St. Mary’s Medical Center ‘has been a great blessing to East Tennessee.’
People of all religious persuasions lamented the sale in 2011 of St. Mary’s Medical Center to a for-profit entity. It is not so much that new management will do a poorer job in the practice of the healing arts. Indeed, things might be even better than before, as new blood and new ideas continue to make the science of 21st-century health care simply marvelous.
No, I think a major cause of the unrest is that our sense of complacency has been shattered. We all know what a great blessing St. Mary’s has been to East Tennessee, and more people have been exposed to traces of Catholicism through our Catholic hospitals than perhaps through our pulpits and even our schools. St. Mary’s Hospital definitely made its mark on the people of these parts, and for the more than three-quarters of a century that this great impact was made, we are grateful.
Where did it all begin? Did Eve, the mother of all the living, treat wounds on her children? Does the array of equipment literally unearthed by modern archeologists bear witness to the practice of the healing arts? Does the importance of the ship’s barber or an army’s medics hint at the development of what we term modern medicine?
It was not in 1927, as momentum continued toward the erection of the first of many buildings and wings on Oak Hill Avenue, but in 1827 in far-off Dublin that Catherine McAuley opened a refuge for women and children called the House of Mercy. In a trail that leads across a century, an ocean, and a good part of our country, the years leading up to April 22, 1930, are ones of adventure, faith, divine providence, and promise.
Seven of Catherine’s family of women religious came to Pittsburgh in 1843, and by 1847 the first Mercy Hospital in the world opened. On Oct. 31, 1866, Sisters of Mercy came to Tennessee—first to Nashville, then on to Knoxville, where the Sisters of Mercy were operating St. Mary School next door to Immaculate Conception, Knoxville’s only Catholic Church at that time.
Shortly after the First World War some Knoxville doctors began an initiative to expand health care beyond that provided by Knoxville General Hospital and the clinic-like Howard Henderson Hospital (the building still stands at the corner of Kingston Pike and Concord Street, just a few hundred feet from the abortion mill where lives are taken, not saved).
Father Francis D. Grady, the pastor of Immaculate Conception, was approached about the Catholic Church’s being a part of improved hospital care. Doctors were willing to underwrite $20,000 of what would become an enterprise of nearly one-third of a million dollars. Common sense would indicate that the proposal should die, yet momentum for a church-run hospital in Knoxville continued.
In the late ’20s the Daniel DeWine property on Oak Hill (old North Knoxville) was given to the Diocese of Nashville (Knoxville did not become a diocese until 1988). The bishop, Alphonse Smith, gave the property to the Sisters of Mercy but made it clear that the church would not be able to offer further financial help. Mercy Sisters Mary Pauline Gray and Mary Thomas Daumer co-founded St. Mary’s. Mother Pauline withdrew five sisters from schools and missioned them to schools as students to prepare them to staff the new hospital. Sister Mary Annunciata Dannaher studied business and hospital administration; Sister Mary Magdalen Clarke prepared for x-ray; Sisters Mary Celeste O’Rourke, Rose O’Keefe, and Bernard Fleming studied nursing.
The sisters were helped in no small way by Knoxville’s two Catholic pastors, Father Louis Kemphues of Holy Ghost (in whose territory the new hospital would be built) and Father Grady, who was also facilitating the beginnings of Knoxville Catholic High School.
Things were popping all around. Then came black Tuesday and the Great Depression. Through it all the Sisters of Mercy, the Catholics of Knoxville, and many other people of great good will worked and worked and worked to make what would become in just a few years great institutions. n
Monsignor Mankel is a vicar general of the diocese and the pastor of Holy Ghost Parish in Knoxville.
