Parkland Memorial Hospital is the oldest public hospital in the city, where new technologies and treatment methods are constantly introduced. There work highly qualified specialists and the next generations of doctors are trained. The institution has a long history, which begins at the end of the 19th century. Find out more at i-dallas.
Construction of the first hospital in the city
In 1874, a hospital opened in Dallas at the corner of Columbia and South Lamar Streets. There was a one-room premise, measuring 25 by 50 feet, where also a kitchen and a bathroom were built. All the patients, regardless of age and gender, stayed in this one ward, which was designed for 18 beds. Operative interventions were also conducted in the same place. However, by 1887, the hospital could no longer cope with the influx of patients, the number of which increased due to outbreaks of smallpox, measles and malaria.
Therefore, in 1894, a hospital was built with funds allocated from the Dallas city government. Here they provided help to everyone who needed it. The wooden building was located on a 17-acre site at the corner of Oak Lawn and Maple Avenue, where a city park construction was originally planned. That is why the hospital received such a name.
Construction began on March 18, 1913, and was completed in one year. The new hospital had three floors, was designed for one hundred beds and became the first brick medical facility in Texas. There were high ceilings, spacious rooms and balconies overlooking the park. There worked six doctors, five nurses and approximately ten volunteers who helped to take care of patients.
At the same time, they continued to use the old building where patients were sent for isolation. But in 1918, a fire engulfed the wooden hospital and destroyed it completely. They were not going to restore it.
Expansion of the hospital
In the 1920s, two wings and a building for nurses were constructed. In the years of the Great Depression, the burden on the hospital increased. The wards were overcrowded. There were not enough medical personnel for everyone. The nurses’ quarters were expanded in 1936. In the same year, the Woodlawn Hospital was built, where patients suffering from tuberculosis were cared for.
In 1938, the fourth wing of the main hospital building was opened.
Moving to a new place
In 1954, Parkland moved to Harry Hines Street. In the same year at the hospital, they began using an artificial kidney machine, the only one in the state. All patients were transferred to a new hospital, which was named “Parkland Memorial Hospital” from the 3rd of October. Gradually, there opened an outpatient clinic, an infectious disease service for children, a burn and cardiology department, in which the first cineangiofluorograph in the United States was installed. It allowed them to simultaneously receive X-ray images of the human heart from the front and from the side. It was used during the first open-heart surgery, which was successfully performed on a seven-year-old girl. The old Parkland Hospital on Maple Avenue officially ended its activities in 1974.
How the hospital is connected to Kennedy
After the US President John F. Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963, he was taken to Parkland Hospital, where he died at 1 p.m. Two days later, the assassin of the president Lee Harvey Oswald, who was stabbed by Jack Ruby and who also died here on the operating table, gets to the same hospital. Jack Ruby died in this hospital from a pulmonary embolism. In 2013, the film “Parkland” was released, which reflected all these events in the hospital.
Opening of a modern hospital
In October 2010, a new $1.27 billion campus opened at the hospital. The new premise had 17 floors and was designed for 870 beds, which made it possible to completely replace Parkland Memorial Hospital opened in 1954. The activities of the new building began in 2015.