205; daring
operations, 207-213 (on the tho-
rax), 210-212 (on the spleen), 214
(on crushed extremities); as fam-
ily doctor, 214-216; low fees, 216;
student parties, 217; encourages
John A. Kenney, 218; takes Ulysses
Grant Dailey as apprentice, 219;
friendship for Reverdy Ransom,
224; "hate fence,'* 227; affair with
Frenchwoman, 229-230; refuses to
join Niagara Movement, 232; deal-
ings with Chicago press, 234, 240;
urges Booker T. Washington to
save Freedmen's Hospital, 234;
operates on Emmett Scott, 237;
calls on Secretary Garfield, 240;
INDEX 381
recommends outstanding Negro
doctors to lecture at Freedmen's,
241; tells Booker T. Washington
his experience with George C.
Hall, 242-243; reads paper on
"Crushing Injuries of the Extrem-
ities" at National Medical Asso-
ciation, 246; is defeated for presi-
dency of National Medical Asso-
ciation, 247; Booker T. Washing-
ton drops him to favor Hall, 250;
celebration of twenty-fifth anni-
versary of his medical work, 251;
Is attacked by Dr. and Mrs. Hall,
252; resigns from Sigma Pi Phi,
254; appointed to staff of St.
Luke's Hospital, 257; resigns from
Provident Hospital, 258
Life in Idlewild, 259, 269; char-
ter member and Fellow of Ameri-
can College of Surgeons, 260; suf-
fers stroke, 260; refuses to defend
himself against Hall, 263; parties,
gifts and honorary degrees from
Howard and Wilberforce univer-
sities, 264; delivers speeches, 264;
at Camp Funston, 267-268; at Ben-
ton harbor, 269; makes his will,
272-273; death and burial, 273-274;
Catholic baptism, 274; his role at
Provident forgotten, 274; the rec-
ord made straight, 275. For resi-
dential addresses of DHW in Chi-
cago, see 25, 51, 157, 214, 227. For
office addresses of DHW in Chi-
cago, see 50, 220. For surgical
operations performed by DHW,
see the following: heart, 85-95;
Caesareans, 118-122, 124-125, 126,
184; tumor on back of German
farmer, 122, 178-179; tumors in
women, 179-183; thorax, 207-213;
spleen, 210-212; crushed extremi-
ties, 214.
Williams, Fannie (Barrier), wife of
S. Laing Williams, 71, 73, 83, 233
Williams, Florence, sister of DHW,
21, 82, 103, 134, 225-226, 276-277
Williams, Hugo, cousin of DHW,
262
Williams, Ida, sister of DHW, 11,
276-277
Williams, Ida, wife of Jim Lord.
See Lord, Ida (Williams)
Williams, John P., Janesville basso,
13, 20
Williams, Mabel, cousin of DHW.
See Parrish, Mabel (Williams)
Williams, Mary Lizzie (Tibbs), wife
of Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams,
228-230
Williams, Peter, uncle of DHW,
135, 276-277
Williams, Price, brother of DHW,
6, 15* 38-39i i3* 2I 4> a? 6 " 2 ??
Williams, Sally, sister of DHW, 6-7,
154, 276-277
Williams, Samuel, cousin of DHWs
father, 26
Williams, Sarah Ann (Price), moth-
er of DHW, 4-6, 21, 30-32, 38, 82,
103, 134, 263; marriage, 5; de-
scribed, 5, 13; favors Price, 15;
death, 225; converted to Catholi-
cism, 274
Williams, S. Laing, 71, 74, 178, 233
Williams family, 4-6, 13, 25-26, 271,
276-277
Wilson, Judge Jerry, 166-167, 171,
244
Woodson, Howard, cousin of
DHW, 262-263
Woodward, Dr. H. B., 185
World's Fair, 82, 135, 168
Wormley, Dr. James A., 145
Wright, Edward H., 178, 225, 269-
270
YOUNG, OTTO, 174
Young Men's Association, 9
Young Men's Hebrew Association,
73
Selected Reviews of
DOCTOR DAN
**. . . strikingly readable ... an astonishing
man." Chicago Tribune
". . . absorbing book."
New York Herald-Tribune Book Review
". . . compelling biography . . /'
Marquis James, Pulitzer "Prize winner
'*. . . stirring and poignant . . . Thoroughly
documented . . . written with insight, sym-
pathy and a strict regard for truth/*
Hartford Times
". . . scholarly and readable biography/'
Little Rock Gazette
"No collection of American biography com-
plete without it." New York Public Library
"A List of Significant Books"
". . . impartial and entertaining style . . ."
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot
". . . as dramatic and swift paced as fiction. . .**
Saunders Redding
author of "No Day of Triumph**
**. . . rich in detail and yet this detail neve*
interferes with the forward surge of tsM
story . . /* Omaha World-HerM
". . . reads like a novel . . /* The Nation
"A substantial contribution to biography as
well as medical history . . ."
Cedar Rapids GazeUq
". . . absorbingly written account of a greai
American/' Los Angeles Herald-Expres^
PITMT .
1 34 889