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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Flashback: July 10, 2019
2019: Chicago officials confirmed an alligator was living in Humboldt Park Lagoon after one was spotted by several people.
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 went into medicine because he disliked earlier work as a shoemaker’s apprentice, was Daniel Hale Williams. Both the 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.
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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.
1990: After he received 2.26 million votes (second overall to Jose Canseco) and earned National League Player of the Month honors for June, Ryne Sandberg hit three home runs to help the National League beat the American League 4-1 in the home run contest.
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The next day, Sandberg and Chicago Cubs teammates Andre Dawson and Shawon Dunston went 0-for-7 at the plate as the American League shut out the National League 2-0 on a windy, rainy night.
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 that 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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