At the intersection of 29th and Dearborn, down by [Daniel Hale] Williams Park in the Douglas community area, stood the Provident Hospital and Training School Association. There, pioneering African-American physician Daniel Hale Williams both established the first integrated hospital and performed the first successful open-heart surgery.
Some credit Catalonian physician Francisco Romero with the beginning of cardiac surgery in 1801; others grant the honor to French military surgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey during the Napoleonic Wars in 1810. Henry C. Dalton is also rumored to have performed a surgery similar to Williams’s at Saint Louis City Hospital in 1891.
