Williams, Daniel Hale (1858–1931)

US surgeon and medical educator. President Grover Cleveland appointed him surgeon-in-chief at Freedmen's hospital in Washington, DC (1893–98), where he established a second training program for black American men and women. He then became a professor of clinical surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee in 1899. In 1913, he was a charter member – and the only black American so honoured at that time – of the American College of Surgeons, and for many decades he was regarded as the premier black American in the medical profession.

Born in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, he was one of the first black Americans to graduate from medical school, graduating from Chicago Medical College, part of Northwestern University, in 1883. He organized Provident Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, in 1891, establishing training programs for the medical education of black American men and women. While there he performed the first successful surgical closure of a wound to the heart and the pericardium in 1893 and perfected the suture technique for stopping haemorrhage from the spleen; he was also an early advocate of asepsis.