Birmingham Photos of the Day (33): Holy Family Hospital

In February 1941 four nurses---three of them nuns---from Nazareth, Kentucky, arrived in Ensley to open a clinic to serve poor blacks in the area. For a little over $12,000 they bought land, a duplex for the convent and "a little Negro hut" for the clinic. Interns from St. Vincent Hospital donated their services two days a week to the free clinic.

After the U.S. entered World War II, the Sisters of Charity were unable to obtain materials to build a clinic, so they added two more "huts" to the complex. In 1946 seven black physicians formed the first official medical staff, and fund raising efforts began in the city for a new building. By July 1950 some $250,000 had been raised.

On January 10, 1954, the new structure, Holy Family Hospital, was dedicated. After an expansion in 1964, the hospital had 83 beds and a staff of 130. Four years later the Sisters sold the facility and the new owners renamed it Community Hospital. After another sale and renaming to Medical Park West, the hospital closed in 1988. 

Further details can be found at BhamWiki. Currently vacant, the building at 1915 19th Street is owned by Faith Chapel Christian Center and was added to the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage in 2008. The Birmingham News published an article about the purchase of the hospital by Faith Chapel on October 13, 2006, pp. 1H and 8H, "Church shares new vision for historic hospital." The article includes three photos, two contemporary ones of the outside and inside a hallway of the facility. A third photo show Mervyn Sterne, John P. Newsome, Col. Wiliam S. Pritchard, and E.H. Gilmore at the groundbreaking in September 1952. Gilmore was a Jefferson County Commissioner.  

Below the photos is an article about the hospital published in the January 1963 issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association.




The hospital occupied this building in 1953. This postcard is from the 1950's.

Source: Alabama Department of Archives & History

These photos of the front and back of the hospital were taken on December 6, 1954, for the Jefferson County Board of Equalization. 

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections 

Here's a photograph of the front of the hospital taken in 2010.

Source: BhamWiki

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 (18): St. Vincent's Hospital in 1908

This photo continues our series from the 1908 book Views of Birmingham. 

Today the St. Vincent's Health System operates in several locations in addition to the large hospital complex in Birmingham's Southside. The first temporary location established in 1898 by the Sisters of Charity Hospital Association was much more modest--the home in Fountain Heights of industrialist and founder of Bessemer, Henry F. DeBardeleben.

Groundbreaking for the facility shown in this photograph took place in March 1899, and this permanent location opened on Thanksgiving Day 1900. Known as Mount Saint Vincent, the hospital was the first in Birmingham to have x-ray equipment installed.

Information about the hospital's beginnings can be found in Howard Holley's History of Medicine in Alabama (1982). 

The Bhamwiki site has this postcard of the hospital in 1910: