Hospitals
In 1907, Burbank's first major hospital opened under the name "Burbank Community Hospital". The 16-bed facility served the community during a deadly smallpox epidemic in 1913 and helped it brace for possible air raids at the start of World War II. The two-story hospital was located at Olive Avenue and Fifth Street. By 1925, the hospital was expanded to 50 beds and in the mid-1980s operated with 103 beds and a staff of over 175 physicians. For years, it also was the only hospital in Burbank where women could receive abortions, tubal ligations and other procedures not offered at what is now Providence St. Joseph Medical Center. A physicians group acquired the hospital for $2 million in 1990 and renamed it Thompson Memorial Medical Center, in honor of the hospital's founder, Dr. Elmer H. Thompson. He was a general practitioner who made house calls by bicycle and horseback. In 2001, Burbank Community Hospital was razed to make way for a Belmont Village Senior Living community. Proceeds from that sale went to the Burbank Health Care Foundation, which assists community organizations that cater to health-related needs.
In 1943, the Sisters of Providence Health System, a Catholic non-profit group, founded Providence St. Joseph Medical Center. Construction of the hospital proved difficult due to World War II restrictions on construction materials, and in particular the lack of structural steel. But the challenges were met and the one-story hospital was erected to deal with wartime restrictions. During the baby boom of the 1950s, the hospital expanded from the original 100 beds to 212. By 2012, the hospital featured 431 licensed beds and ranked as the second-largest hospital serving the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys. The hospital employs about 2,500 employees and 600-plus physicians.
In the mid-1990s, Seattle-based Sisters of Providence Health System, which owns St. Joseph in Burbank, renamed the hospital Providence St. Joseph Medical Center. The medical center has several centers on campus with specialized disciplines. Cancer, cardiology, mammogram, hospice and children's services are some of the specialty centers. The newest addition to the medical center's offerings is the Roy and Patricia Disney Family Cancer Center, scheduled to open February 8, 2010. The cancer center features four stories of the latest in high-tech equipment to treat cancer patients and provide wellness services. The center, estimated to cost in excess of $36 million, was built with money from the family of Roy E. Disney, the nephew of Walt Disney. Roy E. Disney died in December 2009 of stomach cancer.
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Famous quotes containing the word hospitals:
“Our panaceas cure but few ails, our general hospitals are private and exclusive. We must set up another Hygeia than is now worshiped. Do not the quacks even direct small doses for children, larger for adults, and larger still for oxen and horses? Let us remember that we are to prescribe for the globe itself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We achieve “active” mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“... women can never do efficient and general service in hospitals until their dress is prescribed by laws inexorable as those of the Medes and Persians. Then, that dress should be entirely destitute of steel, starch, whale-bone, flounces, and ornaments of all descriptions; should rest on the shoulders, have a skirt from the waist to the ankle, and a waist which leaves room for breathing.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)