“That Building Was Sacrificed for the Sick”: Women’s Hospital Projects and Professional Emancipation in the American West, 1848–1920

When Sister Joseph of the Sacred Heart learned the results of the court case defending her convent’s right to hold land, she immediately turned to developing the property: “We were determined to build a building that would embellish the city.” High lumber and labor costs scrapped the nuns’ plans for a new structure; instead, they went door to door seeking church subscriptions, not of funds, but of abandoned buildings. They relocated donated shacks back to the convent land and established what they cheekily named Fabourg Providence, a complex of buildings flexibly adaptable to changing community health needs. Today, the women's hospital project is the oldest continuously-operating healthcare corporation in the Pacific Northwest.

Women religious, lady doctors, political activists, and graduate nurses fundraised for hospitals to address the physical and moral afflictions in growing cities—and provide professional opportunities for the managing group. An immediate concern shared among women’s groups was their ability to secure and outfit a “suitable” building for their cause. The hospitals they built reflected the negotiability of late nineteenth century American medical practice and women’s diversely imagined and implemented hospital solutions for healthcare crises in their cities. This paper foregrounds the specific, intentionally curated spaces in which women’s hospital collectives brought forth their visions of modernizing medicine and roles for women in the professional medical landscape. Working in buildings “sacrificed” for the care of the sick, women’s collectives and the hospitals they founded became vital, durable institutions in urban centers of the American West.