St. Joseph's long course on the hill: 1903–1989

1903 — 1989 — Madison Street and Notre Dame Avenue

A century of building in place: The hospital the three sisters opened grew on its hill for a hundred and twenty-seven years, and the system's own published timeline is the Story of South Bend section of the growth: one hundred beds added in 1903; a training school for nurses established in 1907, its first class nine students — the school's full record stands in the nursing entry below; another wing in 1922, bringing the total bed count to 171; a third major expansion in 1958 adding 156 beds; new patient towers in the 1970s; and a new outpatient center built onto the front of the hospital in 1989. The figures are the system's own, printed as it gives them. The hospital's charitable arm worked at the documented size the Charities record passes to this section: the St. Joseph's Hospital Aid Society, whose November 1916 meeting — more than a hundred guests, reported in the South Bend News-Times of 18 November 1916 — furnished a room on the hospital's third floor, stands in the press of its day as the institution's own auxiliary at work. In the system's later decades the South Bend hospital stood as the anchor of the sisters' regional system, Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center, and in 2000 its parent changed over it: Trinity Health was formed that year by the consolidation of Holy Cross Health System and Mercy Health Services, and the South Bend hospital passed under the national Catholic system its Mishawaka successor still belongs to. What the timeline does not give is a peak bed count for the South Bend campus beyond its dated points — 171 in 1922, and 156 more in 1958 — and this record prints the system's figures as given rather than summing them into a total no source states.

Sources:

1. Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center, published institutional timeline — the 1903 addition of 100 beds, the 1907 training school and its first class of nine, the 1922 wing and the 171-bed total, the 1958 expansion of 156 beds, the 1970s patient towers, and the 1989 outpatient center.
2. South Bend News-Times, 18 November 1916, as carried in the Charities record of this history — the St. Joseph's Hospital Aid Society's meeting of more than a hundred guests and the furnishing of a third-floor room; the society's institutional home is this entry, per the Charities boundary.
3. Trinity Health / Saint Joseph Health System corporate accounts — Trinity Health's formation in 2000 by the consolidation of Holy Cross Health System and Mercy Health Services.