A Drama in Time: Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet opened Tucson's first hospital

“Tucson: A Drama in Time,” by John P. Warnock, professor emeritus of English at the University of Arizona, will soon be published, but it has its beginnings as a volume of the Journal of the Southwest.

We are publishing excerpts on the fourth Monday of the month.

Before St. Mary’s Hospital, the best Tucson had was a pest house on Alameda Street (pest houses were those places for people with communicable diseases, which in Tucson were likely to be tuberculosis and smallpox in the 1880s), and mothers. Then came the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.

From Tucson: A Place-Making, Volume 58, Number 3, Autumn 2016, concerning Arizona’s first hospital:

1870

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Having traveled by wagon from San Diego across the California and Arizona deserts, seven Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet come around Point of Rocks and arrive in Tucson, the townspeople having gone out to welcome them in a celebration punctuated by gunfire. Before long, they have opened a private school for girls near St. Augustine Cathedral. In 1873, they open a school for Indians at Mission San Xavier (still in existence in 2014, operated now by the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity, who teach at the school and reside in the convent at San Xavier). In 1880, they will open St. Mary’s Hospital, Arizona’s first hospital.

1880

At the foot of Tumamoc Hill on Sisters Lane (later Hospital Road and then St. Mary’s Road), St. Mary’s Hospital is opened by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, who had first arrived in Tucson 10 years earlier, having come by wagon from San Diego. Before this, Tucson’s “hospital” had been its “pest house,” on Alameda Street, much in use during the epidemic of smallpox that began in Tucson in 1877.