Red Cross Hospital of Louisville: Remembered
First Red Cross Hospital
by Steven Lippmann, MD
The Red Cross Hospital of Louisville had a very prominent role in our regional health care system. For most of the 1900s, this was the hospital designated for Black people’ s medical care in the days of enforced racial segregation.
The Red Cross Hospital( not affiliated with the American Red Cross) was started in 1899 by Black physicians since African American doctors were not allowed to practice in Louisville’ s hospitals. Drs. William H. Perry, W. T. Merchant, Ellis E. Whedbee and R. B. Scott are some of the founding physicians. The hospital opened in 1899 in a house at Louisville’ s Walnut and Sixth Streets. In 1905, it was moved to a much better and larger building at 1436 South Shelby Street. This greatly improved services. It provided a lot of the medical care for African American people since other hospitals had mostly also excluded Black patients. It was the biggest health care facility designated primarily for African Americans in Kentucky.
The Red Cross Hospital helped mitigate a health care exclusion for the African American people that had long been overtly neglected. Louisville’ s Black population supported the hospital, and it was
18 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE a source of community accomplishment and pride. The professional staff there did a large part of the maintenance and upkeep, as well as providing monetary assistance.
Louisville General Hospital was our local public hospital but was slow to fully integrate and has no established date of formal desegregation. However, it did offer medical attention to a limited number of indigent people, including some Black patients. Besides medical care, the Red Cross Hospital also conducted training programs for nurses and doctors. It was the first institution to offer nursing education to African American applicants. Here, Mary E. Merritt, RN, became the first ever registered nurse in Kentucky. She practiced there in various positions.
Services were consistently offered to anyone, even those who could not afford to pay, including white patients. Most of the patients were African American. It continued providing good quality general medical hospitalizations for decades, even expanding bed capacity numbers. Outpatient services were opened and some clinics also offered subspecialty coverage. By the 1940s, Red Cross became an important private African American hospital approved to provide cancer interventions by the American Cancer Society.