Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on July 9, according to the Tribune’s archives.
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Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
- High temperature: 98 degrees (1974)
- Low temperature: 50 degrees (1895)
- Precipitation: 2.43 inches (1946)
- Snowfall: None
1893: The first successful open-heart surgery took place at Provident Hospital — the city’s first interracial hospital — on Chicago’s South Side.
The patient was James Cornish, a young man with a knife wound to the chest from a barroom brawl. The surgeon, who had gone into medicine because he disliked earlier work as a shoemaker’s apprentice, was Daniel Hale Williams. Both patient and surgeon were Black.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: Inventions and innovations by Black Chicagoans
Medical textbooks of the time said that operating on a human heart was too dangerous, and there was no precedent for opening the chest, longtime Tribune science and medical reporter Ronald Kotulak wrote more than a century later.
Despite lacking X-rays, antibiotics, adequate anesthesia or other tools of modern surgery, Williams stepped in. Cornish lived, and Williams went on to acclaim. In 1894, Williams was appointed chief surgeon at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., which gave care to formerly enslaved Blacks.
1995: Jerry Garcia’s final show with the Grateful Dead took place at Soldier Field in front of a sold-out crowd. Tribune critic Greg Kot wrote Garcia’s voice “sounded tired, he muffed lyrics and he sometimes dispensed with entire verses altogether in a remote performance.” Garcia died exactly a month later from a heart attack.
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