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Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on July 9, according to the Tribune’s archives.

Is an important event missing from this date? Email us.

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
In 1893, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a pioneering Black surgeon, performed the first successful suture of a human heart and pericardium at Provident Hospital in Chicago. (baiduhai archive)
In 1893, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a pioneering Black surgeon, performed the first successful suture of a human heart and pericardium at Provident Hospital in Chicago. (baiduhai archive)

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.

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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.

The Grateful Dead played two sold-out shows at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 9-10, 1995. The concerts were the last ones with lead guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia. (baiduhai)
The Grateful Dead played two sold-out shows at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 9-10, 1995. The concerts were the last ones with lead guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia. (baiduhai)

1995: Jerry Garcia’s final show with the Grateful Dead

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 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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