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LI Hospitals: Charitable Beginnings

By Rhoda Amon | Staff Writer

Mercy Medical Center's new cancer center (Mercy Medical Center Photo)

STRUCK DOWN by tropical diseases, men returning from the Spanish-American War in Cuba were carried off the troopships at Montauk in 1899. Fortunately there was a hospital on Long Island where they could be treated -- Nassau Hospital, founded in 1896 in temporary quarters in West Hempstead. Of the 50 seriously ill veterans taken there, 49 recovered, an extraordinary number for those days. Or any day.

Nassau, now called Winthrop-University Hospital, moved to Mineola in 1900. It was the only voluntary health-care facility east of Queens. (With a speedy horse and carriage you might get to a Queens facility such as Flushing Hospital, established 1884; more likely, you would be cared for at home.)

The years before and after World War I saw the beginnings of today's hospitals, often in rambling Victorian houses converted to sanatoriums by local philanthropists, doctors or nursing sisters concerned for the "sick poor."

Brunswick Hospital Center in Amityville grew out of a home founded in 1887 for what was then called "defective" or "insane" children. "They didn't have public relations in those days," says hospital center owner Dr. Benjamin Stein.

Nor was there much help or hope for the Tiny Tims of the cities. Shunned by the rest of the world, handicapped city children were brought to the Brooklyn Home for Blind, Crippled and Defective Children, founded in Port Jefferson in 1905 by the Daughters of Wisdom, a French Catholic order. The Brooklyn Home -- now the St. Charles Hospital and Rehabilitation Center -- was never in Brooklyn. Port Jefferson, then a shipbuilding and whaling town, was considered part of the Diocese of Brooklyn under Bishop Charles E. McDonnell, who also encouraged the Nursing Sisters of the Congregation of the Infant Jesus to found a small sanatorium in Hempstead in 1913. That's now the Mercy Medical Center.

Meanwhile, on the East End in 1905, two charitable Greenport sisters, Marie and Mary Evalina Wood, donated a house for the establishment of the first community health-care facility in Suffolk, called Eastern Long Island Hospital. Four years later, Southampton Hospital opened in two rooms of the Goodale Boarding House with nurse Charlotte Lillywhite in charge. The rules specified, "Charity cases have precedence over all others."

Huntington Hospital was also a gift from a local philanthropist, Cornelia Prime, who bought a house on 5 acres for $17,000 and donated it with $3,000 more for upkeep. Opened in 1916 with 22 beds and six baby bassinets, it's now bursting out of its 12-acre site and its space has expanded from 5,000 to 220,000 square feet.

In probably the most unlikely startup, the St. Francis Heart Center began with two sisters of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary selling embroidery door-to-door in Flower Hill in the early '20s. The gentle nuns impressed shipping magnate Carlos Munson, a Cuban-born Quaker, who offered them a 15-acre farm to start a summer camp for inner-city kids. In 1937, the sisters accepted 12 young cardiac patients in a converted carriage house. By 1948 St. Francis was one of the nation's largest and best-known cardiac centers.

The early hospitals expanded rapidly -- and new ones were created -- after World War II, as the eastward migration of young families put a strain on all Long Island facilities, especially the maternity wards. The Baby Boom caught Nassau and Suffolk with fewer than two hospital beds per 1,000 residents. Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre reported more than 4,000 births a year from '51 to '55, fourth highest in the nation.

Until recently, most Long Island hospitals were regional facilities serving the surrounding communities. But in the '90s, faced with new financial realities and exploding technology, regional hospitals have been banding together in what some call the hospital mating game. The alliances bolster the hospitals' bargaining power with health insurance companies and, in many cases, offer patients sophisticated medical treatments not available in their own communities.

Among the first to network were the long-established Flushing facilities: the circa-1914 Booth Memorial Hospital, now the New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens, and Flushing Hospital, which became the New York Flushing Hospital Medical Center, both affiliated with the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and members of the New York and Presbyterian Hospital Care Network. The two Flushing facilities were among the first to provide acupuncture for pain relief, advanced cardiac treatments and a large pediatric asthma center in New York Hospital Queens.

A Nassau combine, the Winthrop-South Nassau University Health System, hooked up Winthrop with its South Shore neighbor, South Nassau Communities Hospital. The two hospitals have intertwining histories. South Nassau owes its beginnings partly to Mary Pearson, RN, who was graduated in the first class of Winthrop's nurses training school, established in 1900. After serving with the Army Nurse Corps in France in World War I, Pearson ran an eight-bed sanatorium in a converted house in Rockville Centre, but she soon realized the South Shore needed "a true hospital" like Winthrop. Thanks to her tenacity -- and a $250,000 fund drive -- a 50-bed community hospital rose in Oceanside in 1928.

Two newer hospitals, Mid-Island in Bethpage and Massapequa General, both founded in the '50s, are also affiliated with Winthrop.

The largest hospital network in Nassau-Suffolk got larger this fall when North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset merged with Long Island Jewish Hospital in New Hyde Park to form the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health Systems. The alliance brings together some of Long Island's oldest and newest hospitals, including Huntington Hospital, Southside Hospital in Bay Shore, Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream and the North Shore University Hospitals at Glen Cove, Plainview, Forest Hills and Syosset.

The network's flagship, North Shore of Manhasset, staged the Island's most glamorous hospital opening in 1953. Players included such North Shore socialites as former Mets owner Joan Payson and her brother, diplomat-publisher John Hay Whitney, who contributed a 10-acre site; Tex and Jinx McCrary, who promoted the project on their "Tex and Jinx" radio show, and singer Perry Como who led the "Penny Parade" of schoolchildren contributing 250,000 pennies.

The original star, however, was teenager Peter Udell of Great Neck, whose injuries in an auto accident in 1945 pointed up the need for a local hospital. The postwar population boom also gave birth to Long Island Jewish Hospital, which opened in 1954 on the Queens-Nassau border. It has since expanded to a large, sprawling medical center encompassing Hillside Hospital, its psychiatric division (founded in 1922), and the Schneider Children's Hospital which opened in 1983.

Long Island's Catholic hospitals are also finding strength in unity. Mercy Medical Center and St. Francis forged a North Shore-South Shore alliance under the banner of the St. Francis-Mercy Corp. The two hospitals are also members of the Catholic Health Services of Long Island, along with St. Charles in Port Jefferson and Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip. St. Charles also has an informal cooperative arrangement with its Port Jefferson neighbor, the John T. Mather Memorial Hospital.

Mather came into being in 1929, thanks to a $2 million bequest from philanthropist John T. Mather. It was the first community hospital in Brookhaven Town and the first in Nassau-Suffolk to have an operational hyperbaric therapy unit for the treatment of carbon monoxide poisoning and other conditions of oxygen deprivation.

After years of going it alone on the East End, Eastern Long Island Hospital on the North Fork, Southampton on the South Fork and Central Suffolk Hospital in Riverhead, which serves both forks, formed the Peconic Health Corp.

The State University Hospital and Medical Center at Stony Brook opened in 1980 as Long Island's first teaching hospital attached to a medical school. Stony Brook has since helped move Long Island into the frontlines of research -- with an AIDS center, a Lyme disease center and hotline (516-444-TICK), kidney transplant service, cardiac diagnostic center and sleep disorders lab.

Most imposing on the Nassau landscape is the 19-story Dynamic Care Building of the Nassau County Medical Center. It began as a small county hospital surrounded by farmland in East Meadow in 1935. An older facility of the county health system is the A. Holly Patterson Geriatric Center in Uniondale, which started as an almshouse for the county's poor in 1909, in the days before Social Security and Medicare. It's now a model medical and rehabilitation center -- another symbol of changing times on Long Island.