Jewish Hospital Merged With Barnes Hospital in 1996, But An Older Jewish Hospital Building Remains Integral To Current Treatment

The Washington University Medical School campus (aka Barnes, BJC) in St. Louis’ Central West End neighborhood has changed considerably in the last 100+ years. It’s also quite a bit different from when I moved to St. Louis in 1990. It will continue to evolve. This post isn’t a detailed look at the huge number of incremental changes, it’s a look at a little bit of history about the Jewish in Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

It’s not clear to me which medical facility first located within the area bounded today by Kingshighway on the west, Forest Park Ave. on the north, Sarah on the east, and I-64 (US-40) on the south. I do know the automobile either hadn’t been invented, or was just a toy for the wealthy.  Hopefully someone will do a book on the history of medical facilities in the region.

St. Louis’ first hospital for Jewish residents perhaps began with a meeting 143 years ago today, on October 27, 1878. This was just after the city/county divorce so the city’s current limits were already set. Forest Park was still wild, much of the city’s new limits were rural.

Leaders of the city’s Jewish community met at Harmonic Hall to form the Jewish Infirmary and Hospital Association of St. Louis. As early as 1853 Isidor Bush, businessman and philanthropist, had joined with other Jewish leaders to establish a Jewish hospital. After several false starts, Bernard Singer president of the United Hebrew Relief Association of St. Louis, subscribed $1,620 toward the establishment of a home for old and infirm Jews. The meeting that he called was well attended and an additional $870 was pledged.

More money was slow in coming , however, and finally the association revised its plans to allow for the building of a home for the aged and infirm, with a hospital as an appendage. In 1882 the United Hebrew Association dedicated the Home for the Aged and Infirm Israelites at 3652 S. Jefferson Avenue. Today Jewish Hospital, as part of the Washington University Medical Center, is one of the city’s finest medical institutions. (Source: St. Louis Day by Day by Frances Hurd Stadler, 1990, pp204-05)

The author doesn’t connect the dots between the 1882 dedication and the 1990 second printing of her book. I suspect the hospital appendage never happened, but one finally opened:

In 1902, The Jewish Hospital of St. Louis opened at 5415 Delmar Boulevard. Prior attempts to create such a hospital had cited the need to care for the poor Jewish refugees of St. Louis; however, when the Jewish Hospital become a reality, it did so under the directive to afford care to the sick and disabled of, “any creed or nationality.” By 1905, additions to the original hospital building were already required to accommodate more patients, marking the first in a long line of expansions the Jewish Hospital would undergo over the years.

By 1915, the hospital was treating close to 2,000 patients annually. The following years made it clear that further expansion was needed, and in 1920 the hospital purchased land on Kingshighway Boulevard for the purpose of erecting a larger hospital building. The Delmar location was sold, and, following years of construction and funding campaigns, the hospital at 216 South Kingshighway Boulevard was dedicated in May 1926. By the end of 1927, the new building’s first full year in operation, the hospital had treated 5,146 patients. In 1951, a plan was finalized which provided for the integration of three St. Louis Jewish health agencies into what would become the Jewish Hospital Medical Center. The Jewish Hospital of St. Louis merged its operations with those of the Jewish Sanatorium, the Miriam Rosa Bry Convalescent-Rehabilitation Hospital of St. Louis, and the Jewish Medical Social Service Bureau. To accommodate the operations and patients of these health agencies, the Jewish Hospital was required to expand at its Kingshighway location. A building expansion program which included the addition of two new buildings and a six-story wing created room for the patients of the three other agencies to be moved to the newly named Jewish Hospital Medical Center in 1956.

Over its years of growth, Jewish Hospital and its staff have achieved several medical firsts, including performing the first successful in vitro fertilization in Missouri in 1985 and creating the first major in-patient child psychiatric service in the St. Louis area in 1958. When Washington University Medical School and Associated Hospitals (WUMSAH) was formed in 1962, Jewish Hospital was one of the original participating institutions, and in 1963 Jewish Hospital became a major teaching affiliate of Washington University Medical School.

In November 1992, Barnes and Jewish Hospitals signed an affiliation agreement, agreeing to pool resources wherever possible. This affiliation agreement was completed in March 1993 to create Barnes-Jewish, Incorporated (BJI). In April of 1993, BJI and Christian Health Services announced that they would affiliate to create BJC Health System, an affiliation which was finalized in June 1993. In January of 1996, a merger of Barnes and Jewish Hospital, built on the sharing of resources which began with the completion of the affiliation agreement in 1993, was legally completed, and the two became the present day Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Barnes-Jewish Hospital is consistently ranked among the best hospitals in America by U.S. News and World Report. (Wash U/Becker Archives Database)

Only one Jewish Hospital building remains: the 1970s (60s?) Schoenberg Pavilion.

Schoenberg Pavilion was a building at Jewish Hospital, before the 1996 merger with Barnes Hospital — creating Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Today it looks very different than it did then. You cannot directly enter the building from the outdoors — only through the Center for Advanced Medicine (CAM) on the east or the newish Parkview Tower, on the west.  The north side faces Forest Park Ave. and the south side is green space over an underground parking garage.

Inside the Schoenberg name is preset at the bank of elevators inside the 70s building.

Inside the entry at the new Parkview Tower is a big sign with mottos from Barnes Hospital and Jewish Hospital.

Jewish Hospital began a dozen years before Barnes Hospital, likely serving Jewish and n0n-Jewish patients. Though probably not black patients for many years.

And finally, in the main floor hallway connection the Center for Advanced Medicine to the Parkview Tower people from the history of Barnes & Jewish are highlighted in a beautiful display.

As I receive treatment at Washington University Medical School/BJC I’m thankful for the generosity of those who helped start and continue such a fine institution.

— Steve Patterson

An Open Letter To Missouri Governor Mike Parson & Staff

Dear Governor:
This post is in response to a Post-Dispatch story pointing out an error in a department website.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson is vowing to prosecute the staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after the newspaper says it uncovered security vulnerabilities on a state agency website.

The governor is characterizing the paper’s actions as a hacking that the state will investigate. He said it could cost taxpayers $50 million.

“Not only are we going to hold this individual accountable, but we will also be holding accountable all those who aided this individual and the media corporation that employs them,” Parson said at a news conference on Thursday. (NPR)

The paper ran the story only after the department corrected their mistake, but you’ve repeatedly described it as “hacking.” I hope this letter will help educate you and your staff.

I’m not a cybersecurity expert, but I’ve been blogging for two weeks shy of 17 years. I’ve never had a class in HTML, nor have I bought a book on the subject. I’m self taught. I’m also 54, so this didn’t come naturally as it seemingly does for younger folks. Speaking of age, yours isn’t an excuse — my oldest brother is 5 years older than you and he gets this stuff without having been a web designer.

Since I just used an acronym above that’s likely foreign to you this may help:

The HyperText Markup Language, or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.

Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for the appearance of the document.

HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets. Tags such as <img /> and <input /> directly introduce content into the page. Other tags such as <p> surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page. (Wikipedia)

All the <blah blah blah> stuff reminded me of high school & college in the 1980s. The college professor that ran our architecture computer lab liked the word processing application WordStar. It was the DOS days so we had to type things like <B> before and after a word or phrase we wanted to appear as bold on the printed page — it never appeared bold on the screen. Apple’s Mackintosh eliminated this simple coding by doing that in the background. Microsoft’s Windows operating system adopted this as well. The younger members of your staff may not remember DOS or WordStar.

Owning a Mac and using a Mac/Windows at various jobs I thought I’d left coding behind. I had until I began blogging on October 31, 2004. Early on I used 2 different HTML platforms to create my blog & posts before settling on WordPress.  These all do the heavy lifting behind the scenes, but I’ve had to go into the source code over the years to fix problems with how something appears. I’ve also liked how others displayed information on webpages so I’ve looked at their source code to learn. Emails and digital photos also have code. Again, it’s not visible unless someone taps a few buttons or clicks to see it.

Source code is easily viewed by anyone. Hacking is entirely different. This is where someone attempts to gain entry into a computer network or application. There’s always someone attempting to hack into my blog ever week.

I’d like to think at least one person on your staff understands the Post-Dispatch pointed out the mistake made by the state agency so it could be fixed.  Someone around you knows the Post-Dispatch helped the state by preventing social security numbers of teachers — numbers that shouldn’t have been in publically accessible source code. The other possibility is your entire office is clueless how websites work.

To simplify this I’ll use your own state website as an example:

I didn’t hack the website. I selected a menu item from a regular web browser — this code is necessary so browsers will display the website as desired. In more complicated databases sometimes it is set up incorrectly so that information that shouldn’t be shown is displayed here.

Someone is attempting to cover their own ass, or protect someone else. Leaders admit when mistakes are make, not try to shift the blame onto those privately bring mistakes to the state’s attention. Yes, an investigation is necessary to get to the bottom of this — an investigation of how social security numbers were displayed in easily accessible source code and why so much hot air to deflect the blame.

Where there’s smoke, there’ fire.

Stop wasting our time and money simply because you’re to shallow to admit you were wrong!  The world already knows it, we just want to hear you say it. Additionally the Post-Dispatch deserves an apology from you. They did exactly what they should have, but you managed to turn a yawn of a subject into national news. Congrats on briefly jumping ahead of DeSantis & Abbott.

— Steve Patterson (a regular Missouri voter for 30+ years)