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IDKMYDE: The Open-Heart Miracle They Don’t Teach · The Breakfast Club

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  Speaker 1: The open heart miracle they don't teach. I welcome back
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  Speaker 1: no at alls to another episode of the most anticipated
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  Speaker 1: podcast on the Block Effect podcast network, especially in February,
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  Speaker 1: entitled I didn't know Maybe you didn't either. I'm your
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  Speaker 1: host b Dot. I was a felon at sixteen years old,
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  Speaker 1: had no direction, but my HBCU saved my life. Thank
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  Speaker 1: you Winston Salem State University. I love you with all
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  Speaker 1: my heart. And to kick off this episode, I'll give
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  Speaker 1: you three of the most useless facts you'll never need
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  Speaker 1: not a day in life about hearts. Your first useless fact,
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  Speaker 1: open heart surgery was considered impossible well into the twentieth century,
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  Speaker 1: and the twentieth century is the nineteen hundreds. Your second
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  Speaker 1: useless facts. Doctors believed that stopping the human heart meant
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  Speaker 1: guaranteed death. The third useless fact, the breakthrough that changed everything,
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  Speaker 1: came from a black surgeon whose name rarely gets taught
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  Speaker 1: in medical schools. Would you like to meet them? I
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  Speaker 1: didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know.
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  Speaker 1: I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know. Open
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  Speaker 1: heart surgery today it sounds routine, still serious, but possible.
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  Speaker 1: Millions of people are alive today because surgeons can safely
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  Speaker 1: operate on a heart. Your uncle with the bypass alive,
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  Speaker 1: your me mo with the valve replacement. She will hear
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  Speaker 1: for Christmas, that baby that were born with a heart defect,
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  Speaker 1: who now running track. Even when my mama had congestive
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  Speaker 1: heart failure and they were putting all them tubes and
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  Speaker 1: stuff in there and making sure that blood pumped to
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  Speaker 1: it effectively. But for a long time, doctor said it
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  Speaker 1: couldn't be done. The heart was off limits, too risky,
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  Speaker 1: too sacred, too final. Touch the heart, you've touched death.
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  Speaker 1: That was the belief until doctor Daniel Hell Williams changed
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  Speaker 1: everything eighteen ninety three. Doctor Williams one of the first
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  Speaker 1: black surgeons in America. He performed one of the world's
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  Speaker 1: first successful open heart surgeries. Did you hear that date?
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  Speaker 1: Eighteen ninety three, Before antibiotics, before blood banks, before heart
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  Speaker 1: lung machines, before modern anesthesia, before most hospitals would even
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  Speaker 1: let a black doctor walk through the front door. A
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  Speaker 1: man named James Cornish got stabbed in the chest. The
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  Speaker 1: knife went deep. There's a sack around your heart. It's
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  Speaker 1: called the pericardium. That was torn. They just knew bro
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  Speaker 1: were gonna die. Everybody in that room knew BRO about
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  Speaker 1: to check out. Everybody except Daniel hell Williams. Man. Daniel
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  Speaker 1: opened that man's chest. He looked at what no surgeon
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  Speaker 1: was supposed to look at, and he saw the damage.
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  Speaker 1: He sewed up the actual lining of that man's heart
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  Speaker 1: and then closed it. And then James Cornish woke up
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  Speaker 1: for a few minutes, not for a few hours. That
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  Speaker 1: man lived for decades after that surgery. That moment shattered
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  Speaker 1: medical belief. Open heart surgery went from impossible to unavoidable.
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  Speaker 1: So why are you, today, years old, just hearing doctor
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  Speaker 1: William's name. Why we don't hear his name like we
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  Speaker 1: hear other medical pioneers. But here's the uncomfortable truth. Medical
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  Speaker 1: textbooks often frame heart surgery as a gradual evolution, as
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  Speaker 1: if the breakthrough just happened. Who did it? Nobody knows,
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  Speaker 1: it just evolved. They skipped the part where a black
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  Speaker 1: surgeon took a risk when the rules said don't do that.
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  Speaker 1: It's like saying the light bulb gradually evolved without mentioning Edison,
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  Speaker 1: except they always mentioned Edison. And here's what makes it
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  Speaker 1: even more remarkable. Doctor Williams did this while one hospitals
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  Speaker 1: were segregated, two black doctors were barred from medical societies,
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  Speaker 1: three medical schools barely admitted US, and four most white
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  Speaker 1: hospitals wouldn't even let black patients through the door. So
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  Speaker 1: what did he do? Bruh built his own hospital, Provident
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  Speaker 1: Hospital in Chicago in eighteen ninety one, the first interracial
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  Speaker 1: hospital in America. He trained his own staff, he created
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  Speaker 1: his own standards, He built his own institution. Does that
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  Speaker 1: sound familiar? It should, because that's the Cardigi Woodson playbook Baby,
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  Speaker 1: before Woodson even wrote it. If they won't let you in,
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  Speaker 1: you build your own damn door. Cardi G. Woodson understood
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  Speaker 1: this a century ago. If we don't preserve our breakthroughs,
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  Speaker 1: somebody else will rewrite them. Every heart surgery performed today
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  Speaker 1: traces back to a man who wasn't even supposed to
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  Speaker 1: be in the room. And I didn't know. Maybe you
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  Speaker 1: didn't either. I