Celebrating the Past, Creating the Future, Improving Health Every Day: Sentara Healthcare Celebrates 125 Anniversary

By Lisa P. Schulwolf and Halley L. Fehner

Sentara has come a long way since the Retreat for the Sick opened in 1888. From its origins as a modest haven for Norfolk’s poor, Sentara has grown into a multi-faceted health system providing health care across Virginia and North Carolina. Sentara was fortunate to have generations of visionary leadership necessary to conceive of growth on such a broad scale. Too often visionaries wreck on the rocks of reality, but Sentara has been equally fortunate to have prudent leaders willing to do solid strategic planning. There were lots of big decisions to be made, but Sentara seldom ran an unwarranted risk. Steady, perhaps, but ahead of the main current; attuned to the past, but committed to creating the future of health care. Along the way, there have been changing technologies and systems, and new partnerships and mergers, all a means to the same end sought by the nurses of 1888 – saving lives and improving quality of life. Today, on the banks of Hampton Roads, the shoreline of eastern North Carolina, in the bustle of Northern Virginia, and in the scenic Blue Ridge, Sentara Healthcare is there – many people with a single goal: to improve health every day.

The book is dedicated to the patients who entrust us with their care and to the Sentara Healthcare staff, physicians, volunteers, and community members-past, present and future. Their commitment and outstanding achievements, over the years, help Sentara achieve its mission. All book proceeds go directly to the Sentara Foundation - Hampton Roads.

The book provides detailed history and photographs tracing back 125 years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781939389367

Book preview

Congress

Chapter One:

A SUITABLE HOSPITAL, 1888-1936

For much of the nineteenth century, most Americans gave birth, endured sickness, and even had surgery in their homes. Some relied on barber shops for extracting teeth and treating infections. An 1873 survey identified only 178 institutions nationwide, and only a few of those incorporated medical school instruction. With the causes of infection not fully understood, the most rudimentary precautions against the spread of disease were seldom taken. Many hospital treatments were little more than home remedies, passed down from mothers to daughters and even gleaned from cookbooks of the day. Not surprisingly, nineteenth-century hospitals were often considered a last resort for the terminally ill— little better than the almshouses that took in the destitute.

Beginnings

Things were only a little better in nineteenth-century Norfolk, Virginia. The city did have the nation’s first Marine Hospital, established in 1787 as a haven for sick and disabled seamen. In 1830 the U.S. Naval Hospital opened in nearby Portsmouth with a staff of one surgeon, two attendants, a cook, and two washers. In 1855, however, when a yellow fever epidemic—known by locals as the Death Storm— swept through the region, both hospitals were swamped. Wealthy heiress Ann Plume Behan Herron opened her elegant home to the sick, and when she died of the fever, she left her estate to the Catholic Daughters of Charity. Her legacy was incorporated as St. Vincent DePaul Hospital in 1856.

For much of the nineteenth century, hospitals were seen as little more than where the poor went to die. National Library of Medicine

The Norfolk Retreat for the Sick’s first home on the corner of Holt and Reilly Streets in 1888.

By the 1880s, Norfolk was again in dire need of medical facilities. At the end of the Civil War, Norfolk was a city of ruins, its warehouses abandoned and wharfs crumbling. But surrounded by oyster-bedded waterways and fertile farmland, the city recovered steadily, more than doubling its pre-war population by 1890. New rail lines brought coal and cotton into the rebuilt port, and electric lighting illuminated hotels, restaurants, and bars downtown. And in May 1888, amid the mounting urban bustle, the Women’s Christian Association met to entertain the prospect of a new hospital.

Their goal was to establish a suitable hospital to provide medical aid to the sick and disabled without regard to nationality or creed and to provide for the poor without charge. Before the year was out, Norfolk’s physicians and civic leaders had donated $5,000 to make a down payment on an imposing Spanish-style house on the corner of Holt and Reilly Streets, and the new Norfolk Retreat for the Sick was open. Captain John L. Roper served as the first president, and Bessie Williams Reid was the first superintendent.

While the Retreat for the Sick took hold in Norfolk, across the bay in Hampton a forward-thinking educator embarked on her own hospital project. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, to a prominent abolitionist family, Alice Mabel Bacon arrived in Hampton in the 1880s. She had been there once before, in 1870, to visit her sister Rebecca, who taught at the Hampton Institute, a college founded in 1868 to provide education to freedmen. Alice Bacon began teaching at Hampton Institute and, like other educated women from prosperous families, out of a sense of duty and decency she also wanted to help the sick and poor of the community. She was appalled at the poverty of African Americans who lived in run-down cabins near the Institute. Descendants of slaves who had sought asylum near Fort Monroe during the Civil War, they had nowhere to go for medical treatment and had neither the resources nor the skills to provide care at home. With quiet resignation, they endured ailments that could have been cured even by the rudimentary medical care of the time. One’s heart is wrung with the desire to relieve something of their misery, Bacon wrote in 1890. Any help except that of a hospital would be in vain, and with two or three exceptions, there are no hospitals in tide-water Virginia!

Captain John L. Roper served as the Retreat for the Sick’s first president.

Bacon resolved not only to establish a hospital for Hampton’s impoverished but also to found a school of nursing for prospective caregivers. After one of her students at Hampton Institute expressed a desire to become a nurse, Bacon learned that although African Americans did much of the caretaking throughout the South, there was nowhere they could go for formal training. In a community in desperate need of caregivers, Bacon knew that a nursing school that would admit black students would do just as much good as a hospital.

During the Civil War, the Union Army constructed the Grand Contraband Camp in Hampton Roads as a refuge for escaped slaves. Known as Slabtown, the community became home to the Hampton Institute in 1868. Library of Congress

A frequent sight in Hampton: Alice Mabel Bacon on her horse, Dixie. Hampton University Archives

Seemingly emboldened by her twin goals, Bacon appealed to the Hampton Institute for space. She got an old carpentry shop on the school grounds. In this modest two-room building, she opened a hospital and nursing school in June 1891. Dr. Harriet Lewis, a female physician who had come to the Hampton Institute as a medical missionary, agreed to stay at the hospital and work without pay. Lewis, head nurse Sarah Connacher, and five students ate, slept, and worked within an arm’s length of their hospital’s ten beds.

The tiny hospital soon had a name— Dixie, after Bacon’s horse that pulled the wagon that doubled as an ambulance. During its first year, Dixie Hospital served thirty-seven patients and ran out of space. In summer 1892, the hospital was moved— literally— to a new site with better drainage. A two-story addition was built beside the original small frame building to house the hospital staff. Within a few years, Dixie had grown to twenty-one beds and featured a new laundry, a maternity cottage with three bedrooms, an operating room, and a kitchen. Also in 1892, the Hampton Training School for Nurses was officially incorporated, becoming one of the first training schools for black nurses in the nation.

A nurse tends to patients at Dixie Hospital in the 1890s.

Dixie Hospital’s new site, circa 1895. The maternity cottage is on the far right. Hampton University Archives

The first graduating class of the Retreat for the Sick nursing school in 1895. Norfolk Public Library

Norfolk hailed the opening of its own nursing school that year as well. Hattie Everingham was superintendent of the Retreat for the Sick. Like Alice Bacon, she realized that without competent caregivers, no hospital could function. Nursing had been considered for centuries a temporary familial or community obligation rather than a professional service or potential vocation. Accordingly, Everingham found the lack of nurses to be her most pressing problem. In 1892 she opened a two-year training school at the Retreat for the Sick. Women eighteen or older with a grammar school education were welcomed, and tuition was free. Students even received $5.00 per month to buy books, uniforms, and other supplies. Four young women enrolled in the first class.

Nurses often shared cramped quarters, such as those at Dixie Hospital seen here in about 1900.

These trainees helped keep staffing costs down, a necessity since hospitals relied heavily on charity. Monetary contributions were preferred, but in-kind contributions were accepted— gifts ranged from bed linens to baked goods. In 1894 Alice Bacon recorded one assorted donation to Dixie of 30 cents, 2 cantaloupes, and 21 live chickens. Bacon continued to appeal to Northern readers of the Southern Workman. In one 1893 article, Bacon invoked Dixie’s gospel of cleanliness, of healing, of love. In less lofty terms, she wrote of the challenge of reversing age-old assumptions about health care. Every day, she wrote, nurses had to fight ignorance and prejudice against new-fangled notions of bathing and careful feeding and use of disinfectants and other sanitary measures. These cases have been hard…and discouraging, but have brought out the missionary spirit, self-reliance, and self-control of our student nurses as nothing else could have done.

Bacon’s observations were apt: medical practices were indeed rapidly changing. But not everyone was quick to adopt them. In Dixie’s earliest days, head nurse Connacher regularly rode into town to find out if anyone was sick— a necessity because the common practice was to go to a hospital only when death seemed inevitable. As late as 1884, prominent physician Hunter H. McGuire told the Medical Society of Virginia that sterilization was unnecessary as the pure country air in Virginia [was] in itself aseptic. Thankfully, McGuire was in the minority. Most physicians then acknowledged that antiseptic procedures decreased the risk of infection dramatically. Rubber gloves, autoclaves, and sterilized bandages became widely used by the 1890s, allowing physicians to safely perform surgeries that in an earlier time would have been too risky. The development of diagnostic x-rays in 1895 also greatly improved surgical procedures, and larger, more professional nursing staffs supported better monitoring of patients. One journalist writing in the early 1890s referred to the remarkable improvement in hospitals as a striking instance of our advancing civilization. Once seen as places where one went to die, hospitals were becoming havens of hope and healing.

Doctors recorded anesthesia— including chloroform, ether, and cocaine— used in operations at the Retreat for the Sick.