In July 1893 James Cornish arrived at Chicago’s Provident Hospital with a knife wound over his heart, and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams opened his chest with no antibiotics, no blood transfusions, and no breathing machine. This episode traces how Williams got there: born in 1856 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, he lost his father to tuberculosis at nine, ran away from a shoemaker’s apprenticeship in Baltimore, and ran a barbershop in Janesville, Wisconsin, before apprenticing with physician Henry Palmer. With backing from Chicago activist Mary Jane Richardson Jones, he earned his medical degree from Chicago Medical College in 1883.

Shut out of hospital privileges, Williams founded Provident in 1891 as a non-segregated hospital with a nurse training school. He repaired the tear in Cornish’s pericardium, and Cornish walked out about 50 days later. Williams then ran Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, co-founded the National Medical Association in 1895, and in 1913 became the only African American charter member of the American College of Surgeons. He died in 1931 in Idlewild, Michigan, in what some accounts call relative obscurity.

• Why opening the chest without positive pressure ventilation collapsed the lungs
• How Williams helped Emma Reynolds become the first Black woman to earn an M.D. from Northwestern in 1895
• Where his operation fits beside Henry Dalton’s 1891 pericardial repair and later surgeries on the heart muscle
• His marriage to Alice Johnson, daughter of sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel
• Why the architect of so many institutions faded from public memory