Beth Israel Medical Center - History

History

Beth Israel was incorporated in 1890 by a group of 40 Orthodox Jews on the Lower East Side each of whom paid 25 cents to set up a hospital serving New York's Jewish immigrants, particularly newcomers. At the time New York's hospitals would not treat patients who had been in the city less than a year. It initially opened a dispensary on the Lower East Side. In 1891 it opened a 20-bed hospital and in 1892 expanded again and moved into a 115-bed hospital in 1902.

In 1929 it moved into a 13-story, 500-bed building at its current location at the corner of Stuyvesant Square. It purchased its neighbor the Manhattan General Hospital in 1964 and renamed the complex Beth Israel Medical Center, located at First Avenue and 16th Street in Manhattan.

By the 1980s it had long extended beyond its Jewish base. In 1988 it had the largest network of heroin-treatment clinics in the United States with 7,500 patients and 23 facilities.

It acquired Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side in the 1990s, renaming it Beth Israel Medical Center-Singer Division, and Kings Highway Hospital Center in 1995, renaming it Beth Israel Medical Center-Kings Highway Division.

In 2004, Beth Israel Medical Center closed the Singer Division and consolidated its Manhattan inpatient operations at the main hospital campus, called the Petrie Division, on First Avenue at 16th Street in Manhattan.

As of 2010 Beth Israel Medical Center has residency training programs in nearly every major field of medicine including: Emergency Medicine, Internal Medicine, Surgery, ENT, Oral Maxillo-Facial Surgery, Radiology, Family Medicine, Dermatology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Neurology, Ophthalmology, Pathology, Psychiatry, Podiatry, and Urology. Continuum Health Partners which owns Beth Israel provides resident trainees with subsidized housing and a competitive salary. In 2011 Huguette Clark died at the hospital at age 104. She left one million dollars to the hospital upon her death.