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Exactly why the backers of Barnes University chose in 1912 to rename their institution National University of Arts and Sciences is unknown, although it is possible to speculate that whereas construction of the (totally unrelated) Barnes Hospital was by then underway, the hospital trustees perhaps asserted claims to exclusive rights to the Barnes name. National University established an undergraduate college in 1913, with courses initially offered in the medical building, then in 1915 moved to a structure at Grand and Delmar Boulevards. The institution attempted as well to operate a preparatory academy. After Christian Hospital withdrew from administration of the former Centenary structure, what was left of the inpatient facility was renamed National Hospital. Also in 1915, a merger was announced between the medical department and the St. Louis College of Physician and Surgeons, another financially beleaguered independent school. This arrangement failed, however, with Physicians and Surgeons withdrawing its faculty and students in 1916. That year witnessed the end of all the National departments but medicine. In 1918 the last medical class graduated and National’s clinical facilities ceased to treat patients.

Barnes Medical College was founded in 1892 as a "for-profit" institution by a group of St. Louis physicians and businessmen. In 1911, Barnes Medical College merged with American Medical College. In 1912, the product of this merger was given a new name: National University of Arts and Sciences. The effort failed, however, and all programs ceased by 1918.

Barnes Medical College was named in honor of a recently deceased merchant, Robert A. Barnes (1808-1892). Barnes had bequeathed money for the construction of a hospital and it has been widely presumed that the educators’ choice of name was part of an attempt to secure an affiliation between the two institutions. If so, the attempt failed, for the trustees of the Robert A. Barnes estate chose instead to reinvest the assets and wait for a more favorable time to build Barnes Hospital. Ignoring the rebuff, the college trustees constructed a building of their own at 2645 Chestnut (later renamed Lawton) Street. The institution quickly became the largest medical college in the city (ca. 400 students) and its program outgrew the original structure. In 1896 a second building opened two blocks west, on Lawson at Garrison Avenue. In 1902 the objective of a college-related clinical facility was achieved with the establishment of Centenary Hospital and the Barnes Dispensary in a new adjoining building. The institution also operated a dental college (see below), a college of pharmacy, and a nurses’ training program. At its height, the college enrolled approximately 600 students, and in 1904 changed its name to Barnes University. Despite these enhancements and changes of name, it became increasing apparent that the institution was financially unstable. The trustees offered their properties to the Curators of the University of Missouri in 1906 to house the state medical college. The negotiations lasted over a year and the Curators came close to accepting what seemed at first to be a generous offer. In the end, however, the state refused to pay the private venture’s debts and plans for the connection collapsed in 1908. During this same period, Barnes did absorb a smaller private school, the Hippocratean College of Medicine. Flexner severely criticized the Barnes institutions in 1909, however, a contemporary reviewer writing for the American Medical Association (Philip Skrainka, 1910) judged their quality “good.” One year following the merger with American Medical College in 1911 the names Barnes ceased to refer to medical instruction by this organization. For a brief period (1911-1914?) the Centenary facility was administered by Christian Hospital. From 1919 until 1936 the city of St. Louis used the building as a hospital for African American patients (City Hospital No. 2). The structures at Garrison and Lawton were demolished in 1960.

American Medical College was organized in 1873. Its backers were promoters of “eclecticism,” which was an approach to therapeutics that emphasized herbal remedies. The first class graduated in 1874, when instruction was offered at 7th and Olive Streets. The college admitted two classes each subsequent year up to 1883, thereafter a single class annually but with a longer term of instruction. From 1878 until 1890 the institution was located at 310 North 11th Street in St. Louis, and then moved to 407 S. Jefferson Avenue. Some time around 1900 the faculty staffed what was billed as “the only eclectic hospital in the west,” Metropolitan Hospital, but this facility evidently did not remain open long. Flexner graded American along with several other Missouri medical schools as “utterly wretched” following his visit in 1909. In 1910 the college abandoned eclecticism and formally embraced “regular” medicine. The college purchased a new building and also opened a second hospital and a dispensary on Pine Street at Theresa Avenue. Again the clinical facilities were short-lived. In 1911 American merged with nearby Barnes University. The combined institution was renamed National University in 1912.

St. Louis Medical College was chartered in 1841 as the medical department of St. Louis University. The university appointed the first faculty, but allowed them to be governed by an autonomous, nonsectarian Board of Trustees. Instruction began in October 1842 in a small building that was owned by the first dean, James Vance Prather, located on Washington Avenue near Tenth Street and adjacent to the university buildings. In 1849 the college moved to a neoclassical style building at Clark Avenue and Seventh Street built by the financier John O'Fallon. Despite the nonsectarian board, public pressure -- particularly from the extreme nativist movement, the so-called "Know Nothing" party -- demanded that the department sever ties with the Roman Catholic university. In 1855, the state of Missouri granted the college a charter as an independent institution.

In the 1850s and 1860s St. Louis Medical College was so dominated by one man, the second dean, Charles Alexander Pope that it was commonly referred to as "Pope's College." There was some literal truth to the name, because Pope owned the Seventh Street building outright. On Pope's death in 1870, his colleagues were forced as a group to raise funds to buy the facility. That group organized under the name of the Medical Fund Society of St. Louis.

In the 1870s the curriculum of the college was reformed and expanded. By 1880, all students were required to matriculate for three years before receiving a diploma. In 1891, St. Louis Medical College became affiliated with Washington University and was designated its medical department. For eight more years, however, the old name was maintained, and the medical school was known jointly as the Washington University Medical Department and Saint Louis Medical College. This dual name was dropped only when the Missouri Medical College affiliated with the university in 1899.

In 1892 the Medical Fund Society and Washington University sponsored the construction of a new facility at 1804 Locust Street. The building was praised for being "commodious and well planned." But less than twenty years later, the same building was devastatingly criticized by Abraham Flexner in his famous report to the Carnegie Commission. With the reorganization of Washington University School of Medicine in 1910, most of the remaining traditions of St. Louis Medical College were abandoned in the interests of progressive medical education.

The Jewish Sanitarium "was established in 1910 and opened in 1914. The Jewish Sanitarium, which was located on Fee Fee Road in St. Louis County, and which was supported by United Charities (now the United Way) through the Jewish Federation, was established to give adequate nursing and medical service and full maintenance to anyone suffering from any chronic disease, including lodging, board and complete medical services. The facility accepted Jewish persons suffering from any chronic disease, the majority of whom either had or were exposed to tuberculosis.

In order to provide for the special needs of children with, or exposed to, TB, the Sanitarium, which had 24 beds for chronic invalids and 52 for TB patients, created and sponsored, the Summer Preventorium in 1926, for a total of 32 children, 16 boys and 16 girls. The program, which was informally called “Camp Fee Fee,” accepted an entirely new group each year. Service included full maintenance, lodging and board, playground activities under specially qualified supervisors, health education and complete nursing and medical service."

... “The Sanitarium consisted of a colonial-style main building with a pillared porch and an extension with enclosed second-story porches. A second building, the Shoenberg Memorial, resembled a Spanish mission in its design,” he said.

"In 1951, a Community Health Plan resulted in the merger of the Miriam Rose Bry Convalescent Hospital in Webster Groves, the Jewish Medical Service Bureau, and the Sanitarium with Jewish Hospital. By Oct. 10, 1956, all of the Sanitarium’s patients had moved to Jewish Hospital."
URL: https://www.stljewishlight.com/blogs/cohn/remembering-camp-for-jewish-kids-exposed-to-tuberculosis/article_2180e068-3998-11e2-b61d-0019bb2963f4.html

Sidney Jick was a graduate of Washington University School of Medicine in the class of ?. He was the son of the late Morris E. and the late Fanny Jick.

Alpha Omega Alpha (AOA) is a national medical honor society that recognizes scholarship and leadership in medicine and related fields. It is composed of medical men and women, in medical schools in North America who show promise for attaining professional leadership, notable physicians in practice, and others who have gained unusual recognition in fields related to medicine. The original chapter was founded in 1902 by William W. Root, then a junior in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Chicago, medical department of the University of Illinois.

Root founded the organization as a protest against 'a condition which associated the name medical student with rowdyism, boorishness, immorality, and low educational ideals.' Root and his fellow medical students formed a society that would foster honesty and formulate higher ideals of scholastic achievement.

The Washington University Chapter, called the Alpha of Missouri, founded in 1905, was the seventh chapter. The founding members of AOA at the medical school saw the need for a higher educational standard before the 1910 Flexner report changed the department and American medical education as a whole. The Washington University Medical Department raised its standards for entrance to the medical school, hired full time faculty, reformed the curriculum, and built a new medical campus with numerous hospitals on site as partners in medical education.

As the negative image of the medical student changed, the society continued to foster and honor student scholastic achievement at Washington University. The activities for members changed over the years but included initiation with an AOA membership key and certificate, annual banquets and lectures, and an AOA Book Prize still given each year at commencement for outstanding scholarship (News from the Medical School, Washington University, press release, March 10, 1954; Washington University School of Medicine Bulletin online, accessed 3/17/2006; Online Finding Aid to the Alpha Omega Alpha Archives, 1894-1968, at the National Library of Medicine, accessed 8/11/2006).

Nu Sigma Nu is an international professional fraternity for medicine. The Pi chapter of the Nu Sigma Nu was a student medical fraternity located at the Washington University School of Medicine. The chapter was a first a local medical fraternity of the Missouri Medical College begun in 1898. In 1900, Alpha Kappa Phi became the Pi chapter of a national fraternity, Nu Sigma Nu. The Washington university chapter had an enthusiatic alumni club in the early years besides its active or student chapter. In its heyday, it maintained a large residential chapter house on Forest Park Boulevard. Nu Sigma Nu's last members graduated with class of 1972 and met at Olin Residence Hall. When the chapter residence was sold, Cecil H. Charles, an active alumnus established a fund which paid expenses for many years. In 1972 when the chapter dissolved, the funds assets were transferred to the Medical School to form the Cecil M. Charles, Nu Sigma Nu Medical Scholarship Fund.

Dr. Donald L. Thurston, 77 a prominent pediatrician, who practiced in St. Louis for half a century died in December 1987. Don L. Thurston, MD, was also a Washington University professor of pediatrics and a professor emeritus of pediatrics. He joined the faculty of the department of Pediatrics in 1947 and retired in 1979. He and his wife, Dr. Jean Holowach Thurston collaborated on multiple research projects in pediatric epilepsy based on cases at St. Louis Children's Hospital and the Pediatric Convulsive Clinic.

Donald Lionell Thurston earned a Bachelor of Science at Vanderbilt University in 1934 and also an M.D. From Vanderbilt University School in 1937. Jean Holowach and Donald L. Thurston met in the 1940s in the Department of Pediatrics at Washington University. They married in 1949.

During his long career he specialized in general prediatrics and treatment of allergies. He was also on the medical staff of St. Louis Children's Hospital where he retired in 1985?. He was a member for many years of the Missouri Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, serving as chairman from 1977-1985. He was director of the first Birth Defect Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital from 1964-1970.

St. Louis Children's Hospital was founded in 1879 and is the oldest pediatric hospital west of the Mississippi River and the 7th oldest in the United States. St. Louis Children's Hospital (SLCH) opened in 1879 at 2834 Franklin Avenue, in a small building which could admit just 15 patients. Created through the efforts of a group of St. Louis women and homeopathic doctors, SLCH was one of the first hospitals dedicated to the care of children in the United States. Within five years of opening, a new, larger hospital building was constructed at the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Adams Street in 1884. The hospital's growth continued as it affiliated with another children's hospital, the Martha Parsons Free Hospital for Children (previously the Augusta Free Hospital for Children), in 1910.

A large gift to fund a new hospital building and an affiliation agreement with Washington University prompted the hospital to move again in 1915. This new building was located at 500 South Kingshighway Boulevard near the new Barnes Hospital and the Washington University School of Medicine campus. SLCH would move once again just one block north to a new building at 400 South Kingshighway Boulevard in 1984. Throughout its years of operation, SLCH has shared staff, building space, and in other ways partnered with other local institutions including Barnes Hospital, Jewish Hospital, and St. Louis Maternity Hospital. In 1994, SLCH signed a merger agreement with BJC Health System.

Over the course of its history, SLCH has continually grown, offering new services and admitting more patients. From the two initial patients which the hospital admitted in 1879, total patient admissions at the main hospital building grew to 76 admissions in 1885; 1,800 admissions in 1915; 3,987 admissions in 1942; 7,360 admissions in 1977; and 15,500 admissions in 2009. The $551.34 of cash on hand which the hospital reported in 1879 had grown to net revenue of $4,556,000 in 1983, just before the hospital moved to its new 400 South Kingshighway building.

St. Louis Children's Hospital has achieved worldwide, national, and regional medical innovations and firsts, and provides national and regional leadership in multiple medical specialties. Among these achievements is the first treatment of a diabetic child using insulin in the United States in 1922. SLCH is consistently ranked among the best pediatric hospitals in the United States by U.S. News and World Report.