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The history of alternative medicine in Milwaukee and elsewhere is intrinsically linked to the practice of mainstream medicine. Early medicine in Milwaukee was often a gruesome affair, with bleedings and purges that offered little in the way of relief. The horrors and inadequacies of these treatments bred public distrust in the mainstream medical community. Alternative… Read More

Columbia St. Mary’s is really the history of two institutions: the Catholic St. Mary’s, Wisconsin’s first hospital, and Columbia, a non-sectarian hospital focused on research and teaching. Their developments reflected the maturation of the health care industry, including the search for cost savings in the 1980s and 90s that brought them together under one roof… Read More

Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin traces its history from a little house on Brady Street offering free pediatric care in the late nineteenth century to its current manifestation on the County Grounds in Wauwatosa, where it is part of the Regional Medical Center. Unique among the state’s hospitals with its exclusive focus on child care, Children’s… Read More

The Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center is the direct descendant of the Northwestern Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers (NHDVS), established by Congress in 1865 to care for Union soldiers who had suffered disabling wounds or illnesses due to their service in the Civil War. The home was funded partly by… Read More

In the spring of 1993, approximately 400,000 people fell victim to what Milwaukeeans have since referred to as “Crypto.” At least sixty-nine people—mostly people suffering from AIDS—died in this Cryptosporidium outbreak, which would become the country’s largest waterborne disease epidemic on record. These numbers do not include those who visited Milwaukee and drank the water… Read More

For much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, care for mentally or physically disabled individuals in the United States fell largely on the immediate family. In cases where families were unable to care for disabled members, the local community sometimes provided care. In some burgeoning cities of the early nineteenth century, charitable organizations coordinated… Read More

In 1909, the synod of the Evangelical Church, a predecessor of the United Church of Christ, founded a Deaconess Society in the German tradition that called on Christian Sisters to offer hospital care to Milwaukee’s sick and needy. The fifteen-bed unit established by the Society in 1910 on what is now West Wisconsin Avenue grew… Read More

The centerpiece of the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center, Froedtert Hospital serves as the teaching affiliate of the Medical College of Wisconsin. Froedtert opened in 1980 after nearly three decades of often halting planning that revolved around the trust left by Milwaukee malt baron Kurtis R. Froedtert. A latecomer to Milwaukee’s health care scene, Froedtert Hospital,… Read More

The integrated health care systems that currently dominate health care provision in Milwaukee were created in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Before the many mergers and acquisitions that formed them, health care was provided by many small independent providers. In 1988, there were twenty distinctive community… Read More

Johnston Emergency Hospital, established by the city of Milwaukee, opened in its permanent location on the corner of Third and Sycamore (now Michigan) Street in 1894. It provided emergency medical care in a twenty-four-bed facility. The hospital earned a place in history on October 14, 1912, when a would-be assassin shot presidential candidate Teddy Roosevelt… Read More

For over 130 years, Milwaukee County provided health care at the county grounds in Wauwatosa. What began as poor relief for the area’s growing population in the nineteenth century developed into Milwaukee County General Hospital, a core institution within the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center. In 1995 rising costs and other challenges led to its privatization.… Read More

The only Wisconsin Jewish hospital opened in Milwaukee in June 1903. It was founded as a nonsectarian hospital at a time when most private religious hospitals established hospitals for their religious communities. Although the Jewish community in Milwaukee opened the hospital to treat the large Jewish immigrant population, many of whom arrived with very little… Read More

Formal nursing education in the United States had its beginnings in the late 1800s, after Florence Nightingale suggested a model for schools in England. Schools proliferated as hospitals needed nurses to care for the patients. Milwaukee was no different. The first Milwaukee schools were established in 1888 as the Wisconsin Training School for Nurses and… Read More

Milwaukee has proven exceptional in its reform-minded approach to public health since it established a Board of Health in 1867. Later efforts to improve public health began after the city’s rapid population growth in the late nineteenth century (by 1910 Milwaukee was the twelfth largest city in the United States, with a population of 373,857).… Read More

Milwaukee was buzzing with activity in late June and July of 1865, as the month-long fair to raise money for the local soldiers’ home packed Main Street with crowds of fairgoers. The event was an extension of work undertaken early in the Civil War by women from the west side of the Milwaukee River who… Read More