Forest City Hospital, located in the Glenville neighborhood, was considered Cleveland’s first fully interracial hospital when it opened in 1957. The site of the hospital was on the grounds of the old Glenville Hospital at 701 Parkwood Avenue, which was eventually entirely razed for the development of Forest City. This construction was made possible by the Forest City Hospital Association, which was formed in 1939 by physicians and community members who supported the creation of an interracial hospital that could effectively serve Cleveland's Black population and provide an institution where Black physicians could find steady work. Some of the prominent founding members of the Forest City Hospital Association included Dr. Ulysses Grant Mason Jr., Dr. Middleton H. Lambright, and Dr. Samuel Freedlander.
Throughout the decades preceding the opening of Forest City Hospital, there had been active discussion among Cleveland’s medical community and public advocacy from local civic organizations for the development of such a facility. In 1930, about 35 Black physicians practiced in Cleveland, with only five being employed securely as staff of the Western Reserve Society Medical School. The rest were forced to seek positions at institutions where they might be subjected to outright discrimination through unequal working conditions and unjust terminations. Many African American physicians reported that though they were forced to work long hours, it was not an uncommon occurrence not to work directly with a single patient over an entire shift as white patients would request to see a white doctor while Black patients were routinely denied care by institutions for a variety of reasons. Along with physicians who pushed for the creation of a hospital where they would be accepted fully and find solid work, the ever-growing Black population of Cleveland also exerted pressure on the established hospital systems. Between 1910 and 1940, Cleveland's African American population grew from 8,488 to nearly 85,000. This increase in population, and subsequently patients seeking medical care, elicited unsatisfactory responses from Cleveland hospitals. Some institutions established specific days that served as the only times when Black patients were even considered to receive care, while some institutions enacted policies whereby Black patients were forced to wait and receive care in the oldest wings of a building and be treated only using the oldest equipment.
These major problems in the treatment of Black physicians and the care available to the entire Cleveland Black community led to the establishment of the Forest City Hospital Association in 1939. Of the 39 founding members, nine were Black physicians hoping to spark the creation of a new institution free from racial discrimination and bias. The association searched for properties where they could either build a brand-new building or renovate an existing one. Eventually, the organization decided that the site of the old Glenville Hospital would be suitable as it was in a prime location to serve the Black community in Cleveland’s east side neighborhoods. Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, the Forest City Hospital Association worked closely with the Cleveland branch of the NAACP, which they viewed as the likeliest source of significant funding for the construction of a new interracial hospital. However, this proposed cooperation in the building of a medical facility would be fraught with dilemmas due to disagreements on exactly where and how such a project would be undertaken. Specifically, the NAACP was continually reluctant to commit any large sum of money towards the building of a new hospital as they had already recently invested in building two other hospitals to serve black communities in New York and Chicago, each of which had proved to be a financial drag on the NAACP. In May 1954, the NAACP voted to formally disapprove of plans presented by the Forest City Hospital Association to tear down the old Glenville Hospital and create a new building. This vote effectively ended the NAACP’s involvement in the initial funding of the new facility. Opportunely, the Forest City Hospital Association had gained favor in the public eye and forged connections with other Cleveland organizations willing to help fund the project. In 1954, the Cleveland Hospital Fund granted $404,000 to the Forest City Hospital Association, allowing it to break ground at the old Glenville Hospital site. In 1955, with construction just underway, Ohio Governor Frank J. Lausche launched a public subscription campaign in support of the hospital. This effort, along with other fundraising activities conducted by the Forest City Hospital Association, contributed an additional $641,000 to the total fund.
After just over two years of construction, Forest City Hospital officially opened its doors to patients on August 4, 1957, with Cleveland's Call & Post newspaper declaring the institution to be "A hospital for all." The hospital initially held 92 beds, but it would eventually become a 103-bed facility. Among the care offerings at Forest City Hospital were general practice and family care, surgery, gynecology, emergency services, and state-of-the-art X-ray and imaging services. In just its first year of operation, Forest City Hospital admitted over 2,500 patients, conducted over 1,300 surgical operations, took over 4,500 X-rays, and was the site of over 500 births. Of 53 physicians on staff, 26 were Black, as were most of the other hospital staff such as nurses and technicians. For its entire time in operation, Forest City Hospital served as an institution where anyone, regardless of race, could receive high-quality and timely medical care without risk of discrimination or segregation.
Forest City Hospital functioned comfortably for nearly a decade until 1967, when concerns over the building’s ability to add more beds and facilities to accommodate an ever-growing population came to a head. For the next several years, the hospital embarked on a new fundraising campaign in an attempt to raise enough money to build a new expansion and effectively double the total amount of bed space. However, throughout the early 1970s total admissions fell and consistently occupied bed space declined, jeopardizing the plans for any new expansion. From the loss of this potential fundraising and the inability to renovate, the quality of services at Forest City Hospital reportedly fell. Moving forward, Forest City Hospital began to prioritize outpatient and supportive services, along with keeping a high-quality emergency care unit running. By the 1970s, nearly all medical organizations in Cleveland had removed major barriers targeting Black patients and healthcare workers from finding care and work. Coupled with the facilities of Forest City becoming outdated and with no hope of a renovation for the hospital, patients and physicians continually left for other Cleveland institutions. Beset by financial stress, low admissions, and a shortage of physicians and nurses, Forest City Hospital finally closed in 1978. Although it lasted barely over two decades, Forest City Hospital provided a crucial lifeline in an era of struggle for access to quality healthcare.
]]>Though he has been called America’s first neurosurgeon, Dr. Harvey W. Cushing was not the first American to perform brain surgery. Others did before him, piercing the dura which encases the brain in order to attempt to remove tumors, but the results were almost always disastrous for the patient. With his pioneering use of local anesthesia, innovative methods to control bleeding and oxygen levels in the brain, and his skilled hands as chief surgeon at Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Yale University hospitals from 1896 to 1939, Harvey Cushing revolutionized the field, conducting highly successful operations and dramatically reducing the odds of patient mortality during such operations. One of his biographers compared Cushing's contributions in the field of neurosurgery to those of Sigmund Freud in psychiatry.
Harvey Cushing was born in Cleveland on April 8, 1869, in a house that sat on the site where the Cushing Building at 224 Euclid, built by his father, sits today. Harvey was a fourth-generation physician who knew and benefited from the experiences of both his father and grandfather, early leading medical practitioners here. Dr. Erastus Cushing, Harvey's grandfather, was born and grew up in Cheshire, Massachusetts, not far from the New York state line. He migrated to Cleveland in 1835, and in 1839 purchased a house on the south side of Public Square, east of Ontario Street, where the May Company building now sits. He and his family resided there, and he conducted his medical practice at that location, for the next three decades. Dr. Henry Kirke Cushing was the son of Erastus and the father of Harvey. Henry trained in Cleveland and Philadelphia to become a doctor, and entered into practice with his father in 1851. By 1860, he was married with children, and living just up the street from his parents in the house on Euclid Avenue where his son Harvey, the youngest of his 10 children, would be born nine years later.
While Cleveland had certainly changed from the time when Erastus Cushing arrived here in 1835 until the time when his Henry son moved into that house just up the street on Euclid Avenue in 1860, the south side of Public Square and lower Euclid Avenue (from the Square to East 9th Street) had remained essentially a residential neighborhood. That began to change during the Civil War and postwar period, when, as the Cleveland Leader put it in a March 10, 1870 article, business interests on Superior Avenue and Ontario Street “crept across the open space” of Public Square and began erecting commercial buildings on the south side of the Square and on both sides of Euclid Avenue. The Cushing family certainly contributed to that change. In 1868, the year his wife died, Erastus Cushing razed his house on the south side of the Square and built in its place the Cushing Block, a beautiful four-story brick building with Amherst sandstone ornamentation, designed by the architectural firm of Heard & Blythe and completed in 1869. One of the building’s first tenants was the Standard Oil Company, just recently founded by John D. Rockefeller. Erastus Cushing too was a tenant in the building, keeping a medical office there, while living as one of the "regular boarders" in the nearby Forest City Hotel on the west side of Public Square, where the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel sits today.
In 1873, Henry Cushing moved his family, including 4-year-old son Harvey, uptown to a new house on fashionable Prospect Avenue near Sterling (East 30th) Street. The following year he tore down his house on Euclid Avenue and put up in its place the Cushing Building, a four-story brick commercial building that in its architectural style very much resembled the building which his father had built five years earlier. The Cushing Building (which is only 36 feet wide, though 215 feet deep) was connected by a party wall to the wider Cobb Building, built at the same time, giving the appearance that the two were one larger building. (The Cobb Building was torn down in 1940 to make room for the new W. T. Grant store.) In addition to the Cushing Block and the Cushing and Cobb Buildings, two additional similarly-styled buildings--the Euclid Avenue Block and the Hardy Block--were erected in this period between what are today East 1st and East 3rd Streets, completing the transformation of that part of the south side of Public Square and lower Euclid Avenue from a residential to a commercial neighborhood.
Dr. Henry Cushing kept a medical office in the Cushing Building, as did other Cleveland physicians, from 1874 until his semi-retirement in 1893, the year his father Erastus died. He then turned occupancy of the entire building over to the George H. Bowman Co., an imported china and glassware store, pursuant to the terms of a 99-year lease. Harvey Cushing's share of the income from this and other long-term leases of downtown commercial properties owned by his father and the estate of his grandfather would be a major source of his income not only in his early years as a young physician, but even later when he was world-famous, yet paid only a modest salary by the university-owned hospitals that employed him.
The George H. Bowman store that took over occupancy of the Cushing Building in 1893 was a fixture on lower Euclid Avenue for the next four decades, but in 1932 it was forced to close its doors as a casualty of the Great Depression. The Cushing Building was afterwards leased by the Cushing family to several other retail businesses, and then in 1937 to the Coles Shoe Store which dramatically altered the appearance of the building by adding to its facade an art deco-style marble and granite stone covering. In 1948, Coles Shoes' parent company purchased the building from the Cushing family. The building was thereafter known as the Coles Building until 1983, when Baker Shoes replaced Coles Shoes. The building then became known as the Baker Building until 1997 when that shoe store closed.
Over the next several years, the Cushing Building sat vacant while a plan for the redevelopment of it and the nearby W. T. Grant Buildngs as an apartment complex materialized. According to city records, in 1999 the marble and granite art-deco covering was removed from the Cushing Building. In 2003, the redevelopment project was completed and the Cushing Building became a part of the new W. T. Grant Loft Apartments. Today, the upper floors of the Cushing building are luxury apartment lofts while the first floor is occupied by a restaurant. Clevelanders who walk past the building on their way from Public Square up Euclid Avenue can admire it as one of the last surviving examples of high Victorian Gothic architecture on lower Euclid Avenue, as well as the site of the birthplace of America's first neurosurgeon.
]]>The Cleveland Clinic was founded on February 5, 1921. Frank E. Bunts, George W. Crile, and William E. Lower volunteered to serve their country as field surgeons and physicians in the Medical Corps of the United States Army during World War I. The military hospital experience impressed these men with the efficiency of an organization that included every branch or specialty of medicine and surgery. By the time that they returned home, Bunts, Crile and Lower had recognized the benefits that could be obtained from cooperation by a group of specialists. Along with John Phillips, they came together to found the Cleveland Clinic.
Many private practices and physicians were against the concept of opening a group practice. They believed that such a wealth of resources available to a group might give them an unfair competitive advantage. Fortunately, the founders of the Clinic were professors in one or more of the Cleveland medical schools and all had served as presidents of the Academy of Medicine. A core ideal emerged to create an institution in which medicine and surgery could be practiced, studied and taught by a group of specialists.
The Cleveland Clinic officially opened for business on Monday, February 28, 1921. The beautiful new building featured four stories, of which the upper three were built around a large central well extending from the second floor up to a glass skylight. The main waiting room was located at the bottom of the well on the second floor; while the office, examination rooms and treatment rooms opened onto the elegant second floor waiting area. The x-ray department, clinical laboratories and a pharmacy were located on the first floor. The fourth floor contained the art and photography department, editorial offices, offices for administrative personnel, a library and an executive boardroom.
The hospital quickly grew in popularity and Clevelanders accepted it so enthusiastically that plans for expansion were made within the first few years after it opened. By 1928, the Cleveland Clinic was a rapidly expanding, state-of-the-art hospital full of promise with potential to become one of the leading medical institutions in the nation.
]]>Geneva Medical College of New York admitted the first woman into its medical training program in 1847. What began as a joke within the male student body helped launch the beginning of new career goals for women. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to enter and graduate from a medical program in the United States, yet even with this advancement, men continued to treat women as inferior. Dr. Blackwell was forced to travel to Europe to gain the necessary experience; Paris, France namely, which was the mecca for women interested in medicine at this time.
In the 1850s, Dr. Myra King Merrick emerged as a leading female physician in Cleveland. Dr. Merrick became interested in medicine when her husband became ill and his treatment fell upon her. She studied medicine at the Central Medical College in Rochester, New York, and worked as a nurse at the Hydropathic Institute in order to gain experience. In 1852 she returned to Cleveland with her family, and during the Civil War she relocated to Lorain County where she helped treat wounded soldiers.
In 1867, Dr. Merrick and Dr. Cleora Seaman founded the Cleveland Homeopathic College for Women on Prospect Avenue. When the Cleveland Homeopathic School of Medicine stopped admitting women into their medical program, Dr. Merrick and Dr. Seaman felt it was an injustice. Both doctors saw the dire need for women to have a place to learn and gain professional experience. The college produced a number of prominent Cleveland women doctors, including Dr. Kate Parsons, Dr. Sarah Marcus, Dr. Martha Canfield, and Dr. Josephine Danforth Gillette. These leading women physicians helped build the reputation of the Women's and Children's Free Medical and Surgical Dispensary, which eventually became Woman's General Hospital.
Dr. Merrick and Dr. Parsons founded the dispensary in 1878 and the other women doctors served not only as physicians, but also on the board of directors. Dr. Canfield in particular played an important role in the dispensary's transformation into a hospital. These women each helped pave the way for other women to achieve the dream of becoming doctors. They provided a place not only for education, but also for a chance to obtain experience in the field and pass their knowledge on to the next generation of women doctors.
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