Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I-Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson.

And I'm Holly Fry.

Today we are going to talk about Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, who's often described as the first person to successfully perform an open heart surgery.

That's not completely correct. There were some other earlier open heart procedures, but he was still a surgical innovator at a time when the field of surgery was not nearly as advanced

as it is today. And he was also a huge part of the Black Hospital movement. That was in

pretty much the first half of the 20th century. Opening hospitals for black patients when a lot of the U.S. medical system was

racially segregated, and in a lot of places, black patients did not have anywhere they could

receive care. Daniel Hale-Williams. the 3rd, known as Dan, was born on January 18, 1856, in

Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He was the fifth of seven children

born to Sarah Price Williams and Daniel Hale Williams Jr., who was a barber. The family were

Methodists, and they had white, indigenous, and African ancestry. Sarah's mother had been enslaved

on the same plantation in Maryland as Frederick Douglass,

and she and Douglas were cousins.

There's not a lot of detail recorded about the younger Dan's earliest years,

but in 1867, after the Civil War, the family went to Annapolis, Maryland, where Sarah had had family.

Traveling to Maryland would not have been nearly as easier possible before that point.

Not long after they got there, though, Dan's father died of tuberculosis, and Dan and his siblings were split up.

Dan's brother was the oldest,

and he was already in law school. Dan's two oldest sisters and their mother all went to Illinois to live with relatives and study hairdressing. Then the next two oldest sisters were placed in a

convent school, and the youngest sister stayed with Dan's grandmother.

Dan was pulled out of school and sent to Baltimore to live with a family friend and trained to be a shoemaker.

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