History
Founded and financed by businessman Kaspare Cohn, Cedars-Sinai was established as the Kaspare Cohn Hospital in 1902. At the time, Cohn donated a two-story Victorian home located at 1441 Carroll Avenue in the Angeleno Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles to the Hebrew Benevolent Society to create the hospital as a memorial to his brother Samuel. Just 12 beds when opening on September 21, 1902, the hospital's services were initially free.
From 1906 to 1910, Dr. Sarah Vasen, the first female doctor in Los Angeles, acted as superintendent. In 1910, the hospital relocated and expanded to Stephenson Avenue (now Whittier Boulevard), where it had 50 beds and a backhouse containing a 10-cot tubercular ward. It gradually transformed from a charity-based hospital to a general hospital and began to charge patients.
The hospital relocated again in 1930 to 4833 Fountain Avenue, where it was renamed Cedars of Lebanon after the religiously significant Lebanon Cedar, used to build King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem in the Bible and could accommodate 279 patients. In 1918, the Bikur Cholim Society opened a second Jewish hospital, the Bikur Cholim Hospice, when Great Influenza Pandemic hit America. In 1921, the hospice relocated to an 8-bed facility in Boyle Heights and was renamed Bikur Cholim Hospital. In 1923 the Bikur Cholim Hospital became Mount Sinai Home for the Incurables.
On November 7, 1926, a newly-named Mount Sinai Hospital moved to a 50-bed facility on Bonnie Beach Place. In 1950, Emma and Hyman Levine donated their property adjacent to Beverly Hills, and by 1955 the construction completed and Mount Sinai Hospital opened on 8700 Beverly Boulevard (now Cedars-Sinai Medical Center). The original building stood until 1994 when it was damaged in the Northridge earthquake. Cedars of Lebanon and Mount Sinai Hospitals merged in 1961 to form Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Donations from the Max Factor Family Foundation allowed the construction of the current main hospital building, which broke ground on November 5, 1972 and opened on April 3, 1976.
In 1994, the Cedars-Sinai Health System was established, comprising the Cedars-Sinai Medical Care Foundation, the Burns and Allen Research Institute and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The Burns and Allen Research Institute, named for George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen, is located inside the Barbara and Marvin Davis Research Building. Opened in 1996, it houses biomedical research aimed at discovering genetic, molecular and immunological factors that trigger disease.
In 2006 the Medical Center added the Sapperstein Critical Care Tower with 150 ICU beds.
In fiscal year 2008, Cedars-Sinai served 54,947 inpatients and 350,405 outpatients, and there were 77,964 visits to the emergency room. Cedars-Sinai received high rankings in eleven of the sixteen specialties, ranking in the top 10 for digestive disorders and in the top 25 for five other specialties as listed below.
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“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
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