Amazing Medical Stories by George Burden

prejudice. In 1895, with the support of three white and five black physicians, the Medico-Surgical Society of the District of Columbia was formed. The same year, he helped found the National Medical Foundation.
    Engrossed in his surgical practice, Williams was shocked to learn that his status at Freedmen’s Hospital was being undermined. When the situation became unbearable, he concluded he had no choice but to resign from the hospital and return to his practice in Chicago.
    Within months of his return to Chicago, Dr. Williams turned his attention to the South, where he knew the black population desperately needed access to proper medical care. For some time, a medical college in the southern United States had been trying to create an academic environment that would lead to the graduation of a greater number of black doctors. Dr Williams was more than willing to help them achieve this objective.Without remuneration, he began to work and teach at the college. His enormous commitment to improve medical care for blacks living in the American South had a significant payoff: it fostered forty hospitals in twenty different states. Helen Buckler insists that his fervour, his unremitting labour and uncompromising perfectionism truly earned him the right to be known as the “Moses to Negro Medicine.”
    In 1912, Dr. Williams reluctantly resigned from Provident, the hospital that he had helped found. The man who had replaced him as its medical director had always resented the older physician’s high standing in mainstream medicine and had done everything possible to destroy his credibility. However, Dr. Williams’ reputation remained unblemished. In 1913, he was the only black man among a hundred surgeons who were formally installed as members of the newly formed American College of Surgeons, and in 1919, black doctors practicing in Missouri presented him with a silver cup to express their appreciation for his work in advancing the medical profession in that state and all of the United States.
    On August 4, 1931, Daniel Hale Williams died. In his will, the bulk of his estate was designated for the benefit of his race. The largest bequest, $8,000, went to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
    Sadly, the hospital Dr. Williams founded had a troubled existence, even though a new faculty with three hundred beds was opened in 1983. However, this rejuvenation was brief. Five years later, serious financial and management problems resulted in the sudden closure of Provident Hospital. In 1991, the then-derelict facility was purchased by the city, and more than fifty-eight million dollars was spent on renovations. Calls to Provident Hospital in Cook County revealed that there is little evidence at the refurbished facility to mark Dr. Williams’s contribution to the original hospital, and there is no official acknowledgment of his remarkable medical career. No play or movie has been made about this extraordinary doctor and surgical pioneer; Helen Buckler’s book stands alone.
    This raises a question: If Dr. Williams had been white, or if he had chosen to keep his black heritage a secret, would his memory have received the tribute it deserves?
    Dorothy Grant

THE DOCTOR
AND THE KING OF SIAM
    Most people are familiar with Anna Leonowens, the Victorian-era governess and teacher of the multitudinous offspring of Mongkut, the King of Siam. Anna’s book,
The English Governess at the Siamese Court,
created a sensation in the nineteenth century. Her renown was further magnified by Margaret Landon’s 1944 biography,
Anna and the King of Siam,
which inspired the subsequent hit musical and Hollywood film,
The King and I.
Few know that after her adventures in Southeast Asia, she moved to Canada, where she spent most of her life. Fewer still realize that beginning with her grandson, James Fyshe, she founded a medical dynasty, all of them McGill graduates with a taste for adventure as strong as her