The Man Who Sewed Up a Heart

In 1881, Theodor Billroth, the most famous surgeon on Earth, declared that any doctor who attempted to stitch a wound in the human heart would lose the respect of his colleagues. It was not a controversial opinion. The heart was off-limits. You could operate on nearly anything else, but the heart was God's jurisdiction.

Daniel Hale Williams had been a barber.

He'd also been a shoemaker's apprentice, a bass player in an opera house, and briefly a law student, before deciding what he really wanted to do was open people up and fix them. He got his medical degree in 1883, became one of three Black doctors in Chicago, and founded his own hospital with twelve beds and an interracial staff, because no one else seemed inclined to do it.

Then, on the night of July 9, 1893, a man named James Cornish arrived with a knife wound to the chest.

Williams cut through the rib cartilage. He opened a trapdoor in the man's chest. The heart was beating. He sutured the torn pericardium with catgut, by lamplight, holding the edges of a wound that pulsed under his forceps. There were no antibiotics. No X-rays. No blood transfusion. One rather suspects Billroth would have looked away.

Cornish walked out of the hospital fifty-one days later. He lived another twenty years.

He outlived Williams by twelve.