Daniel Hale Williams - Wikipedia

On August 4, 1931, Daniel Williams, American heart surgeon who performed the first open heart surgery, died at the age of 73. From the article:

"At the time that Williams graduated from what is today Northwestern University Medical School, he opened a private practice where his patients were white and black. Black doctors, however, were not allowed to work in American hospitals. As a result, in 1891, Williams founded the Provident Hospital and training school for nurses in Chicago. This was established mostly for the benefit of African-American residents, to increase their accessibility to health care but its staff and patients were integrated from the start.[8]

In 1893, Williams became the first African American on record to have successfully performed pericardium surgery to repair a wound. On September 6, 1891,[3][4] Henry Dalton had successfully performed pericardium surgery to repair a wound, with the patient fully recovering.[9] Earlier successful surgeries to drain the pericardium, by performing a pericardiostomy were done by Francisco Romero in 1801[10] and Dominique Jean Larrey in 1810.[11]

On July 10, 1893, Williams repaired the torn pericardium of a knife wound patient, James Cornish.[3] Cornish, who was stabbed directly through the left fifth costal cartilage,[3] had been admitted the previous night. Williams decided to operate the next morning in response to continued bleeding, cough and "pronounced" symptoms of shock.[3] He performed this surgery, without the benefit of penicillin or blood transfusion, at Provident Hospital, Chicago.[12] It was not reported until 1897.[3] He undertook a second procedure to drain fluid. About fifty days after the initial procedure, Cornish left the hospital.[8]

In 1893, during the administration of President Grover Cleveland, Williams was appointed surgeon-in-chief of Freedman's Hospital in Washington, D.C., a post he held until 1898. That year he married Alice Johnson, who was born in the city and graduated from Howard University, and moved back to Chicago. In addition to organizing Provident Hospital, Williams also established a training school for African-American nurses at the facility. In 1897, he was appointed to the Illinois Department of Public Health, where he worked to raise medical and hospital standards.[13]

Williams was a Professor of Clinical Surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee and was an attending surgeon at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. He worked to create more hospitals that admitted African Americans. In 1895 he co-founded the National Medical Association for African American doctors, and in 1913 he became a charter member and the only African-American doctor in the American College of Surgeons."