Eleanor Taylor Bell Memorial Hospital

Transcribed article: Razing of Hospital Recalls First K.U. Medical School. By Margaret Olwine - A Member of the Star's Staff. The symbol of much that is prestigious in Kansas Medical history will be town down early next month too make way for a new kind of progress. Eleanor Taylor Bell Memorial Hospital, the first home of the University of Kansas Medical school, has been purchased from the university by the Urban Renewal Agency of Kansas City, Kansas. The last tenants of the two remaining red brick buildings at 311 Seminary Street, will move to the former Rosedale postoffice at 4207 Rainbow. Then the old hospital, still remembered fondly by the remaining survivors of the first 17 classes of medical students (1907 through 1924) and a few retired hospital employees, will be torn down. Research team that have occupied part of the space in recent years also feel nostalgic. "It has been a quiet, pleasant place to work," Dr. Anne Nielsen remarked during a tour of the buildings. "But I'll have to confess I've been frightened a few times late at night mainly because the way the wind swooshes through the hallways." "Old Eleanor Taylor," as current medical school staff workers and students refer to the buildings, stands alone in a thicket of tall cedars and dead elms midway up a steep ridge overlooking Southwest Boulevard and its junction with Seventh Street Trafficway. The hill, called Goat Hill by a generation of winded students, is cleared now of residences which once covered it. Among the few persons who remember Eleanor Taylor Bell in her heyday are D.M. Sams, who was museum curator there and then later at the Medical Center at 39th Street and Rainbow Boulevard for 41 years, and also by Guy Stone, land marketing manager for the Rosedale University Urban Renewal Project. Stone grew up on Goat Hill, but like most Rosedale natives, he calls it Hospital Hill. "It was never a convenient spot for a hospital, but Dr. Simeon B. Bell, a Rosedale doctor and landowner, gave the university that particular five acres of land," Sams said. Medical school history also states that Dr. Bell contributed other land and buildings valued at $100,000. Dr. Bell also is recorded as the father of Southwest Boulevard. He was reported to have routed the thoroughfare from Kansas City, Mo., to Rosedale, Merriam and Shawnee in such a way as to pass his lands and thus increase their value. But Kansas medical history places greater emphasis on Dr. Bell's conviction that doctors should be educated in public institutions rather than privately owned hospitals or by "reading" with practicing physicians. After a decade of discussion, the Kansas Legislature accepted Dr. Bell's offer of a site. Three private hospitals in Wyandotte County gave up their identity in 1906 to assure the success of the new 80-bed clinic and medical school. The first hospital was the taller of the two buildings that now remain. A dispensary, which still stands, also a nurses' residence and classroom building, were added quickly. But then the medical staff and the university board of regents recognized the need for expansion ad the difficulty of achieving it on the hillside site. Rosedale citizens and University alumni raised funds for the purchase in 1920 of the first 15 acres of the present medical center grounds. "That," Sams recalled, "is when Eleanor Taylor started downhill." Patients who used to go to the hospital by Southwest Boulevard streetcar line, only to have to climb the last steep block up Broad Street to Seminary, were glad for the switch to Rainbow and 39th Street. For a time the hospital stood empty. Stone attended Boy Scout meetings in the cavernous second floor of the clinic. For a time the medical center's museum was maintained in the classroom building behind the dispensary. Then it was torn down. Then the old complex housed the Center's tuberculosis patients and its psychiatry department. From 1958 to 1970, the main building was home for 300 monkeys and 50 employees of a viral research project underwritten by the National Foundation Infantile Paralysis and later the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Herbert A. Warner, research professor of pediatrics, led the team, which developed a new method of producing diagnostic antiserums in great bulk. The anti-serum, valued by one medical writer at $10 million, were shipped free to laboratories all over the world. The Wenner team produced about 65 reference regents, thus speeding the recognition of the polio viruses, and also 29 coxsackie and 35 ECHO viruses. Now a member of the infectious diseases department of Children's Mercy Hospital, Dr. Wenner remembers the old hospital as "a good place to work, perfectly satisfactory for what we were doing." Also sharing an affection for the isolated setting has been the research team currently occupying the dispensary. On two floors formerly occupied by psychiatric patients, labor about six members of a team studying the relationships of viruses to leukemia in humans, chickens, dogs and mice. Dr. Alvar A. Werder, chairman of the microbiology department at the medical center, heads the team, which is making biochemical, immunologic and biologic studies in germ-free mice, chickens and Japanese quail. The research team has produced 30 generations of germ-free mice, which are 99 per cent leukemia-free. The mouse population - now 4,000 are born, live, breed and die in sterile plastic cages developed by the team. The team is studying whether a family of closely related viruses produce similar diseases in various mammals and birds. The possibility looms, since tumor cells from other species have been implanted repeatedly in the germ-free mice. The mice, the 200 quail and the 50 chickens, along with the plastic cages, banks of metal chicken coops and great amounts of sterilization equipment, including a one-of-a-kind autoclave, will be moved in the next three months. A delay in the remodeling of the postoffice accounts for the university's delay in turning over Eleanor Taylor Bell, named for Dr. Simeon Bell's wife, to the urban renewal agency. According to Sams, the tenants of the new high-rise apartment will have the best view of the downtown Kansas City skyline ... and also the chilliest breezes. "It got so cold there sometimes, we used to say there wasn't a thing to stop that wind between Goat Hill and the North Pole," Sams recalled with a shiver. Death of a Landmark. Abandoned as a hospital 48 years ago, Eleanor Taylor Bell Memorial Hospital has nevertheless withstood time's indignities and made a medical contribution. But now the first home of the University of Kansas Medical School will make way for an apartment complex. The site is at 311 Seminary Street, Kansas City, Kansas. Kansas City Times, February 26, 1972.