Luke’s, physicians performed the state’s first operation for cleft palate & harelip. Luke’s Hospital recorded Florida’s first surgery for contractive deformity in children.

Many people saw the places as relatively unclean, uncomfortable, & unfriendly, not offering the benefits that derived from one’s own home and family doctor.ĭuring the early 1900s, nevertheless, Jacksonville’s local hospitals made some real contributions.

During the later 1800s, the institutions had been established in America largely for health-care of indigent people, out-of-towners, and other patients who did not have adequate housing for treatment & recuperation. These perceptions were due partly to the original purposes of many hospitals. Until well into the 1900s, numerous people had uneasy feelings about hospitals in general. Jimmy Carter, in fact, was the first US president to have been born in a hospital in 1924. Initially, many physicians and parents avoided the use of incubators because they considered them to be unhygienic and because most parents (who gave birth at home) were reluctant to entrust their babies to doctors for hospital care. Incubators were also exhibited at other world’s fairs, and a would-be young actor named Archibald Leach toiled as a barker outside one of these displays, shouting “Don’t pass the babies by!” Leach would later achieve fame under his stage name, Cary Grant. They were used primarily for the prematurely-born infants. Baby incubators had been a curiosity at the Chicago World’s Fair just eleven years before. PRECIOUS BUNDLES - As shown in this photo, three newborns lie in an infant incubator at a Jacksonville hospital in about 1904.

Hospital incubator babies