Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have spread beyond the Colleges of Medicine as the other Health Sciences colleges address racism in health care.
In the month of July 1893, just nine days and 700 miles apart, two medical surgeries of remarkable, historical significance occurred. More than a century later, they are as fascinating as ever one noted for who performed the operation and the other for who the patient was.
James Cornish entered Provident Hospital in Chicago on the night of July 9, suffering from a stab wound to the heart. Overnight, his condition worsened. With Cornish’s life at stake, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams determined the next morning that he would perform open heart surgery to repair the wound, immediately.
The prevailing view in the medical community in 1893 was that the living, beating human heart was not to be meddled with. In 1891, 46-year-old Dr. Henry Dalton in St. Louis performed the first procedure on the pericardium (the membrane that envelopes the heart) but no one had yet fixed a wound on the heart itself.