Mercy Hospital
Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Founded in 1847 by the Sisters of Mercy as Pittsburgh's first hospital. Medical internships began in 1848, and the nursing school in 1893. This was the first Mercy hospital worldwide, caring for all patients, especially the community's poor.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
When the Sisters of Mercy opened Pittsburgh's first hospital in 1847, the booming industrial city had no institution devoted to caring for its sick and injured, least of all its poor. The order quickly made it a place of teaching as well as healing, launching medical internships the following year and one of the era's early nursing schools in 1893. As the first Mercy hospital in the world, it became the seed of a Catholic health-care network that would spread far beyond Pittsburgh.
Why it matters
It marks the origins of organized, professional health care in an industrial American city — pioneered by Catholic women whose commitment to the poor shaped medicine and nursing education for generations.
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Related people
- · Sisters of Mercy
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Sisters of Mercy
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1993
In December 1843, Frances Ward and six fellow Sisters of Mercy arrived from Carlow, Ireland, and opened the first convent of their order in the United States on this Pittsburgh ground. In a growing industrial city crowded with poor and immigrant families, the sisters set to work at once teaching, nursing the sick, and caring for the destitute. From this modest beginning, Mercy convents and their schools and hospitals spread across the nation.
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