TIMELINE
Episcopal Hospital
1860 Construction on a new hospital building gets underway as the Civil War intervenes. The first casualties from the Virginia campaigns arrive in 1862, with the wounded overtaxing military hospitals.
1848 Episcopalian Rev. Alonzo Potter (left) and Philadelphia physician Caspar Morris (right) lobby to create a new hospital. With only 200 charity care beds combined, the city’s two hospitals, Philadelphia General and Pennsylvania Hospital, cannot serve all the city’s chronically ill and poor.
1845
World Wars I and II. In 1945 it attracted international attention for pioneering the world’s first surgical technique to remove scar tissue from the heart’s mitral valve. Episcopal was a training site or base of practice for many prominent figures in American medicine, including Howard Kelly, MD (1858–1943), one of the four founding physicians of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Charles Harrison Frazier, MD (1870–1936), who,
1870 1851 Ann Leamy and Elizabeth Stout offer their 5.5-acre property for the new hospital — an offer initially opposed due to its “remoteness” from the city. In 1852, the renovated mansion opens as the Hospital of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The first patients are treated on Christmas Eve.
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with Harvey Cushing, developed neurosurgery in the United States. Today, with a busy emergency department, a general medical telemetry inpatient unit, outpatient services in several specialties, and 118 beds for psychiatric care, Episcopal serves as Temple’s main site for behavioral health services. Its Crisis Response Center sees more than 11,000 psychiatric outpatients annually. In recent years, Episcopal has won
1913 The hospital treats its first auto accident victims. Three years later, it responds to a severe outbreak of poliomyelitis in Philadelphia.
1895 1888 Episcopal founds its nursing school. Later, its graduates help establish the organization now known as the American Nurses Association.
| TEMPLE HEALTH MAGAZINE | WINTER 2014
1924 Episcopal serves as a training site for medical students of the University of Pennsylvania, and later, Temple University School of Medicine (1933). Demand for services grows. In 1928, the hospital logs 6,700 inpatient stays and 31,000 outpatient visits.
1920 1917 Episcopal authorizes the formation of a base hospital in France under the auspices of the Army Red Cross.
IMAGES: TEMPLE ARCHIVES; 1860: MPI/GETTY IMAGES
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ounded in 1852, Episcopal Hospital, now known as Temple University Hospital-Episcopal Campus, is the second-longest continually operated hospital in Philadelphia. The oldest, Pennsylvania Hospital, was founded in 1751. Episcopal’s history is storied. It cared for Union soldiers during the Civil War, weathered the polio epidemic of 1916, and staffed field hospitals overseas during