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WThite Plains Hospital
he hospital was originally a four- our emergency room is now. We added a
room building founded in 1893 new wing in 1924 and got to a bed capacity on Chatterton Hill. We were actu- of 100. Today, we’re at 292.
ally founded before the City of This year, we’re excited to celebrate White Plains, although it existed our 120th anniversary. We are planning as a village. The hospital was a major campus transformation. The first founded by a group of 22 women phase of that is enhancing our outpatient and three men who came togeth- radiology suite and redoing our surgical er to create a “hospital adequate surfaces. So as we look back, we’re also for the needs of the community.” looking ahead to continuing to position
The first year the hospital was open it the hospital strongly for the next 120 years. treated 31 patients. To put that in per-
1. This is the first hos- pital building the year it was opened. When the hospital received its charter in 1893, the Village of White Plains had the highest death rate in the County, with pneumonia as a princi- pal cause of death.
2. This is Dr. H. Ernest Schmid, the first chief of staff, in 1894. He would apparently do house calls on horse- back, and I’ve heard him described as a “colorful, towering” figure.
3. This is a photo from 1907 of the hospital’s horse-drawn ambu- lance. It was a gift; that first month, it respond- ed to 75 calls. (To put that in perspective, in 2012, there were 12,500
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people brought to the hospital by ambulance.) The horse-drawn ambulance was then mounted on a motor- ized chassis on 1912.
4. This photo of the operating theater is from 1943. The operat- ing suite was on the entire top floor of the building, and the big to-do there was that
it was air-conditioned. In 1912, we actually had our first operating room, which, interest- ingly, didn’t have run- ning water.
5. We actually used to have a nursing school. It opened in 1900 and closed in 1967, but this picture is of the nurs- ing students and their instructor, who is the one sitting, in 1916.
spective, in 2012, we cared for more than 170,000 patients.
In 1907, we moved into a brand-new red brick building facing East Post Road. That was demolished in 1940, but it is still part of the hospital property, about where
—Dawn French Vice President of Marketing and Community Relations, White Plains Hospital
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