Cleveland Clinic and UH’s greed helped killed the 47 hospitals and 7000 beds thinking leaders started building in 1837 to deal with future pandemics
CLEVELAND, OH – The Cleveland City Directory of 1974 identifies 47 hospitals in the nation’s 8th largest city that year. Within and around Cleveland’s direct municipal borders were 7000 hospital beds that had been built into our health care infrastructure since City Hospital was constructed in 1837 after the cholera pandemic. This story’s feature image is of the newly-constructed free Cleveland hospital 184 years ago. As Cleveland experienced more pandemics the city’s enlightened political and health care leaders pushed for and enacted laws that provided funding to increase hospital bed capacity and expand free care. By 1937 Cleveland’s City Hospital…