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Black History Month
February 10, 2016
Celebrating Black History
C OnTinued frOm P age 9
Sweet Street Food Cart
on the corner of 15th and Alberta
call 503-995-6150 to place order
Monday - Friday, 11:00am - 7:00pm
Sweet Street Barbecue
for Black History Month
Buy one chicken dinner get 1 free chicken sandwich
(With this coupon -- Expires February 29, 2016)
try that was black-owned, oper-
ated and managed, and the irst
racially integrated hospital in the
city as well as the irst hospital
for black women in the United
States.
He employed African-Amer-
ican and white doctors and em-
phasized the need to provide the
best available care for everyone,
requiring doctors at the hospital
to keep abreast of the latest ad-
vances in medicine. The hospital
had a phenomenal 87 percent
success rate, especially consid-
ering the inancial and health
conditions of most patients and
the primitive conditions of most
hospitals.
It was here in 1898 that a
man was brought in with a stab
wound to the chest. Dr. Williams
operated on the man, stitching
up the heart itself and thus be-
coming the irst person to ever
perform open heart surgery. This
was almost unheard of at the
time, as entrance into the chest
or abdomen of a patient would
almost surely bring resulting in-
fection and death.
Not only was Dr. Williams
the irst surgeon to perform open
heart surgery, he was the irst to
open the chest cavity successful-
ly without the patient dying of
infection. If he failed his reputa-
tion as a doctor could be ruined.
He was not looking for fame or
trying to do something new and
special, he just did what he could
to save the man’s life.
The surgery was tedious and
dangerous. A month later the pa-
tient was opened up again to re-
move luid. Fifty one days later,
he recovered and went home to
live for another 50 years. Sim-
ilar procedures had been per-
formed in the early 19th century
by Francesco Romero, a Spanish
surgeon and by Napoleon’s phy-
sician, Dominique-Jean Larrey,
but Dr. Williams is credited with
the irst fully successful open
heart surgery.
Newspaper headlines report-
ed: “Sewed Up His Heart! Re-
markable Surgical Operation on
a Colored Man.”
In 1894, at the request of Pres-
ident Grover Cleveland, Dr. Wil-
liams became Surgeon in Chief
at the Freedmen’s Hospital in
Washington D.C. and organized
different departments to treat a
variety of illnesses.
In 1913 he was the only Af-
rican-American in a group of
charter members of the Amer-
ican College of Surgeons. The
American Medical Association
refused to accept black mem-
bers and so he helped to de-
velop his own organization. An
interesting sidelight is that he
was honored in the Stevie Won-
der song “Black Man” from the
album “Songs in the Key of
Life.”
Dr. Williams encouraged Af-
rican-American leaders to open
hospitals in cities where Afri-
can-Americans would receive
irst rate care. He received nu-
merous honors and was the irst
black physician named as a Fel-
low in the American College of
Surgeons. He died on Aug. 4,
1931.
I irst learned about Dr. Wil-
liams when I was in high school.
Later at the age of 26, I was irst
assistant to a heart surgeon who
opened a boy’s heart in an emer-
gency circumstance. As I held
the moving heart in my hands,
a memory and kinesthetic expe-
rience that will never leave me,
rekindled my thoughts of Dr.
Williams.
Dr. Ronald Turco is a physi-
cian from Portland and an au-
thor of articles on black history
topics such as the jazz era and
civil rights.