On this summer night, 132 years ago, July 10, 1893, James Cornish didn’t know if he would live to see dawn.

Stabbed in the chest during an altercation in Chicago, he was rushed to Provident Hospital on the city’s integrated south side.

Cornish was Black.

He likely didn’t know that the hospital had been founded two years before as Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses, the nation’s first integrated hospital, a haven where Blacks and whites could both be treated. Where Black and white physicians could save lives side by side.

It was also launched as a training ground for Black nurses, also a first in the nation. Like Black physicians, aspiring Black nurses were still being barred from most nursing schools and hospitals in Chicago — yes, in the north — and throughout America.

Cornish likely didn’t know that the hospital was created by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the son of a barber, born in 1858 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. Someone who should be lauded in our history books, whose journey should be share with all our children, not ignored or erased as Donald Trump continues to attempt with his attack on “DEI” (or his twisted version of it) and erasure of Black history.

Daniel was the fifth of seven children who lost their father early in the boy’s life. His mother moved her children to several cities until Daniel found himself in middle school in Wisconsin.

Like many young Black men in the 19th century, amid Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, Daniel learned a skill: shoemaking. But he wanted more. At 20, Williams became an apprentice to Dr. Henry Palmer, a former Wisconsin Surgeon General. He later studied medicine at Chicago Medical College (now Northwestern University’s Feinberg College of Medicine) before entering private practice in an integrated neighborhood on the south side.

Williams taught anatomy at his medical alma mater and was the surgeon for the City Railway Company, which owned cable cars and horse-drawn modes of transportation on the integrated south side until 1914.

But Williams wanted more. He dreamed of a place where Black and white Doctors could study and practice and where Black nurses could train without racial constraints. On May 4, 1891, he opened Provident Hospital.

Just over two years later, James Cornish arrived not knowing if he would live.

He went into shock, prompting Williams to suspect the chest wound was deeper than it appeared and that it may be near Cornish’s heart. According to Columbiasurgery.org he asked six doctors — two Black and four white — to watch him operate on the victim. (I don’t even want to imagine what anesthesia was like then.)

Williams cut between Cornish’s ribs until he could see the still-thumping heart. He sutured the damaged left internal mammary artery but saw that the sack around Cornish’s heart had been penetrated by the knife, leaving a gash near the right coronary artery.

Williams rinsed the wound with a salt solution and repaired the damaged sack. Fifty-one days later, Cornish walked out of the hospital and lived for another 20 years.

Maybe Cornish later knew, or maybe he never did know that on that night 133 years ago, he was the benefactor of the first open heart surgery in the U.S. By anyone.

Williams became chief surgeon at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, DC, before returning to Chicago to continue saving lives.

In 1913, he was the first African American inducted into the American College of Surgeons. To this day, at Howard University Hospital, a “code blue” is often called a “code Dan.”

Williams died in 1931.

If you didn’t know, now you know. We should all know.