A man named James Cornish had been stabbed.
He was bleeding from his chest.
This was a summer night in Chicago. The year, 1893.
He was taken to the Provident Hospital.
The founder of the hospital was a doctor named Daniel Williams.
Back then, many hospitals refused to accept black patients. Daniel was black and urgently felt the need for a hospital that readily accepted patients of both races.
And thus, with some support, he started the Provident Hospital.
It had only been a few years since starting. The hospital’s reputation had not been well-established just yet.
It was against this backdrop that this particular tense evening presented itself to Daniel.
Daniel rushed to the operating room.
While doing so, he pulled in 6 other doctors with him to the operation — two black and four white doctors. They were not there to help him. Their only job was to be witnesses to what he was about to do.
This might not make sense to us initially, but we’ll talk about that later.
In the small and cramped operating room, he inspected the stab wound.
He found an artery had been ruptured. He stitched it and reduced the bleeding.
Upon further inspection, he found a bigger problem.
The stabbing had ruptured the pericardium — the sac that surrounds the heart — and slashed a blood vessel in the heart.
This was a devastating discovery.
Common Convention
In those days, a problem like this would be solved by external treatment.
Doctors would wait and hope a heart injury would heal while providing salt water, and other support.
Most patients would die as the heart could not heal so quickly.
But the heart was never operated upon.
The common belief was that the beating heart was the final limit of the human capacity to operate.
Surgery could not be performed on it while it was still beating. But a heart that did not beat was a dead person’s heart.
Thus, heart injuries remained out of reach of surgeons.
In such cases, the risk of performing surgery was considered extreme as any opening of the chest cavity also entailed lung-related risk.
The heart itself is always moving and any operation on it carries the risk of worsening an already bad situation.
And so, doctors maintained that the heart must never be touched.
The Solution
1893 was an era when extreme skepticism followed black doctors.
Any death on their watch was scrutinised to a greater extent than in the case of white doctors.
For any deaths on their watch, they’d have to explain what went wrong.
People with injuries like James Cornish’s never made it. A knife stab that tore open a heart artery almost always led to the patient’s death.
It was because of this certainty that Daniel decided to take a risk.
This probably explains why Daniel had pulled in 6 doctors into the operation theatre, especially given that the majority of them were white.
It was because of what he was planning to do next.
Daniel decided to attempt to stitch the ruptured heart-artery.
He rinsed the wound, held the ruptured ends with forceps, and sutured the open wound. Then he stitched the sac that the heart sits in.
James Cornish walked out of the hospital 51 days later. His heart surgery had been a success.
James Cornish lived for another 20 years after the surgery.
Daniel’s decision to perform open heart surgery had proven to be a success.
This also happened to be one of the world’s first ever open-heart surgeries.
Despite the risk of reputational damage, and possible scrutiny, Daniel had the presence of mind to continue.
He saw an injury that looked treatable.
He took some precautions — the 6 witnesses.
He weighed his odds — the patient would probably die without surgery anyway.
And decided to go ahead.
It worked.
Templeton
This lesson on situation awareness — that of knowing when to go against the commonly established practices — is one of the most telling traits of successful surgeons.
It also applies to investors.
The investment world is filled with examples like these.
One such case was that of John Templeton.
He had practically retired in 1992, at an age of roughly 80 years old.
John had been a young man during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
After studying law, he had the unique experience of travelling to 35 countries. This period was marked by conflicts and economic hardship.
The voyages gave him a perspective few in his time had.
His trading and investment journey started in 1937 — a little before the time the Second World War started. In the thick of extreme pessimism and doom, Templeton saw what others were not seeing.
Even in that era, Templeton had spent considerable time researching history.
Wars mean certain sectors pick up extremely well.
Railroads were one such. Steel and manufacturing were others. There were a bunch of others like them.
He had carefully bought stocks that had the potential to turn around in times of war.
The success from this investing marked the start of his fortunes.
Owing to his global exposure, he started a mutual fund called the Templeton Growth Fund in 1954 — a mutual fund that invested in stocks across the globe.
Templeton was often called one of the world’s best global fund managers because of this mutual fund.
Between the fund’s inception in 1954 and John Templeton retiring in 1992, the fund gave a return of around 15% per annum.
In 1968, he moved to the Bahamas. His reasoning was that it was necessary for him to stay away from Wall Street in order to not mimic their mistakes. Some also speculated that it was for tax-saving reasons.
In 1992, he sold his mutual fund to Franklin Resources and retired.
His focus would now turn towards philanthropy.
2000s
And yet, despite retiring, despite being 87 years old, despite quitting the money management world — he was back to the markets in the year 2000.
The tech boom was at its peak.
Everyone else saw dotcom companies’ valuations reach astronomical levels. Nobody knew how to price these internet companies.
Many were trading almost 100x their earnings.
John Templeton just couldn’t resist.
He had seen many booms and busts. Unlike others, he was seeing a pattern.
Many dotcom companies were doing IPOs.
After the IPO, the founders and major investors (venture capitalists) were locked in. They could not sell their shares immediately.
But they could sell once the lock-in period ended after a few months.
These insiders (founders, venture capitalists, etc) knew that there was no way they could ever make enough earnings to justify a 100x valuation.
They would all start selling their shares as soon as the lock-in period ended.
John Templeton had never studied dotcom companies in history. They never existed in the past.
But from past experience, he knew what overhyped companies looked like. They looked like what he was seeing in the dotcom companies.
He started placing shorts on all these dotcom companies’ shares, starting in Jan 2000 when optimism and euphoria were touching new peaks.
He had a very specific strategy: the shorts were placed exactly 11 days before the lock-in ended.
With near-perfect timing, the shorts worked in his favour.
According to some reports, he made about $86 million from just shorting dotcom companies.
He lived till 2008, dying at the age of 95.
Quick Takes
+ India’s gross GST collections rose 15.40% year-on-year to Rs 2.11 lakh crore in July 2026 compared to Rs 1.83 lakh crore a year ago.
+ The government increased windfall taxes on fuel exports. The export duty on petrol was increased to Rs 3.50 per litre. Diesel export duties increased to Rs 25.50 per litre. ATF exports were raised to Rs 22 per litre.
+ LIC’s Rs 31,410 crore OFS was subscribed over 3.3 times from institutional investors on day 1. The government is selling up to 6.50% stake at a floor price of Rs 382 to comply with minimum public shareholding norms. The offer will open for retail investors tomorrow.
+ RBI kept the repo rate unchanged at 5.25% and maintained a ‘neutral’ policy stance.
+ The government operationalised the Inventory-based Cross-border E-Commerce Export Framework under the Foreign Trade Policy, 2023 for exports of goods manufactured or produced in India.
+ RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra said that plastic currency notes will be in circulation from next financial year.
+ SEBI proposed allowing depository receipts to be issued against units of REITs and InvITs in a consultation paper. This is aimed at attracting foreign inflows.
+ The government approved construction of a 135.87 km, four lane Guwahati-Tezpur Corridor along the NH-15 in Assam worth Rs 8,970.20 crore.
+ The government approved Rs 23,731 crore for ‘GOBARdhan’-India’s national unified scheme for compressed biogas.
+ The government clarified that India is neither importing nor intends to import ethanol from the US for fuel blending. The fuel blending programme and ethanol procurement is entirely from domestic producers.
+ Coal production rose 7.51% year-on-year to 69.75 MT in July. Coal dispatch grew 18.03% in the same period to 86.85 MT.
+ India remained a net importer of steel in July. Finished steel consumption rose 6.50% year-on-year to 14.40 MT in July. Steel production rose 1.40% to 13.70 MT in the same period.
+ India’s forex reserves rose by $10.51 billion to $692.87 billion in the week that ended on 31 July.
+ Nine companies including Rediff.com India, Garuda Aerospace, and Playsimple Games Limited received Sebi approval for their proposed IPO.
+ SEBI streamlined inspection of market intermediaries by mandating joint inspections by stock exchanges and depositories.
The information contained in this Groww Digest is purely for knowledge. This Groww Digest does not contain any recommendations or advice.
Team Groww Digest