1962

Opening of St. Jude’s Research Hospital for Children in Memphis. Spearheaded by Danny Thomas and his organization of Lebanese and Syrian Americans (ALSAC) and its grant of $159,000 in 1958, the hospital was nondenominational and dedicated to study of catastrophic childhood diseases, especially leukemia and sickle cell anemia. Its creation “offered a sharp break with Memphis’s past – a break with its civic disdain for ‘indigent outsiders’ and with its previous low national profile as a research center” (Wailoo III, 152). The hospital banned racial segregation, e.g., in its wards, bathrooms, and clinical services, and in nearby hotels (e.g., Claridge’s) that received the families of patients. “The coming of St. Jude’s thus pointed to the ascendancy of research medicine with its new economy, an economy with the ability to change the local conception of the infirm as well as to influence local values . . . it represented a consolidation of public attention and cultural authority around new and feared childhood diseases, and around the specialists who studied them” (154-155).