By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo
In 1932, Buffalo was swept up in the celebration of the city’s centennial, and many groups and organizations that had existed through those 100 years took the opportunity to celebrate their own existence as well.
The Buffalo Academy of Medicine — particularly proud that Buffalo’s first mayor, Ebenezer Johnson, was a medical doctor — wrote a lengthy history of the practice of medicine from Buffalo’s frontier days right up to the most modern advances 1932 could offer.
The most interesting part, however, might not be that dryly written narrative, but the index of hospitals open in Buffalo in the centennial year.
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The directory offers a glimpse of medical care in a different era: the J.N. Adam Memorial Hospital devoted to the “various phases of tuberculosis.” The Moses Taylor Hospital in Lackawanna “chiefly for the care of industrial accident cases.” Buffalo State Hospital, “a special state hospital of 2,400 beds devoted entirely to mental diseases.”
Several of the hospitals also took out ads in the booklet — they give a look at some of the hospital buildings around Buffalo as they stood 85 years ago.
Buffalo Stories archives
Buffalo Stories archives
Buffalo Stories archives
Buffalo Stories archives
Buffalo Stories archives
Buffalo Stories archives
Buffalo Stories archives
As Buffalo waits with great excitement for the implosion of the Millard Fillmore Gates Circle Hospital on Oct. 3, 2015, and controversy swirls about what might be built in its place– 50 years ago, additions onto the old Millard Fillmore Hospital were ushering in “an era of great change in healthcare,” just as the abandoning of Gates Circle for the Medical Campus did several years ago.