South Bend Hospitals

Hospitals

South Bend's hospital history is the history of two foundings, twelve years apart, on ground less than a mile apart. The first was Catholic: in 1882 the Sisters of the Holy Cross — the congregation whose motherhouse stands at Saint Mary's College, and whose sisters had nursed the Union Army a generation before — opened St. Joseph's Hospital on the hill above the river, the first institution in South Bend, on its own published record, to care for the sick. The second was Methodist: in January 1894 the women's missionary societies of the city's Methodist Episcopal churches opened a three-bed hospital in a converted house, the Epworth Hospital and Training School, which grew by community subscription into the plant that in 1945 took the name it still carries, Memorial Hospital of South Bend. Between them the two houses divided the city's care for a hundred and twenty-seven years, trained its nurses in schools of their own, absorbed the epidemics at the size this record gives them, and then, in the twenty-first century, took the two roads American hospitals took: Memorial consolidated, in 2011–12, into Beacon Health System, the locally owned nonprofit system headquartered in this city; and St. Joseph's, in December 2009, moved out of South Bend altogether, to a new hospital in Mishawaka — leaving behind, in the city its sisters had served since 1882, one clinic for the uninsured that still bears a sister's name. Every documented founding, growth, merger, closure, and departure is printed below at the size the record gives it, the closed as plainly as the open. One boundary governs the whole file: Beacon's other hospitals and Saint Joseph's Mishawaka successor are regional institutions seated in other cities, and they enter here only at the size this city's record owns.