Medicine: From Gin to Gastroscope

Since 1933, Chicago’s Provident Hospital for Negroes has delivered 3,826 babies without a single true maternal death. This fact, all the more remarkable since the maternal death rate among Negroes is elsewhere very high, was revealed last week by Director John Baldwin West to visiting members of the National Medical Association, who came to celebrate the hospital’s 50th anniversary.

No ordinary hospital is Provident. Founded in 1891 by a brilliant young Negro surgeon named Daniel Hale Williams, it was the first institution in the U.S. for training Negro nurses and interns. A number of white industrialists gave money for a frame house and 13 beds; local Negroes donated such necessities as 8 Ib. of prunes, 8 Ib. of feathers, a bottle of Holland gin, a washboard, a pair of crutches, four cakes of soap.

Two years after Provident was opened, Dr. Williams* made it famous. For there he performed the first successful heart operation in medical history: he took three stitches in the heart of a man who was stabbed in a brawl. Yet he still worked 18 hours a day, sterilized water in an old wash boiler, scrubbed the walls and floor of the operating room every night.

In 1929 Philanthropist Julius Rosen wald raised $3,000,000 for a large, redbrick plant, linked the hospital to the University of Chicago. Today Provident is the biggest and best voluntary (privately run) Negro hospital in the U.S. It has 165 beds, handles 1,000 emergencies a month (mostly charity), has 88 doctors on its staff (eight of them whites). Among the staff consultants are such famed white doctors as Gynecologists Fred Lyman Adair and Joseph Bolivar DeLee.

Some Provident accomplishments reported by Dr. ‘West last week:

> Dr. Rudolf Schindler, inventor of the flexible gastroscope (a sort of periscope which enables doctors to see the inside of the stomach), trained a Provident doctor in his work. Thus Provident is one of the few U.S. hospitals to have one of these important gastroscopic clinics.

> Three-fourths of all Negro doctors who have qualified as specialists in the U.S. in the last ten years, and many heads of Negro hospitals, are Provident-trained. Among its noted alumni: Dr. John Wesley Lawlah, dean of Howard University College of Medicine; Dermatologist Theodore Kenneth Lawless and Surgeon Ulysses Grant Dailey, now at Provident.

* Dr. Williams was the first of two Negroes elected to the exclusive American College of Surgeons. The other: famed Skull Surgeon Louis Tompkins Wright of Harlem.