In a few days we will happily welcome in the New Year of 2021. The old year, the Pandemic Year, gave all of us unprecedented challenges as we struggled with technology working and learning from home. Zoom allowed many of us to still see our colleagues, friends, and family as we conducted our lives socially distanced, occasionally leaving our homes masked and carrying a vial of hand sanitizer. The singular gleaming hope has been the indomitable resilience of humankind, especially health care workers who have confronted and continue to confront the deadly virus. Yes, let us count chief among our blessings, especially those of us living in Indianapolis, an ability to access health care delivered by well-trained and dedicated people from emergency medical services to the hospitals and medical centers with high quality medical equipment.
The high quality of hospital health care that we now enjoy in Indianapolis began with little public support. It was an earlier pestilence, smallpox, that prompted city leaders to consider building the first hospital in Indianapolis. However, once the “fright had passed away, the citizens protested against a tax” to build the facility and the materials that had been assembled to erect the hospital were given to a contractor to build a hotel instead. A few years later “the grim King of Terrors” returned, but this time once the illness had subsided Dr. Livingston Dunlap, a member of the city council, pushed for building a city hospital and “kept the subject in a chronic state of resurrection” until it was finished in 1859. Located on land where the current Eskenazi Hospital stands, the fledgling hospital was lacking patients and might well have been used for other purposes if it was not for the Civil War. The federal government ran the hospital during the war years, making additions to it and improving the grounds. Following the war, the hospital returned to city control in July 1866 with the appointment of Dr. Green V. Woollen as superintendent and visiting physicians and surgeons. A city dispensary was established in 1870 for outpatient care of the poor.
When Dr. William N. Wishard became superintendent of the City Hospital in 1879, he found a building in disrepair and outdated with no trained nursing staff. During his eight years as superintendent, Wishard oversaw an expansion and modernization of the hospital and the creation of a nurse training school. In addition to the public hospital and dispensary, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul established an infirmary in Indianapolis in April 1881 that would soon become St. Vincent Hospital, at Capitol Ave and Fall Creek Pkwy. It, too, opened a nurse training program in 1896.
As the need for hospital bed space in Indianapolis grew, other private institutions followed. Protestant Deaconess Hospital, 200 N. Senate Ave., was established in 1899 (closed 1935) through the efforts of the city’s German-American community and the Epworth League dedicated Methodist Hospital, 16th and Capitol Ave., in 1908. Both hospitals also had their own nursing schools. In 1914 St. Francis Hospital was founded by the Poor Sisters of St. Francis Seraph of Perpetual Adoration and established in the Indianapolis suburb of Beech Grove. In addition to these hospitals, a number of specialty institutions also came and went over time. However, one of the most enduring of these was Riley Hospital for Children which opened in 1924.
Sadly, until the post-World War II years not all Indianapolis citizens had access to these medical facilities; only City Hospital was open to the African-American community, and only for emergency care. In response to this segregation of health care, African-Americans established Lincoln Hospital, 1101 N. Senate Ave., in 1909 and Sisters of Charity Hospital, 1502 N. Missouri, in 1911. In addition to providing medical care, both hospitals had a training program for nurses, the only such programs open to blacks in the city. Unfortunately, these hospitals had a brief existence and were forced to close for lack of funds by the early twenties.
It took much longer to establish a medical school in the city. Asbury University (DePauw University) established its medical department, the Indiana Central Medical College, in Indianapolis in 1848. However, it faced some opposition because it was a Methodist school, while others expressed concern “that several of the faculty did not belong to any church.” The college only lasted four years. Twenty-one years later, the Indiana Medical College opened its doors under the auspices of the Indianapolis Academy of Medicine, and in 1874 Indianapolis saw a second medical school organized, the Indiana College of Physicians and Surgeons.
The Indiana Medical College, however, came under criticism early in 1878 when the faculty narrowly voted to bar women despite having had a number of female graduates “all of whom …have reflected credit upon their alma mater.” Dr. Ryland T. Brown, chair of the physiology department, resigned in protest and was commended for his action in a testimonial signed by 56 prominent women and men of Indianapolis. The controversy led to other faculty resignations and the eventual amalgamation of the college and the College of Physicians and Surgeons into the Medical College of Indiana, an affiliate of Butler University. While maintaining separate locations in Indianapolis, the two medical schools continued to train future doctors along with the Physio Medical College of Indiana, the Eclectic Medical College of Indiana, and the State College of Physicians and Surgeons.
In 1905 the Medical College of Indiana and the Central College of Physicians and Surgeons consolidated as the School of Medicine of Purdue University with its Indianapolis campus in the former Medical College of Indiana building at the northwest corner of Senate Ave. and Market. Three years later, Indiana University School of Medicine was formed by a merger of the Purdue School of Medicine and the State College of Physicians and Surgeons. Today’s IU medical complex began in 1914 when Robert Long Hospital was built and became the first hospital dedicated to the medical school.
Over the ensuing decades, the medical center expanded with new hospitals and clinics where research and scientific diagnosis benefited the health of all. Across Indianapolis, access to quality care improved when Community Hospital was established in 1956 and existing hospitals built new campuses or vastly modernized existing ones. Today we are blessed in Marion County to have the past 160-plus years of experience in health care as those trained professionals in the hospital wards do battle in this year of the Pandemic.
