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Daniel Hale Williams was an African American surgeon and the founder of Provident Hospital of Cook County in Chicago (1891), the first nonsegregated hospital in the United States that trained doctors and nurses. Williams was a pioneer among surgeons, performing the first successful heart surgery in 1893. In 1913, he was the only African American charter member of the American College of Surgeons.

A graduate of Chicago Medical College (now Northwestern University Medical School) in 1883, Williams practiced medicine in Chicago at a time when there were only three other Black physicians in the city. In 1893, Williams was appointed surgeon-in-chief at the Freedmen’s Hospital (now Howard University Hospital) in Washington, D.C. In 1897, he was the first Black man appointed to the Illinois Department of Public Health, where he worked to raise medical and hospital standards.

Williams was a Professor of Clinical Surgery at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, for about twenty years, beginning in 1899, and was an attending surgeon at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. In 1895, he cofounded the National Medical Association for African American doctors.