Wichita Hospital

PLAY AUDIO

They didn't call it the Wild West for nothing – in the 1880s, if you were a cowboy who'd been shot you might have been taken down south to the Ladies Benevolent Home, built in 1879 on South Francis Street. Later in 1898, that early health care facility moved to the corner you're now standing on, at Douglas and Seneca, where the Quik Trip is located. Now known as the Wichita Hospital, financial problems led to its sale to the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1925 for $150,000. Later the sisters built another hospital on East Harry street which remains and operates as a Via Christi facility. The Wichita Hospital was closed in 1953, and a new Sedgwick County Hospital was built on 9th street (now the campus of KU Medicine and Pharmacy-Wichita).