Small Archive of The Daniel Hale Williams Medical Reading Club

Washington, DC: The Daniel Hale Williams Medical Reading Club, 1990. Unbound. Near Fine. A collection of 49 flyers and a membership list for The Daniel Hale Williams Medical Reading Club, a society formed by and for Black physicians. Each of the 49 flyers are a single-page, either mimeographed or photomechanically reproduced on the rectos only. The membership list is three stapled leaves. All or most of the flyers have been lightly trimmed, affecting only a handful of letters or words, and with old folds, likely as mailed, overall very good or better.

The earliest flyer is a list of lectures for the years 1934 and 1935; the next two are 1957 and 1965 programs for concerts with performances by the members; the rest are for meetings from 1979 to 1990. The membership list, for the years 1987-1988, lists 48 Black doctors mostly from Washington, DC and a few from Maryland.

The Club appears to have been founded around 1930 and was named after Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a Black surgeon who performed the first successful heart surgery in the U.S. in 1893. He founded Provident Hospital in Chicago, the first non-segregated hospital in the United States. In 1913, Williams was elected as the only African-American charter member of the American College of Surgeons.

Each of the Club's meetings featured a dinner followed by a lecture on medical procedures or public health concerns. This small archive came from the papers of W. Montague Cobb, Distinguished Professor of Anatomy at the Howard University College of Medicine.