History Panels in Jefferson Tower at UAB

Despite all the construction at UAB in recent decades, Jefferson Tower remains one of the most distinctive buildings on campus. The sixteen-story structure opened in December 1939 as the county's Jefferson Hospital and a few years later became part of the UA School of Medicine. It served as University Hospital until the North Pavilion opened; all inpatient activities were transferred there by September 2010. Various offices and clinics now occupy the building.

In the lobby of the main entrance are six panels that offer historical photos around various themes. The panels are labelled Change, Education, Tradition, Community, Care, Service. I managed to get semi-decent photographs of three of them, as seen below.

I'm not sure how long these panels have been up, but I've been at UAB since 1983 and have walked by them for many years. Originally a mix of historic and contemporary photos, this UAB Archives exhibit has become all historical by now. The University's archives date to 1990, but these panels have an even older aura. 

As I've noted in previous blog posts, such as the one on the Hillman Hospital Annex Cornerstone, most of us walk by history every day and never notice. 

 

 

Postcard of Jefferson-Hillman Hospital around 1945, roughly the time the University of Alabama School of Medicine moved from Tuscaloosa and became a four-year program. Dig those cool cars! And I wish Jefferson Tower still had that striking entrance.

 

 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Standing Tall at UAB: The Statue of Dr. William E.B. Davis

This statue is found to your left as you start up the front entrance steps of the New Hillman building on the UAB campus. You can find out more about the building in an earlier blog post. The man depicted is William Elias Brownlee Davis [1863-1903], described in the subtitle of an article about him as "surgeon--teacher--organizer." Davis was one of Alabama's most prominent 19th century physicians.

Born in Trussville, William and his older brother John formed a third generation of doctors in the family. Grandfather Dr. Daniel Elias Davis was an early settler in Alabama; their father, Dr. Elias Davis, was killed at the Battle of Petersburg during the Civil War.

John Daniel Sinkler Davis graduated from the Medical College of Georgia in 1879, and when he set up practice in Birmingham two years later invited his sibling to come "read" medicine under him. William studied at the University of Alabama, medicine at Vanderbilt and the University of Louisville and graduated from Bellvue Hospital Medical College in New York City in 1884. Then the Davis brothers began a joint practice in Birmingham.

 
The brothers were nothing if not ambitious. Within a decade they had started the Alabama Medical and Surgical Journal, founded the Birmingham Medical College where experimental surgery on dogs was included in the curriculum, and opened a private clinic for surgery and gynecology on Third Avenue. The brothers also helped organize the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association at a meeting in October 1887 held in the local YMCA. The organization still exists today as the Southern Surgical Association.

Originally located on 21st Street North in a former hotel, a new building for the Birmingham Medical College was constructed in 1902 in the same block where this statue now stands. A two-story autopsy house was added later. The college graduated its final class in May, 1915. Graduates from the school included one woman, Elizabeth White. Clinical training took place at Hillman Hospital, St. Vincent's Hospital, and other city facilities including the Davis Infirmary.


In addition to the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association, William served other medical groups before his death in 1903. He was Vice-President of the American Medical Association in 1892 and President of the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 1901. Dr. Davis published extensively in the medical literature, as the references in the Carmichael article noted below demonstrate.

He was killed at a railroad crossing in the city when he was only 40 years old. His wife Gertrude lived until June 1953; both are buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.

This bronze sculpture is the work of Giuseppe Moretti and was cast at his Roman Bronze Works in New York in 1904. The work was commissioned by members of the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association. Moretti's slightly larger cast-iron statue of Vulcan debuted that same year at the St. Louis Exposition.

 

Davis in 1887
Source: BhamWiki

Further Reading

Carmichael EB. William Elias Brownlee Davis: Surgeon--Teacher--Organizer. Ala J Med Sci 1966 April; 3(2): 224-229

Moore RM. The Davis Brothers of Birmingham and the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association. Ann Surg 1963 May; 157(5): 657-669

Birmingham Photo of the Day (22): The Hillman Hospital Annex Cornerstone

Often we walk by history every day and never notice. Recently I was waiting on the bus to take me to my car in the UAB remote parking lot and sat down on a bench. I was facing what is now called the New Hillman Building on 20th Street South. The Annex, actually between Old [1902] and New [1928] Hillmans, was opened in 1913. Here's what I saw on the corner of that building near its entrance:





This plaque for the Hillman Hospital Annex lists the agencies and men prominently involved in the structure. By 1907 the charitable founders & owners of Hillman Hospital, the Board of Lady Managers, transfered it to the Jefferson County Board of Revenue. The individuals were prominent in their day. Dr. Charles Whelan had been elected physician for the city of Birmingham in 1899. Dr. Edgar Poe Hogan published medical articles and served as part-time Superintendent of the hospital from 1910 until 1930. He also participated in the Spanish-American War and served in the Alabama legislature. He died in 1965. H.B. Wheelock had worked as architect on the original Hillman building.

The cornerstone plaque for the original Hillman Hospital building is below, taken from the BhamWiki site. As that article notes, Hillman Hospital originally opened on the city's Southside in 1888 as the Hospital of United Charity. Local businessman Thomas Hillman made a donation to rebuild the hospital after a fire and it was named for him when they new structure opened at its current location. All the names listed on this plaque except for the architect and contractor are women, the wives of local businessmen. That group had begun organizing for a charity hospital as the Daughters of United Charity in 1886.



A photo of the two Hillman buildings in 1929 and some history of the hospital and how it became a part of UAB can be found in one of my earlier blog posts. More about Hillman Hospital can be found on the BhamWiki site.

Alice McNeal, M.D.: Alabama's First Female Anesthesiologist

          On May 8, 2010, in a ceremony in Montgomery, Alice McNeal, M.D., was inducted into the Alabama Healthcare Hall of Fame along with other members of the 2010 class of honorees. Dr. McNeal became the second anesthesiologist inducted; Robert A. Hingson, M.D., in 1999, was the first. 

       The Hall of Fame was established in 1997 “to recognize those persons, living or deceased, who have made outstanding contributions to, or rendered exemplary service for healthcare in the State of Alabama.” Past honorees have included such well-known medical figures as Peter Bryce, William Crawford Gorgas, James D. Hardy,  Seale Harris, Tinsley R. Harrison, Sr., Luther Leonidas Hill, Basil I. Hirschowitz, John W. Kirklin, Josiah C. Nott, Lloyd Noland, David Satcher, and J. Marion Sims. 

In September 1945, the first class of students began their studies at the Medical College of Alabama in Birmingham. This four-year school had replaced a two-year program in Tuscaloosa, and thus students no longer needed to leave Alabama to obtain a medical degree. The demands of creating this school quickly and almost from scratch led DeanRoy Kracke to open a few opportunities for female physicians. When the school opened, Dr. Melson Barfield-Carter, an Alabama native who had practiced radiology in the city since 1929, was named Professor and Chair of the school's Radiology Department. Three years later, Dr. Alice McNeal became the second female department chair at the Medical College.

            Alice McNeal was born in 1897 in Hinsdale, Illinois. She graduated from Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1921, and during the next two years completed internships at Women's Hospital in Philadelphia and Durand Hospital in Chicago. In 1925 she began a stretch of twenty-one years as Anesthesiologist and Instructor in Anesthesia at Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago. During this period she completed a residency in anesthesia under Huberta Livingstone in 1926 and a second residency under Ralph Tovell in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1938 and 1939. Dr. McNeal was certified by the American Board of Anesthesiology in 1941.

McNeal in 1921, at the time she received her Rush MC certificate

She received her M.D. the following year, one of 5 women among 129 total graduates

Source: Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center Archives [Chicago]


 

            During World War II McNeal was active in the effort to bring female physicians into the U.S. armed forces. Women doctors had not been allowed to enlist in World War I; they could not yet vote and thus were not "citizens". A few were allowed to be "contract" physcians during that conflict. McNeal and Dr. Virginia Apgar led the effort in World War II; in April 1943 the Sparkman-Johnson Bill passed Congress, and women were allowed to enlist. 

            By early 1946, Dean Roy Kracke needed a Chief of Anesthesia for the hospital of the new medical school. Apparently John Adriani, a prominent anesthesiologist at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, was offered the position but declined. By May of that year Dean Kracke had persuaded Dr. McNeal to accept the post, and she arrived in Birmingham to become an Assistant Professor of Surgery and Chief of the Surgery Department's Anesthesia Division. In August 1948, Dr. McNeal was named Chair of the newly created Department of Anesthesiology and remained in that position until stepping  down in 1961. She retired the following year. Dr. McNeal died on December 31, 1964.

            In October 1946 Dr. McNeal began organizing a School of Nurse Anesthetists at the hospital. In the spring of 1948 she was one of four founding members--and the only female--of the Alabama State Society of Anesthesiologists. As a result of her efforts, the department's residency program was certified by the American Board of Anesthesiology in February 1949. In that same year, under the auspices of the International Refugee Organization, Dr. McNeal made a nine-week trip to Munich, Germany, and lectured to some 150 local physicians on modern medical practices. She served as President of the Southern Society of Anesthesiologists for 1956-57.

            Dr. McNeal’s professional career had two phases. At Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago, she worked under Dr. Isabella Herb and two other female anesthesiologists, Drs. Nora Brandenburgh and Mary Lyons. By the time she arrived in Alabama, she already had 21 years experience in anesthesia. In her new home, she found herself to be not only one of the few female physicians but one of the few physician-anesthesiologists in the state. In the early years, she coordinated anesthesia administration at the university's busy hospital (formerly the county hospital in the state's most populous county) with help from a few nurse anesthetists, an occasional resident, and sometimes a dental student doing an anesthesia rotation. By 1950 her department coordinated 9700 anesthetics a year at the hospital.

Dr. McNeal presents the Chief Resident’s Chair to Patricia F. Norman, M.D. in 1959. This tradition continued in the department into the early 1990s. 

Source: UAB Archives

She is remembered fondly by those who knew her; former UAB President Dr. Charles McCallum's comment that she was "a great teacher, well-liked, and worked hard" is typical. Dr. McCallum also said “She loved to dance.”  [Source: my interview with Dr. McCallum in 1992] Jim Jones, M.D., a faculty member in her department from 1958 until 1960, remarked that “She dearly loved fine conversation, classical music and well-written books…and good scotch!” Dr. Jones also noted, "Alice in an interview shortly before her demise, denied being a pioneer but did admit to being perhaps a veteran in the field of anesthesiology." [Sources: written tribute by Dr. Jones, December 1971 and my interview with him in March 1996] 

          Former UAB President S. Richardson Hill, Jr., told me in a letter in June 1993 that "I liked her very much and thoroughly enjoyed her company...my wife was also very fond of her, and occasionally on special occasions they exchanged presents. At one time Alice gave my wife a beautiful pocketbook which she had made."

           Unfortunately, Dr. McNeal committed suicide on New Year's Eve 1964. She had stepped down as Chair of the department in 1961, although she remained on the faculty for a year or so after that. McNeal was an only child; her parents were long dead, and apparently she had no reason to return to Illinois. Her body was cremated, but a gravestone for her can be found in Birmingham's Elmwood Cemetery. There the spirit of this stranger in a strange land rests along with many other individuals prominent in Alabama history.

Although she published only two research papers, Dr. McNeal created the foundation for academic anesthesia in the state by chairing the first department for so long, providing excellent patient care and many clinical improvements, and training so many anesthesiologists, dentists, and nurses. Dr. McNeal is thus an important figure both in the history of the state's medical education and its female physicians as well. She was the first female anesthesiologist in Alabama, and one of the first females to chair of an academic anesthesia department in the United States. In 1998 the University of Alabama Board of Trustees established the Alice McNeal, M.D., Endowed Chair in Anesthesiology in her honor.

Dr. McNeal and others in the Hill Heart Suite, Medical College of Alabama, Birmingham in the early 1960s.

Source: Alvin Bearman, M.D. [one of her last residents]

Two photos of Dr. McNeal during her time at UAB. 

•Ca. 1922

•Graduated MC Phi Beta Kappa and AOA

•Woman on right may be her mother

•Photo taken in back yard of family home?

Source: Fran Watkins, long-time CRNA at UASOM

Anesthesia Staff, Presbyterian Hospital, 1936

•Nora Brandenburgh, M.D.

•Alice McNeal, M.D.

•Mary Lyons, M.D.

•Isabella Herb, M.D.

•Spring 1936

      Source: Bulletin, Presbyterian Hospital, April 1936

Anesthesiology 11: 96, 1950 [Department’s first publication]

Julie Cole Miller has written a very nice profile of Dr. McNeal with some additional photos that is available here.

 

What's Local, Online & Free? History, of Course!

The Birmingham area includes several counties and many cities with remarkable histories. Three local efforts are bringing much of that rich web of the past to screens near you.

Birmingham Public Library offers access to collections of images and texts of the African American Experience in Birmingham, the Alabama Theatre, some early newspapers, city buildings, old homes, businessmen and business districts. Also available are scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and local school yearbooks. The Birmingham Memory collection features submissions by the public.

 

Each BPL collection may have several subdivisions.  For instance, the African American Experience collection features a number of subjects, including churches, civil rights, and A.G. Gaston. Various groups such as inventors, lawyers, mayors, musicians and nurses; and schools such as the Industrial High School [now Parker High School] and the Tuggle Institute are also included.

   

In 1903 local social worker and educator Carrie Tuggle opened her Institute for the housing and education of African-American orphans in the area. Within a decade the facility had almost 150 students, most boarding at the school. The Institute became a part of the Birmingham public school system in 1926, and the current Tuggle Elementary School carries on the name. Alumni of the public school have included businessman A.G. Gaston and musicians Erskine Hawkins, Jo Jones and Fess Whatley.

 Research Club at Tuggle Institute in 1911

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

Tuggle Institute c. 1906
Source: BhamWiki

Carrie A. Tuggle [1858-1924]
Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

Besides material about the history of the university, UAB’s digital offerings include oral histories related to the city and Alabama, pellagra in Alabama and Mervyn H. Sterne, a local businessman for whom one of UAB’s libraries is named. Pellagra is a nutritional deficiency disease that was rampant in the South in the first decades of the 20^th century.

Also available from UAB is the Birmingham Medical College collection, material related to the school that operated in the city from 1894 until 1915. The college was one of many proprietary schools in the U.S. before World War I. As state legislatures and the American Medical Association began stricter regulation of medical schools, these small for-profit businesses like Birmingham Medical College began to close. The city remained without a medical school until the Medical College of Alabama moved here from Tuscaloosa in 1945.

A third resource devoted to Birmingham history and culture is the BhamWiki project. A private Wiki project that covers all topics related to the city and the surrounding area, BhamWiki currently has over 10,400 articles and 2400 illustrations available for the interested public. Contributions from anyone are encouraged.

Alabama Mosaic is another catalog of online print and image resources from the collections of numerous libraries, museums, archives and government agencies in the state. Many Birmingham area materials including those from BPL and UAB are linked in this database. All of the resources mentioned here are free to use for personal study and research.

Alabama Mosaic

BhamWiki

Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

UAB Digital Collections

This piece originally appeared on the DiscoverBirmingham.org site on July 25, 2013.

Hillman Hospital & How It Became UAB Hospital

The oldest building in the UAB Medical Center, now known as “Old Hillman”, is located on the block bounded by 19^th and 20^th Streets and 6^th and 7^th Avenues South. The four-story stone and brick structure was dedicated in July, 1903, and named Hillman Hospital after local benefactor Thomas Hillman, President of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. The hospital was constructed on lots 1-6 of the block, purchased from John S. Cox. He had bought the land from the Elyton Land Company in 1877 for $250. A Victorian house on the property was used as the hospital’s first nursing dormitory.

                  Thomas T. Hillman Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama

Efforts to organize a charity hospital for the city had begun in 1884, and Hillman’s donations had helped fund several locations, including a 100-bed facility that burned in 1894. Hillman required that his support pay for wards for both white and black patients. Hillman Hospital was chartered by the state legislature in 1897 and operated by a Board of Lady Managers—wives of local businessmen, a group involved from the beginning as the Daughters of United Charity.

Hillman Hospital in 1908

Source: Views of Birmingham: The Iron Center of the World [1908]

            The four floors and basement were crowded with various facilities, including offices, reception rooms, a laundry, store rooms, and boiler and fuel room for the steam heat. Twelve private rooms and four adult and one child wards occupied most of the first and second floors. The third floor held a surgical amphitheater that could hold up to 80 students, sterilizing and ether rooms, two private operating rooms and more private patient rooms. The fourth floor held the kitchen (with dumb waiter access to other floors), nurses’ dormitory rooms, a dining hall and yet more private rooms.

            By 1924 over 4600 patients a year were treated at Hillman. Financial difficulties had continued, and in 1907 the land and building were sold to the Jefferson County Board of Revenue. An annex built in 1913 failed to relieve the overcrowding of the 90 beds that Dr. Will Mayo had noted on his visit in 1911.  Finally the “new” Hillman Building opened in 1928, followed eleven years later by a five story outpatient clinic.

Hillman Hospital complex, ca. 1929. The original structure on the right was erected in 1902 and the annex, in the middle, was added in 1913. On the left is the 1928 addition, or “new” Hillman. Source: Birmingham Public Library

            Those seats in the main surgical amphitheater of Hillman Hospital were filled by faculty and students from the Birmingham Medical College. The school was a proprietary college owned by nine prominent Birmingham physicians and opened in October 1894. The college and the Birmingham Dental College were first located in a five-story building on 21^st Street North originally occupied by the Lunsford Hotel. The school had electric lighting, lecture rooms, several laboratories and operated a free dispensary. Students were also exposed to patients at the city charity hospital, infirmaries owned by faculty members and clinics in nearby towns.

                  Birmingham Medical College in 1912 Source: BhamWiki

            In 1902 the college constructed its new home next to Hillman Hospital and a two-story autopsy house behind it. By that time the school had 94 students who were required to study four terms instead of the original two. In 1910 the medical and dental schools merged to become the Birmingham Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical College. One of the school’s achievements was the 1899 graduation of Elizabeth White. She was the second female to graduate from an Alabama medical school, following Louisa Shepard who had graduated from the Grafenberg Medical Institute in Dadeville in the 1850s.

                                     Source: Historical Marker Database

            Despite improvements in facilities, funding and graduation requirements, the Birmingham Medical College closed in May, 1915. Six years earlier Abraham Flexner had inspected the Birmingham school and the Medical College of Alabama in Mobile. He and his team were touring the country gathering information on all the nation’s medical schools for the American Medical Association. His 1910 report was very critical of most of those schools, including the two in Alabama; many schools, especially proprietary ones, closed in the next few years. The Birmingham school’s owners sold it to the University of Alabama, which operated it until the final students graduated. After a move to Tuscaloosa, the University’s Medical College of Alabama opened in Birmingham in September, 1945, using Jefferson Hospital as its base of operations.

            Before that major change another building was constructed on the block in addition to the outpatient clinic already mentioned. In 1929 Hillman Hospital opened a nursing dormitory. The structure was renovated and reopened in July 1965 as the Roy R. Kracke Clinical Services Building. Kracke was the first dean of the Medical College of Alabama when it opened in Birmingham.

                              Roy R. Kracke, M.D. [1887-1950]
      Source: National Library of Medicine/Images in the History of Medicine

            By the 1930s another expansion of Hillman Hospital was desperately needed. The County Commission hired prominent local architect Charles H. McCauley to design a seven-story annex to cost $1.5 million in U.S. Public Works Administration funds. By the time the building was dedicated in December 1940, nine more floors were added at a final cost of $2.25 million.

         1939 architect's rendering of Jefferson Hospital Source: BhamWiki

            The new hospital was state-of-the-art and known as the finest hospital in the South. Two banks of high-speed elevators carried doctors, nurses, patients and others from floor to floor. The fifth floor was a maternity ward; the seventh floor featured eleven operating rooms. Both of those floors were air conditioned. The top two floors had living space for 150 nurses and 25 interns and resident physicians. From March 1942 until April 1944 two of the floors were used for secret work by the U.S. Army Replacement and School Command. Responsible for personnel training, the unit’s headquarters had been relocated to Birmingham from Washington, D.C., to protect it from possible enemy attack.

            Four years later the facility became the Jefferson-Hillman Hospital where the new Medical College of Alabama would soon be located. The UA Board of Trustees renamed it University Hospital in 1955 and finally Jefferson Tower in 1979. By September 2010 all inpatient activities had been relocated to the new North Pavilion hospital complex and other areas.

Further Reading

Pennycuff, Tim L. "Hillman Hospital" Encyclopedia of Alabama and its list of sources

This piece appeared on the DiscoverBirmingham.org site in October 2013.