‘It’s not a job. It’s a mission.’ A trauma surgeon takes on the public health crisis of racism
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sk Brian Williams, MD, to identify his defining moment as a trauma surgeon, and, without skipping a beat, he will tell you about what happened in Texas on July 7, 2016. That night, during a protest against police shootings, a man ambushed and shot at a group of police officers, killing five and injuring nine others. Seven of the wounded officers were transported to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Williams was the attending on call that night and the only Black trauma surgeon on a team of 12. “At the time of the crisis, I wasn’t giving any thought to the external social political climate,” Williams said. “It was a medical crisis, and I’m a trauma surgeon. This is my job.” After working through the night to save the officers’ lives, Williams had to break the news to three families that their loved ones did not survive. “After talking to the families, I went to a back room and fell to the ground and started bawling,” he recalled. “I do not cry. I had not cried in so long before that, but that night I was crying. It was a perceptible shift in me personally and professionally.” That night and its aftermath led Williams to put down his scalpel for two years to work on police-community relations in Dallas and catapulted him to prominence as a national thought leader on public health and racism. He worked full time as the medical director of a community health institute to address healthcare disparities within Dallas County, and the mayor appointed him chair of the Dallas Community Police Oversight Board. Today he continues his work as a trauma surgeon at the University of Chicago Medicine — and his work to tackle the toll gun violence and now COVID-19 are taking on the Black community. This spring, he’s teaching a course in the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy related to violence and communities of color. “When public policy becomes weaponized,” he said, “people suffer. Policy can affect the lives of millions of people per year. What if I could teach what I know to a bunch of public policy grad students with no end goal other than to say here’s my
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION
experience, you’re all smart folks going into public policy — you’re looking at this outside of a healthcare lens and can help find some really creative solutions.” While that tragic and traumatic moment in Dallas looms large for him as a trauma surgeon, Williams is further defined and motivated by the racism he has experienced his whole life, in and out of the workplace. Racial slurs hurled at him from cars. People asking him outside of a restaurant to park their cars or mistaking him for janitorial staff in the hospital. He and his wife even learned that adopting a baby of color was less expensive than adopting a child who is white. One day as Williams waited for a car to the airport outside of his apartment in Dallas, someone called the police on a “suspicious Black male.” Officers approached him, asking for identification to prove his residence. His wife, who is white and was not yet aware of the rampant racism that would later come to light in the media, was surprised he complied. She asked him why he did so. He replied simply, “I didn’t want to get shot.”
From engineering to medicine Williams, an Air Force brat, moved around every few years as a child and eventually became an aeronautical engineer after attending the Air Force Academy as the first person in his family to go to college. “While on active duty, I got this bug to go into medicine,” Williams said. “My social circle was all nurses and doctors. I was exposed to these folks talking about their day-to-day all the time, and I thought their jobs sounded great.” At 28, he started medical school at the University of South Florida, where he did rotations in trauma surgery and surgical critical care. On the second day of his trauma rotation, Williams said, he knew that’s what he wanted to do with his life. “The pace of the specialty, patients coming in the door near death and the team bringing them back — trauma surgeons seemed like my kind of people,” Williams said. “I enjoyed operating and the fast pace of the ICU, including the adrenaline.”
PHOTO BY SANDRO MILLER
BY KAT CARLTON
