A Catholic Response to the Urban (Medical) Crisis: Community Medicine at St. Vincent’s Hospital, NYC

Among the institutions that found themselves on the front lines of the urban crisis of the 1960s and 70s were hospitals. In addition to providing vital medical services, they also served as social and economic anchors to communities facing decline and disinvestment. While many were public institutions—which, as scholars of the health care activism of the era have demonstrated, faced community pressure to respond to local needs—a large number were voluntary, religiously-affiliated institutions, with Catholic institutions often the most numerous among them. Focusing on the history of St. Vincent’s Hospital, the oldest and most prominent Catholic hospital in New York City, whose Greenwich Village location placed it in the heart of the city’s urban crisis (and its urban renewal debates), this paper explores its efforts to respond to the needs of those on the medical margins. In particular, it examines the history of the hospital’s Community Medicine department and its pioneering outreach to the homeless and homebound elderly. Rooted in the hospital’s founding mission to serve the poor and medically indigent, it reveals how St. Vincent’s worked to respond to those in need while struggling to sustain itself financially. In addition to aiding those who had been all but abandoned by the medical system, the hospital’s outreach programs also helped medical personnel develop a fuller understanding of the multifaceted social and medical challenges faced by those they served.