Heroes of Healthcare: Rogue Valley Mercy Flights

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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Heroes of Healthcare: Rogue Valley Mercy Flights

This is Part 4in our continued series, Healthcare Heroes, where we look back at the profound legacy of American doctors, nurses, and healers.

Meeting a Need

A photo of a patient being loaded into a mercy flight plane by doctors and nurses
In this photograph taken at the Roseburg Airport on March 26, 1952, a patient is being loaded— with difficulty—into a Mercy Flights plane prior to the addition of a larger door. The patient’s sister-in-law and a Mercy Flights nurse are at right. (Courtesy of Mercy Flights and the Southern Oregon Historical Society.) Image sourced from Mercy Flights.

Located on the border of Southern Oregon and Northern California, the scenic Rogue Valley was the site of rapid population growth after World War II. No one could have predicted the sudden onset of the 1949 polio epidemic or the impact it would have on local populations residing far from complex medical treatment and rehabilitation facilities.

Rogue Valley residents generally valued their distance from “the big cities” of Portland, San Francisco, and even Eugene. But when the polio epidemic hit, they were shocked to recognize the dangers of a six-hour emergency transport on a winding two-lane highway to the nearest iron lung in Eugene, over 100 miles away. 

Read More: Mercy Flights by Ruth Ballweg, MPA, PA, Michael E. Burrill Sr., Michael E. Burrill Jr., and Pirkko Terao

George Milligan, a young FAA control tower operator, proposed a volunteer air ambulance service with its first plane purchased through community donations. Highly skilled former military pilots would fly the planes, nurses and doctors would oversee the medical care, and an influential board of directors made up of community leaders would support the fledgling service. Mercy Flights was born.

Community Action and Leadership 

A photo of the community members who donated to Mercy Flights in front of a plane
With Mercy Flights and its subscription service well established, the board worked hard to protect the planes with the first Mercy Flights hangar at the Medford Airport. Community members who donated time and materials are pictured here. From left to right are W.E. Brooks, Homer Bell, Lee Flink, Elmo Viar, Bart Shepherd, George Milligan, Al Nielson, Roy Ganfield, Jack Edmonds, L.V. Ward, Joel Elkins, Clyde Richmond, and Al Miller. (Courtesy of the Southern Oregon Historical Society.) Image sourced from Mercy Flights.

Community leaders mobilized to promote Mercy Flights through fundraising, devising communications strategies, streamlining a subscription/membership process, and offering legal and technical advice. 

The Mercy Flights board represented a cross section of the power structure in the Rogue Valley. In addition to their direct involvement on what was initially a time-consuming board, each member also brought with them their access to a wide range of colleagues and friends. Their influence reached deeply into the community, and they all knew they were expected to capitalize on this reach. 

The sustainability of Mercy Flights required a stable financial structure. As the board grappled with this issue, Milligan proposed a subscription plan that would provide medical transportation when needed to families covered by an annual subscription. The board enthusiastically supported this strategy and created community subscription drives, making subscriptions readily available in local offices and businesses and encouraging employers to provide subscriptions as a benefit of employment.

Challenges and Historic Rescues 

A Mercy Flight plane dropping off supplies mid-flight
The Mercy Flights Stinson is shown dropping medical supplies and food to a small Southern Oregon community isolated by floods. Without a formal emergency system in place for the entire state of Oregon until 1983, Mercy Flights was most often the first to appear when small communities—even those without an airstrip—needed help. Imaged sourced from Mercy Flights.

Read More: Mercy Flights by Ruth Ballweg, MPA, PA, Michael E. Burrill Sr., Michael E. Burrill Jr., and Pirkko Terao

Prior to 1983, when Emergency Medicine System legislation was passed in Oregon, rescues and emergency responses were informal. The idea of a “first responder” was a new concept. From the first days of its creation, Mercy Flights’ history included involvement in precarious and dramatic rescues from unlikely landing strips such as sandbars and rural highways.

 Mercy Flights founder George Milligan often described these as “make-believe airports.” In one of the early missions, a pilot and nurse landed in Agness, a small community on the Rogue River, and then had to hike to locate the injured patient.

Because of the outdoor lifestyle of rural Oregonians, rescues are commonplace in forests, rivers, lakes, on mountains, or even on sandbars. Fortunately, Mercy Flights’ maneuverable single-engine planes, such as a Stinson Reliant or a Cessna 180, provided access to remote landing strips before helicopters became available. Mercy Flights was also the first to respond to the 1955 Roseburg, Oregon, dynamite explosion that leveled the city; they immediately flew in utility workers and medical supplies. 

Despite his full-time job as an FAA control tower operator, Milligan led and managed Mercy Flights and was a constant presence at the Medford Airport. His personal leadership through rescues, first responses, and disasters was recognized by a number of state and national aviation and safety agencies.

Establishing Southern Oregon as a Regional Medical Center

Mercy Flight crew transporting a child in a neo-natal unit
Over time, the intense neonatal transports became even more complex, requiring additional space in the Mercy Flights planes. Here, Don Wilson (at far left) and George Milligan (next to Wilson) are shown with a Mercy Flights crew during the first steps of a neonatal transport. Image sourced from Mercy Flights.

As the population of Southern Oregon increased, so did the need for health care at all levels. Mercy Flights became the region’s solution for rapidly transferring complex patients to Level 1 and Level 2 hospitals in urban centers in Portland (263 road miles away) and San Francisco (373 road miles away). 

In the 1960s, Medford’s two community hospitals grew into more complex health-care systems that offered care across all of the medical and surgical specialties and subspecialties. Sacred Heart Hospital, part of the Providence healthcare system, built a new facility and renamed it Providence Hospital. The Medford Community Hospital also built a new facility and renamed it Rogue Valley Memorial Hospital. With these new campuses that included contiguous medical offices, treatment centers, rehabilitation facilities, and laboratory services, Medford was now on the map as a regional medical center located midway between Portland and San Francisco.

New technologies also played a major role, as Mercy Flights began to provide neonatal transfer services for premature and ill infants as well as more complex inflight monitoring in pressurized aircraft for very ill patients. New technology also brought with it the need for more highly trained crews, including paramedics and specialty care nurses.

Buy the Book: Mercy Flights by Ruth Ballweg, MPA, PA, Michael E. Burrill Sr., Michael E. Burrill Jr., and Pirkko Terao

Healthcare Heroes: Three Centuries of Healthcare in Charleston, SC

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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Healthcare Heroes: Three Centuries of Healthcare in Charleston, SC

This is Part 3 in our continued series, Healthcare Heroes, where we look back at the profound legacy of American doctors, nurses, and healers.

Self-Proclaimed or Actual Doctor?

A portrait of David Ramsey
David Ramsay (1749–1815), founding member of the Medical Society of South Carolina. Doctor David Ramsay, circa 1796, attributed to Rembrandt Peale (American, 1778–1860), oil on canvas. © Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association, XX1914. Image sourced from Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance.

In 1789, the new United States Constitution was ratified and George Washington was chosen as president. While Charleston rice and indigo planters scrambled to restore their fortunes by planting cotton after the war, a handful of doctors gathered in 1789 to form the Medical Society of South Carolina.

At that time, anyone who wanted to call himself a doctor or to practice medicine was legally permitted to do so. But the issue of who could call himself a doctor grew more important to those few who had obtained a medical education.

Charleston was home to a number of formally educated doctors. William Bull and John Moultrie Jr. were the two earliest Charleston doctors who had actually received formal medical degrees, from universities in the British Isles. One of the reasons these doctors founded the medical society in Charleston was so that patients could identify those doctors who had certified training. 

Read More: Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance by Jane O’Boyle

In 1817, the state legislature mandated doctors’ regulations and licenses and, in 1820, extended licensing to apothecaries. But the society’s self-proclaimed greatest achievement to date occurred in 1824. The Medical Society inaugurated the Medical College of South Carolina, with lectures by Dr. Philip Gendron Prioleau in anatomy, surgery and midwifery, and Dr. Benjamin B. Simons in chemistry. 

Mr. Thomas Roper and His Legacy 

A portrait or Colonel Thomas Roper
Colonel Thomas Roper, 1760–1829. Courtesy of the Waring Historical Library, MUSC. Image sourced from Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance.

Mr. R.W. Roper died on June 12, 1845, and, as he had no children, his estate was dispensed as his father’s will had instructed back in 1829. His father was the former mayor, Colonel Thomas Roper, who had stipulated that, without heirs, the estate would go to the Medical Society of South Carolina. Colonel Roper’s other son, Dr. Thomas W. Roper (R.W.’s brother), had once been secretary for the Medical Society but had died in 1817. 

In honor of his son, Colonel Roper had outlined that without other grandchildren, the society would use the endowment to build a hospital in Charleston. This was when the society established the Roper Fund, with the Roper bequest of approximately $30,000.

The first Roper Hospital opened in 1856 and was managed by the City of Charleston. That same year, 254 patients were treated there for yellow fever, of whom 92 died. During what the minutes call the War Between the States, the Union army controlled the city of Charleston after the siege and commandeered Roper Hospital for its wounded soldiers. After the war, the 1886 earthquake destroyed the Queen Street building, and it was abandoned after only thirty years.

The new 1856 Roper Hospital on Queen Street was later damaged in the 1886 earthquake and abandoned. Imaged sourced from Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance.

The Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy

A portrait of Sister Xavier Dunn
Sister Xavier Dunn, who tended to sick in Charleston for fifty-three years, in the 1880s. Image sourced from Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance.

The Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy were founded in Charleston in 1829 with the primary mission of pastoral care. Organized by Bishop John England, the sisters ministered to the sick in Charleston homes. Yellow fever and cholera epidemics were a regular occurrence. 

Sister Xavier and her superior, Mother Teresa Barry, pleaded to the bishop for a Catholic hospital in Charleston. But it was the gift of Charlestonian Maria McHugh that made it happen when she gave the sisters a large brick house on Magazine Street. The sisters sold this house and bought a property on the northeast corner of Calhoun and Ashley.

Read More: Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance by Jane O’Boyle

In 1900, the hospital opened a school of nursing at St. Francis. New buildings were added throughout the 1900s.

Mary McKay and Beulah Manigault

A photo of Beulah Manigualt
Beulah Manigault. Imaged sourced from Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo, the night shift nurse supervisor, Mary McKay, moved into an eighth-floor hospital room at the St. Francis high-rise on Rutledge and Calhoun. Her home had been devastated during Hugo, as had so many, and there was much for her to do at the hospital. McKay was known for her meticulous makeup, and her room at the hospital had a pink floral wreath on the door that read “Mary’s Room.” She was a diminutive, beloved fixture at St. Francis ever after, ushering homeless transients inside during cold winter nights. She didn’t move out until the hospital moved west of the Ashley, on which occasion she retired to the Canterbury House.

McKay was soon followed into retirement by Beulah Manigault, a St. Francis nursing assistant on St. Gerard’s Hall for thirty-four years. Manigault had worked the 3:00 p.m. shift and raised four daughters with her husband, Harold, in their home at Smith Street and Vanderhorst. “Ms. McKay had no family, so I took care of her too,” said Manigault. “We were her family.”

St. Francis was the first hospital to become integrated in those years, and Manigault was hired by Sister Emmanuel. She cleaned bedpans, changed sheets, sterilized utensils and brushed teeth for the genteel ladies in her ward of private rooms. There was one bathroom at the end of the hall for those fifteen patients, and it had no sink and no tub. “The nurses were so good to me at that time,” said Manigault. “Mary McKay, Anne Moore. They were like family.”

Two decades later, Manigault visits McKay daily and helps with her hair and makeup.

Buy the Book: Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance by Jane O’Boyle

African American Healthcare Heroes of the Civil War

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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African American Healthcare Heroes of the Civil War
Civil War soldiers loading the wounded into a carriage served as an ambulance
A Civil War ambulance removing the wounded. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Image sourced from African American Medicine in Washington, DC.

Dr. Alexander Augusta

Whereas pre–Civil War, African Americans wishing to pursue medicine often had to resort to studying in Canada, post–Civil War, more schools accepted African Americans. An example of the trajectory of African Americans and their training prior to the war can be seen in Dr. Alexander Augusta. 

This is a part of our ongoing series called Healthcare Heroes. Part I looked at memorable achievements in medicine during World War II in Detroit.

Dr. Alexander Augusta secretly learned to read, with the help of Bishop Daniel Payne and, by the 1840s, had moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to begin studying medicine with private tutors while he worked as a barber. According to Dr. Montague Cobb, who wrote one of the definitive articles on Dr. Augusta, “He obtained his early education by stealth from [Episcopalian] Bishop Payne, as it was then against the law to teach colored persons.” 

On April 14, 1863, Augusta was appointed surgeon of the United States Colored Troops (USCT). After Augusta received his commission, he was sent to Camp Barker in Washington, D.C. For many officers in the Union army, although they believed in spirit that there should be equality for all, they had few dealings with African Americans. Several lower-ranking officers were perplexed as to how to deal with a higher-ranking African American officer.

Friends and foes alike saw Augusta as a fighter and champion for the rights of African Americans. As Newby puts it: “In his admiration of his mentor and colleague, Dr. Alexander T. Augusta, Abbott at the same time questioned the actions of Augusta when Augusta openly challenged a system which suppressed the advancement of his race.” Augusta had worked hard for his position in society and insisted that his freedom, not condescension or favor, should give him the rights accorded to any other free citizen in the United States. He did not hesitate to challenge those who stood in his way.

Read More: African American Medicine in Washington, D.C. by By Heather M. Butts JD MPH MA, Foreword by Dr. Hugh Florenz Butts MD

Dr. Charles Purvis

A photograph of Dr. Charles Purvis
Dr. Charles Burleigh Purvis. Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine. Image sourced from African American Medicine in Washington, DC.

Dr. Charles Purvis was the grandson of James Forten Sr., the civil rights leader. Purvis went to Oberlin College and attended Wooster Medical College. In 1864, Purvis began working as a military nurse at Camp Barker with ex-slaves. He graduated from medical school in 1865 and enlisted in the Union army as an acting assistant surgeon. He would serve from 1865 to 1869, treating mostly freedmen. While at the Freedmen’s Hospital, Purvis saw a succession of leaders including Alexander Augusta, William Powell, Caleb Horn and Anderson Abbott. 

Purvis’s thoughts on African Americans and their role in the Civil War were clear: “The Negro slave, guided by some altruistic power, embraced every opportunity to escape his bondage to the seat of government. He was not encouraged in his endeavor, really not desired, still in numbers he came.”

Notable Civil War Nurses

A photograph of Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Image sourced from African American Medicine in Washington, DC.

Harriet Tubman was a nurse in Port Royal and aided the majority of soldiers, who had dysentery and smallpox. 

Sojourner Truth was known as a champion for the rights of women and African Americans and worked in the Freedmen’s Hospital and Freedmen’s Village to bring comfort to the soldiers during the war. 

Jane Isabella Saunders, also known as “Aunt Jane,” was hired by Alexander T. Augusta at the Contraband Hospital in D.C. to tend to the sick and injured. She worked at the hospital in 1865. 

Maria Mitchell was an ex-slave who served in several hospitals in and around Washington and Alexandra Virginia, including L’Ouverture Hospital and the Contraband Hospital. She contracted with the army on May 16, 1864, to serve as a nurse. 

Maria Toliver was born in 1839 on a plantation in Williamsburg. She fled to Washington in 1862. According to Toliver, in her pension application, “I was born in Williamsburg, Virginia and was sold into King William Col., VA and ran off from my master about 1862…about 3 months after I came here to Washington, I [was] hired to a Dr. James Pettijohn to nurse in the Hospital at Camp Barker.”

Buy the Book: African American Medicine in Washington, D.C. by By Heather M. Butts JD MPH MA, Foreword by Dr. Hugh Florenz Butts MD

The Ghosts of the Gary Mills

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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The Ghosts of the Gary Mills

By the time Elbert Gary had completed his plans, the Indiana city of Gary and its mills could boast twelve blast furnaces, forty-seven steel furnaces, an impressive harbor — and an unknown number of lingering ghosts.

It was the opening years of the twentieth century, and would-be workers from every corner of Europe poured in, along with migrant workers from all around the United States. Those workers faced incredible challenges, ranging from exploitative management to dangerous jobs. Loss of digits and limbs, men crushed by railroad cars, decapitations — more than five hundred steel workers have perished in Gary since 1906.

Rumors persist that many of those workers still haunt the region.

Molten ladles

One of the most feared fates in the mills was of falling into “the Heat”: the vats or “ladles” of molten metal. The steel can reach a temperature of almost three thousand degrees, and a human body will apparently disintegrate in the substance in a matter of seconds.

An image of steel workers in Gary, Indiana.
Gary steel workers, 1939. Image sourced from Haunted Gary, courtesy of the Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest.

The question of what to do with the ladle after such a mishap is one that allegedly continues to be a problem: Should the mill use it anyway, since there’s no trace of the unfortunate, vaporized body? Should it be disposed of respectfully, despite the tremendous loss in product—about 150 tons of steel?

One worker talked of a woman who lost her husband in a ladle accident and demanded a body from the mill, wanting to give him a proper burial. Being unable to provide one, the company reportedly cut out a man-sized chunk of the ladle and sent it to the funeral home. The mortician sealed it in the chosen casket and convinced the widow to have a closed-casket funeral. Stories have circulated for years that ladles containing human remains are sometimes buried in Lake Michigan, leading to stories of fishermen off the Gary coast picking up men in the water who regale their rescuers with chilling stories of being burned alive—before disappearing before the fishermen’s eyes.

Sights and smells

This region was known for strange and spiritual occurrences, including the famous Diana of the Dunes. There were many other, smaller examples.

Sometimes deaths in the mill leave behind evidence of the event in the form of disembodied voices or smells. One worker said that after his coworker was crushed by a rail accident, he’d frequently hear a male voice say, “Hey!” in his ear as he was working near the death site.

Another worker told of working with a buddy who had had his skull pierced while working in a “continuous rod” mill and died instantly. For months afterward, workers would smell a strong smell of cigars at the death site from time to time. The deceased worker had been known for always smoking part of a cigar at lunchtime.

Worker against worker

In one case dating back to the 1960s, two workers reportedly had such hatred between them that they seemed always on the verge of physically attacking each other.

Broadway, downtown Gary, 1937. Image sourced from Haunted Gary.

According to the story, there was a woman involved, and one was bitterly jealous, while the other was openly arrogant about his relationship with her. One day, the latter fell five stories and crushed his ribs against a piece of machinery, causing internal bleeding that killed him in minutes.

The only witness to the “accident” was his relentless rival, who said he had seen him “standing there one minute, gone the next.” Some exposed electrical wires along the ground were pointed out by the survivor, who suggested that he must have tripped.

According to his co-workers—none of whom believed his story—he quit soon after the incident, claiming that something had tried to push him to his death at the exact spot where his rival had plummeted to his end.

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Billy the Kid is Dead, Long live Billy the Kid!

James Glassman
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Billy the Kid is Dead, Long live Billy the Kid!

Billy the Kid. What pops into your head? Gunslinger? Bandit? Folk hero? The notorious William Bonney was a cipher. He took on the wild of the frontier, and came to embody all of the adventure, romance, and freedom that the rest of the world found in the tall tales of the American West. And even more so after his death, when Billy the Kid sightings, lore, and conspiracy theories exploded on the American landscape.

Billy, the Sequel

Billy’s life after his “death” was even more interesting than his real life. Enter O.L. “Brushy Bill” Roberts of Hico, Texas. Growing up on the frontier, “Kid” Roberts, as he was called then, was more than proficient with a rifle and a handgun. When he was old enough, Roberts traveled to Oklahoma to try his hand at cattle where he would meet future cattle rustler Belle Star, known by some as the Bandit Queen. At her ranch were the Younger brothers and Jesse and Frank James. Did Pat Garrett kill Billy the Kid, or was it Roberts who caught the bullet? He survived, and it was in this second phase of his life, post death, that he gained his new nickname, “Brushy Bill.” It’s possible considering there was only one authenticated photograph of Billy the Kid. When interviewed decades later, Brushy Bill shared his colorful and unverifiable past. More like a 19th century Forrest Gump, Billy was reported in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, aiding Pancho Villa during the revolution, and even joining the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

Conspiracy Theory

Billy the Kid was always a good subject for newspapers, magazines, and dime novels. In 1926, The El Paso Times Herald claimed that Billy the Kid was alive and living 200 miles away. Everyone knew the night of the fateful shooting in Fort Sumner when Sheriff Pat Garrett met up with Billy and gave him $1,000 to leave New Mexico and never return. Billy generously retorted that he only needed $25. Now here’s the conspiracy theory: the body of another man was buried in the grave. Did Billy live?

A photo of brush where Billy the Kid is presumably buried in Texas
The Kid’s unmarked grave as it appeared in 1928. Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Rose Collection, #2175. Imaged sourced from Tall Tales and Half Truths of Billy the Kid.

Billy’s Gravesite

Whether Billy was actually in his own New Mexico grave will always be disputed. But that never stopped curiosity-seekers and grave robbers from “paying their respect.” As one of the most infamous people of the era, Billy’s corpse was in danger of macabre souvenir hunters, and many travelled to see his trigger finger displayed in a jar. Odder still, Billy’s first grave marker, a crude wooden cross, was first “stolen” by none other than his alleged girlfriend, Paulita Maxwell, who would be later buried in same cemetery.

The Saint

One of the more fanciful folk tales of Billy the Kid comes from Frank Applegate’s book Native Tales of New Mexico. Set in 1881, on the day the Kid was to be hanged, Billy came to the small Spanish village of Escondida, where he sought refuge in the house of a Spanish man and his wife and daughter, Rosa. Later that night at a dance, Billy chased off a undesirable suitor of Rosa. When the creep saw the Kid, he muttered in fear, “El Chivato!” (Billy’s nickname in Spanish). Billy left Escondida the next morning with the entire town sending him off. And with constant retelling of this tale, talk grew of Escondida wanting to make Billy a saint! Saint Billy, anyone?

Heroes of Healthcare: Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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Heroes of Healthcare: Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers

Like most communities in the country, Detroit hasn’t escaped the touch of novel coronavirus COVID-19. But looking at history, we see outstanding stories of heroism and bravery in the face of unspeakable tragedy and danger, and the stories of Detroit’s healthcare providers is no different. This story is the first in our new series, Heroes of Healthcare.

Detroit's Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers

This story was adapted from the pictorial history by Patricia Ibbotso, Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers.

In the Beginning

The history of hospitals in Michigan dates back to the care provided to sick men in Michigan’s early military garrisons. The logbook of Captain Alex Harrison, of the Gage, a boat that was unloading at the Detroit wharf, included this story: “October 11, 1785. One hand sent to the hospital October 14. Durett came on board in place of Butler, gone to the hospital.” A report of June 24, 1790, describes the garrison hospital as one room equipped with 21 single berths and a single chimney.  

In 1933 a general hospital was established here, and this complex grew to accommodate 10,000 patients, later becoming Wayne County General Hospital and Infirmary in 1945. 

An image of the first graduating class of nurses at St. Mary's Hospital in 1896
First graduating class, St. Mary’s Hospital, 1896. Miss Helen Ryan was the superintendent of the nursing school that opened in 1894. Sources say there were 15 graduates, but only 11 are pictured here. (Courtesy Daughters of Charity Archives, Mater Dei Provincialate, Evansville, Indiana, via Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers by Patricia Ibbotson)

Eloise Sanitarium

Many hospitals were founded to meet specific needs, such as those to care for contagious diseases, such as tuberculosis, which was the leading cause of death at the turn of the century. Among them are the Detroit Tuberculosis Sanitarium (better known as the William H. Maybury Sanitarium), Herman Kiefer Hospital, Boulevard Sanitarium, and the Eloise Sanitarium. Other communicable diseases that were common were smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, and polio. 

You may also be interested in: The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC): A Brief History

Eloise was among the first, if not the first, hospital to use x-rays to diagnose patients. The Infirmary Building had an x-ray machine, and patients came from Detroit and other communities to have x-rays taken. 

An image of a music therapist turning the page of sheet music for a patient playing the piano
Piano Recital, 1940s. Music Therapist Jane Matney turns the pages to the music while a patient gives a performance in the Gruber Auditorium. The pianist may be the famous “Dr. X,” a psychiatric patient who was a professional musician whose concerts were broadcast twice on national radio. The first formal program in music therapy for mental patients was initiated at Eloise in 1937. (Courtesy Eloise Museum, Westland, Michigan.)

The Visiting Nurse Association of Detroit 

The Visiting Nurse Association of Detroit, founded in 1898, provided care in both clinics and patients’ homes. In addition to providing care to patients, several early hospitals established schools of nursing and other training programs for radiology and laboratory personnel. Before the establishment of these training programs, the patient’s family or the doctor’s or preacher’s wife gave bedside care to patients. In addition to bricks and mortar, the core of early hospitals consisted of the people who founded and staffed them. 

Related: The Ghost Whisperer of Jacktown, Michigan (via Crime Capsule)

The VNA was founded in 1898. The first tuberculosis clinic in Detroit was established in 1906 by the VNA in a partnership with the Detroit Board of Health.

A photo of the Visiting Nurse Association of 1928 posing in front of their headquarters
The VNA Staff, c. 1928. The entire staff is posed in front of their new headquarters with director Emilie Sargent and retired director Lystra Grettel. The VNA was in a partnership with the YMCA and the Urban League as members of the Detroit Patriotic Fund, a forerunner to the United Foundation. (Courtesy Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.)

Benevolent Societies 

The benevolent societies filled the need to care for old people and orphans who had no other resources. These were usually church-based homes. In many cases, children were left here, not necessarily because they were orphans, but because their mothers had to work and the institution was used for room and board.

A woman from the Daughters of Charity reads to a group of children
Enjoying the shade at Villa Par-Well, Dearborn, c. 1920. In 1903, William Partridge and Henry Blackwell donated six acres of land in Dearborn Township with barns, a house, and orchards to be used by the orphans living at the House of Providence. Here a Daughter of Charity reads to a group of children. (Courtesy Daughter of Charity Archives, Mater Dei Provincialate, Evansville, Indiana.)
Detroit's Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers

Detroit’s Hospitals, Healers, and Helpers by Patricia Ibbotso is available for purchase from Arcadia Publishing.

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