1945: Epworth becomes Memorial

Reincorporated June 1945 — Memorial Hospital of South Bend

A new charter and a new name: In June 1945 the organization was reincorporated, and the Methodist Church ceased to play a management role in the hospital it had founded fifty-one years before. The institution took the name it carries today: Memorial Hospital of South Bend. The heritage account states the change and its mechanism exactly so, and no source reached by this section states why the name Memorial was chosen — whether for the war then ending, or on some other ground — and this record prints the change of 1945 without supplying a reason the documents do not give. The break was of governance, not of ground or of staff: the hospital on the Michigan Street and Niles Avenue campus went on under its new charter, and in time stood under a parent of its own making, Memorial Health System, Inc., whose parts the system's own account names as Memorial Hospital, the Memorial Health Foundation, Memorial Home Care, and Memorial Medical Group. The foundation named there is the hospital's own charitable arm — its institutional home is this record, and its later course, into the united Beacon Health Foundation of 2017, stands in the consolidation entry below. The Epworth name did not leave the ground with the charter: it survives on the Niles Avenue building, and in 2011 it returned to the hospital's masthead in the Memorial Epworth Center, in the psychiatry entries below.

Sources:

1. Indiana Conference of the United Methodist Church (INUMC), heritage account of Epworth Hospital — the June 1945 reincorporation, the end of the Methodist Church's management role, and the building at 420 North Niles Avenue still bearing the Epworth name without a formal Methodist relationship.
2. Memorial Hospital of South Bend, standard published history — the 1945 renaming of Epworth Hospital as Memorial Hospital of South Bend, and the composition of Memorial Health System, Inc.