One finds references to railroad hospitals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Why were these founded?
From limited study of the subject, it seems these hospitals were usually found at division points. References are made to injured empolyees being transport some distance for treatment at these hospitals.
Was the carnage that great on railroads that something akin to a military medical corps was deemed necessary?
Whatever became of railroad hospitals? Did they eventually become absorbed into, or become, community hospitals? Did railroads take the lead in demonstrating the need for community hospitals as medicine advanced in the late 19th century?
Railroad hospitals were a feature of a medical-care system that provided complete employee medical care to all employees through compulsory payroll deduction. This system was pervasive on Class I railroads in the Far Western and Southern regions, but uncommon in the Eastern Region, where only the C&O and the Wabash were so governed, both stemming from managerial heritage – the C&O was a Collis P. Huntington Road, the Wabash a Gould road. The Milwaukee Road was so governed only on lines west of Mobridge, South Dakota. The Great Northern, Soo Line, Burlington, and Chicago & North Western were the only major western roads without a medical-care system; however, Burlington subsidiaries Colorado & Southern and Fort Worth & Denver, and C&NW subsidiary Omaha Road, had medical-care systems.
Medical care through fixed periodic payment was also widespread in industrial-scale western metals mining (Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada), industrial-scale lumbering in Oregon, Washington, and California, and in coal mining throughout the United States. Some steel mills and large, integrated industrial establishments also featured company medical systems, such as Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. in Birmingham. The first railroad hospital, in Sacramento, California, and railroad health-care system was instituted by the Central Pacific Railroad in 1865. The same system began to appear in coal mining at about the same time, some believe it was an outgrowth of British coal-mining practice but there’s not a lot of information about the origins of employee medical-care systems in the 1800s.
The system only indirectly arose from the high injury rate; the root causes were:
(1) the Federal Employers’ Liability Law and no federal or state workmen’s compensation law, which enabled the employee injured in the line of duty to recover damages from the employer through
When the MILW built west they built company hospitals in towns which needed them and used the existing facilities where they existed. The MILW built them in Miles City and Three Forks but not is Butte or Deer Ldoge where hospitals existed. They did not build in Alberton nor Superior. The company hospitals were open to the public as well as to the employees. The NP had a company hospital in Missoula where more than one private hospital was in operation.
The Milwaukee Hospital Association was an insurance adjunct to the company hospitals in cooperation between the company and the unions which was phased out during the 1960s when private insurers were contracted by the railroad under contractual obligations with the unions.
Illinois Central Hospital, on Stony Island Dr. in Chicago and visible from the Metra Electric, had its roots in the railroad, although it was no longer associated with the IC in the 1980’s, when I lived in Hyde Park. It’s successor institution went under a few years ago, but the building still stands.
Red Standefer was paying $1 per month back in 1919 for hospitilization insurance at the Cotton Belt’s Texarkana, AR facility. By 1940 this payroll deduction had gone up to $6 per month.
In the 1960’s and later (and this started much earlier) had as RailWayMan stated a company hospital in SF, but only the long term cases were treated there. First, you went to a Company Doctor which was usually a private physician (sp) and if you needed hospitalization, there were “old” company hsopitals that had been turned into community hospitals where you were sent, and until toward the end of the system, IIRC, there was no cost to the employee and only moderate cost for family members. I do not recall there being any deduction for the employee, but there was for my wife.
When the unions got agreement medical services, the SF hospital and the SP medical system was not permitted to operate as it had for about 100 years, and several of the SP’s unions took it over as an HMO. It finally was closed because its outgo was greater than its income.
A very interesting and informative post - thanks! A bit timely too, as I’ve reading through Stan Johnson’s book, The Milwaukee Road’s Western Extension, which has a chapter devoted to medical care for the workers.
Lessee, SP, UP, IC… If I remember correctly, these were all associated with E.H. Harriman - my respect for the guy just went up a notch or two.
Don’t know when it passed out of RR control, but at one time Savannah GA had a Central of Georgia hospital. I had my tonsils taken out there in 1969, and it was already part of the Candler Hospital group. Years ago Candler built a single hospital to replace 3 or 4 scattered hospitals it operated; don’t know what happened to the Central building.
I provided the photos of Milwaukee Hospital Association hospitals at Mobridge and Three Forks and much of the information for that chapter as well, and I am glad that Stan took the time and showed the interest to include that usually forgotten aspect of railroad history. The history of the association hospital built at Taft for the workers at the St. Paul Tunnel was memorialized in a book, “Doctors, Dynamite and Dogs”, by the daughter of the Chief Surgeon at the hospital and Stan drew some good stories from that.