Medical School's building has long history of medical care
The KU School of Medicine–Wichita's main building began life as a county hospital for the poor, and survived some controversy before finding its current use.
The KU School of Medicine–Wichita's main building began life as a county hospital for the poor, and survived some controversy before finding its current use.
First called the Sedgwick County Hospital, renamed E.B. Allen Hospital in 1971 for one of Wichita's first physicians and mayors, the facility served indigent patients from 1950 through 1979. It replaced what was known as the county sanitarium.
Hints of the building's past can still be found in its architecture. The original building is made up of two long wings, which were the original hospital's wards, designed in the days before private hospital rooms were the norm.
Destination for the poor
The school's internal medicine department administrator, Jill Longstaff, remembers the building's original incarnation well. She went to work in the hospital as an admitting clerk in 1966. It was her first job out of high school.
"Those huge wards were quite typical of an old 1940s or '50s hospital," Longstaff said. "They just had bed after bed after bed."
"Since it was a county institution, the only people we admitted were people who were indigent or on Welfare," she said. "At the time, other hospitals wouldn't take Welfare patients. They had to come here."
The idea of a hospital for the poor didn't strike anyone as odd, Longstaff recalls. "Back then, it was just accepted. If people were poor, you just knew this is where you'd come. People were glad to come where they could get care."
Longstaff can recall many other distinctive features of the hospital building. "There was really hideous green tile on the floors," Longstaff said.
The main lobby had a big switchboard desk and an admitting office. Labs sat off the lobby. The emergency room was located where the main entrance and lobby are today.
Where the main lobby and library now meet, Longstaff recalls, "There was a guy that had a sandwich stand. You could buy sandwiches and soup. He was in a wheelchair. He made everything fresh."
The second floor was a nursing home for elderly patients. The current courtyard, now attractively landscaped and used for outdoor functions, held loading docks.
"It was open-air, but it wasn't fancy," Longstaff said.
Health care changes bring transition
The passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 made it possible for low-income patients to go to regular hospitals. But E.B. Allen Hospital remained open, caring for long-term chronically ill Medicare and Medicaid patients, and some patients who were alcoholics or mentally ill.
A newspaper article from that era compared the hospital to a "100-bed skilled nursing home" - one that was costing the county $55,000 a month to operate.
In the early 1970s, the building began to be considered as a possible home for the then-new Wichita campus of the KU School of Medicine. The fledgling school was first housed on the Wichita State University campus.
The medical school began using E.B. Allen Hospital as its temporary home in the mid-1970s, but county and state officials differed on the hospital's future, and the appropriate use of the property. The school officially took possession of the building in 1979.
"A hospital that had been abandoned"
Garold Minns, now dean of KU School of Medicine–Wichita, was a resident in training when the school moved to its current location.
"It was in sad shape," Minns recalls. On the building's north end, where the boiler room was located, most of the windows had been broken out and pigeons had moved in. "That boiler room was just a mess," Minns said.
Minns also recalled the green floor tile, "It must have been popular in the 1950s."
Minns said the areas of the hospital still being used were functional, "But certainly not luxurious by any means. It obviously hadn't been maintained very well. It looked like a hospital that had been abandoned."
KU was interested in the building because of its central location, and because the county agreed to lease it to the school for the "very reasonable" price of a dollar a year, Minns said.
In the early 1980s, the school got state funding to remodel the building.
"We worked in the building as they remodeled it. We would move from office to office. We lived with jackhammers and drills for two years."
"Most of the building was just totally taken apart from floor to ceiling. They redid the floors and walls, and put in new windows. They did a very nice job on it."
The disreputable boiler room was transformed into what is now Roberts amphitheater.
Remnants ... and reminiscence of the past
Curiously, one section of the building was never renovated until a few months ago. A former surgical suite on the third floor retained its 1950s ambiance until it recently received new carpet and paint. Although if you know what you're looking for, "You can still tell it was a 1950s surgical suite," Minns said.
Longstaff, who lived out of state for years, said she didn't know the old hospital had been turned into a medical school until she returned to work for KU in 1993.
"I thought, 'Oh, my gosh, I'm back where I started'."