Saint Marys Hospital

Cross from the original Saint Marys Hospital building

In 1883, when a tornado hit Rochester, causing many deaths and injuries, the physician, Dr. Mayo, and his sons were called to act as doctors. They enlisted the Sisters of St. Francis to assist as nurses. Together, they succeeded in performing surgeries and nursing the sick and injured. Inspired by these events, Mother Alfred Moes and the Sisters began to raise money for a hospital in which Dr. Mayo and the Sisters would be doctors and nurses, respectively. 

At the time, however, Mother Alfred Moes’ vision was not met with much support and enthusiasm. In the 1880s, the general public viewed hospitals very negatively; they were considered to be “charity asylums for the sick poor who had nowhere else to go, in the same class with poorhouses, jails, and insane asylums.”[i] Yet despite the skepticism, Mother Alfred Moes and the Sisters of Saint Francis spent the next four years living meagerly, saving all the money that they could. After a couple of years of construction, in 1889, Saint Marys Hospital opened its doors for the first time, welcoming not just Catholics, but “all sick persons regardless of their color, sex, financial status, or professed religion.”[ii]

Sketch of Saint Marys Hospital during the planning stage

In many ways, the “Sisters gave of themselves to Saint Marys.”[iii] They spent hours “attending to the psychological and spiritual needs of their patients”[iv] because, to them, this work was an embodied practice of their religion; “they considered the care of the sick as their calling from God.”[v] However, they were not only there for moral and spiritual support. The Sisters were “expertly trained, technically adept and medically knowledgeable,”[vi] with some of them being surgical assistants present in life-or-death surgical procedures in the operating room. So omnipresent were the Sisters in Saint Marys Hospital, that by the 1930’s, “nearly every patient floor or medical area was known by the name of the Sister in charge.”[vii]

The cover of a pamphlet available at the entrance of Saint Marys Hospital

[i] Whelan, Sister Ellen, The Sisters’ Story (Rochester: Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 2002), 45.
[ii] Ibid., 49.
[iii] Leonard, David A., A Century of Caring (Rochester: Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research), 10.
[iv] Ibid., 10.
[v] Ibid., 11.
[vi] Ibid., 10.
[vii] Whelan, 149.