When Sarasota Memorial Hospital first opened in November 1925, it cost $40,000 to build and had 32 beds.
A hundred years later, it's one of the biggest employers in the region, with more than 1,100 beds at two locations, in Sarasota and Venice. The hospital is breaking ground on a third location in North Port on Friday.
Historian Jeff LaHurd researched the history of the hospital for a book called "A Century of Caring" to mark the hospital's 100th anniversary. He spoke with WUSF's Kerry Sheridan.
The interview below has been lightly edited for clarity.
What was Sarasota like 100 years ago, and why did it need a hospital?
That would be 1925; it was fully in the middle of the great land boom of Florida. So it wasn't a little village-type place anymore.
People were coming in droves, buying property to resell, to make a profit, or building their homes here. So with the great influx of people, it became obvious that in order to continue moving forward, they would need a hospital.
Right, so the larger the town gets, the more medical need there is?
Not only because the community needed a hospital, but a hospital was also needed to draw more people. Nobody's going to come to a town of our size and not have proper medical care.
How did people pay for hospital care 100 years ago?
They paid with cash. Before that, individual doctors would come to their house on house calls and would get either paid in money or in livestock or vegetables or whatever they might have on hand.
What other interesting stories did you find about the hospital as you were going through all this research?
I thought it was interesting that the doctors could just go into the operating room.
They could call up John Smith and say, 'Listen, be at the hospital at 10 o'clock in the morning, and I'll operate,' and they would just show up at the hospital. I think finally they ended up putting a lock on the door so that not just anybody could walk in and open the door and do an operation.
And the other thing I thought was kind of interesting is, after the hospital first opened, there was a cat that would come into the operating room and, like, go between the doctor's legs while they were operating. It was almost, I don't want to say primitive, but it was certainly a much more relaxed atmosphere in those days than it is today, for sure.
I noticed, too, in your book, that you could look through the newspaper and see who'd been admitted to the hospital.
Oh, that was up to very recent times. Even in the '50s or '60s, they would say, well, 'Jeff LaHurd went in for an appendectomy' or something like that.
Everything you did was in the newspaper. When people came from out of town, they would say, 'Mrs. Smith came from Chicago. She was going to be at the Miramar hotel for two weeks.' And then, they would just follow what she did here.
It was interesting that the press was kind of fawning over the idea of this hospital. It was really important to the community.
The Sarasota Herald, when they opened in '25, every development was the best development. Every hotel was the finest hotel in Dixieland or the finest hotel in the South.
Everybody of any consequence was billed as the capitalist of
Chicago who's coming here to invest heavily in Sarasota.
Everything was in hyperbole, and the prose at the time was so flowery it would be embarrassing by today's standards. That's one of the reasons I like to read the old Sarasota Heralds. The prose they use was so grandiose and just beautiful, really.
Anything else that you learned about the hospital that you think people should know about?
The nice thing about Sarasota is it's a great place to come to. And a lot of great doctors came to Sarasota. And consequently, other great doctors followed them. And so I think that's one of the reasons that Sarasota Memorial is really at the forefront in medicine of all kinds.
