St. Luke's Hospital history

The original charter established St Luke’s, named for the evangelist/physician, as a hospital on March 29, 1872 and was finalized later that year.

On October 17, 1873, the first patient was admitted to what was St Luke’s Hospital on Carpenter Street (now Broadway), nestled in the scenic hillsides in Fountain Hill borough/ Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

In 1882, Saint Luke’s was a small hospital serving a frontier trading town.

In 1889, the St Luke's School of Nursing was established.

St Luke’s Hospital was founded on Woodland Avenue in 1894 as Cleveland General Hospital.

Saint Luke’s College of Health Sciences, founded in 1903 to provide nursing education, has taught more than 3,500 nurses.

During the World's Fair in St Louis in 1904, the hospital opened its doors on Delmar Boulevard.

In 1948, the Presbyterian Churches joined the Episcopalians in sponsoring St Luke's.

After she did not regain consciousness she was brought back to St Luke’s, which now admitted her. For example, in 1957 a thirteen-year-old girl injured in a car accident was brought to St Luke’s for medical attention.

Arthur Evans, CORE’s protest committee chairman, led a protest where forty people were present with pickets on February 22, 1963.

Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes worked hard to resolve the situation between Local 47 and St Luke’s; however, by December 1967 he believed that he had “exhausted the maximum resources” of his office.

On March 8, 1968, Mayor Stokes announced that the strike was over.

In 1973, the St Louis area's first hyperbaric chamber was installed at St Luke's.

One of the stars of the Royal, Natalie Anderson, was actually born at St Luke's in 1981 when the hospital had a maternity ward.

The first St Luke's Urgent Care Center opened in 1982.

Until it closed in 1988, it had been the oldest nursing school in continuous operation west of the Mississippi River.

That changed in 1989 with the construction of Saint Luke’s North Hospital—Barry Road and our acquisition of Spelman Memorial Hospital, now Saint Luke's North Hospital—Smithville, in the northern part of Kansas City.

In 1990, Saint Luke’s Hospital officially became a primary teaching hospital of the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine.

Saint Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City’s Crittenton Children’s Center, which cares for the emotional health of children and families, officially joined the health system in 1992.

Hedrick Medical Center in Chillicothe, Missouri, joined Saint Luke's in 2003.

St Luke's opened its eighth urgent care center in 2015.