Header image: A photo of Hurley Hospital (now Hurley Medical Center) in 1930. The front of the building is facing eastward, and the Hurley Park seen is now where Hurley’s emergency room is. The Stevenson School seen in the foreground is now a parking lot. The photo is from the Genesee County Historical Collections Center at UM-Flint.
While University of Michigan-Flint student Noah Lutz was looking for internships, he found a significant opportunity to occupy his time. It just wasn’t the one he’d imagined when he began his search.
Lutz, a junior who is studying computer science with a minor in health information systems, was hoping to find an internship with a Flint area healthcare facility. But when he was researching the history of Flint hospitals and healthcare, he found that there wasn’t much recorded in an easily searchable way.
“I connected with the Genesee Historical Collection Center at UM-Flint, and they set me up to start researching on my own about this,” Lutz said.
Part of the difficulty in researching hospitals and healthcare facilities in any municipality is that, because they are well-known local landmarks, media reports they’re referenced in over the years aren’t particularly descriptive.
“They are places that everybody’s assumed to know about, so you’re never gonna see somebody listing Genesys’s address, McLaren’s address, Hurley’s address, or describe what the buildings look like,” Lutz said. “People know where those places are and what they are. But what that’s meant historically is that we’re missing a lot of information about them because they’ve changed over the years. Some are gone. Some have moved. So we’re losing a lot of information about what they did, who operated them, where they were, and that’s something we’re hoping to address.”
That curiosity and desire to fill in historical gaps in the history of Flint and Genesee County medical facilities has now resulted in a major research project called the Genesee County Medical History Project. Lutz and another UM-Flint student, Sierra Pilarski, are working on it along with faculty and staff members Anne Jonas, PhD, assistant professor of computer science; John Girdwood, PhD, student affairs program manager and sociology lecturer; Stephanie Gelderloos, lecturer in the English department; and Margaret Collins, who works in the university’s archives department. Lutz said that Collins helped him found the project and has been a vital resource in connecting him with other local organizations with historic data and records.
Some of the organizations Lutz has worked with include historical societies for Genesee County, Fenton, Burton, and Otter Lake, archives at local colleges and universities, including Mott Community College, Baker College, and Kettering University, healthcare organizations including the Hurley Foundation, McLaren, New Paths, and Genesee Health System, and many more. He’s working with them to look through archived information, historic photos, and other materials to help piece together a more comprehensive history in a way that is searchable and public.
“It’s this interesting mixture of both health agencies and historical agencies,” Lutz said.
The Importance of the Project
Lutz’s motivation for chronicling this history is simple: hospitals and healthcare facilities play a vital role in our communities as care providers, employers, and much more.
“There have been so many people who have passed through these facilities,” he said. “There have been the doctors, the nurses, all of the clinical staff who’ve served there. There have been the patients who were born there, the patients who got care there, the patients who died there. There have been families visiting there.”
Hospitals also serve as a point of pride – most Flint natives will quickly include “I was born at St. Joe’s” or “I was born at Hurley” as a part of their personal narratives when describing themselves and their connections to the city. Lutz wanted to build a tool where people could still find information about a place like St. Joseph’s, which opened in 1921 and closed in 1997 after merging with Genesys. It was located where the Genesys Hurley Cancer Institute is now located on Kensington Avenue, just off of Robert T. Longway.
“Some of these historic places, you Google them and you don’t find any information anymore,” Lutz said. “It’s such a core part of life. I think it’s fair to say that pretty much everybody is going to pass through a hospital at some point, whether that’s when they’re born, when they die, when they get really sick, and we have not preserved their histories very well. So we’re really hoping to increase awareness of Genesee County’s medical history while honoring the people who worked there, the people who got care there, and also just educating all of us. Maybe we could avoid making the same healthcare mistakes about certain topics that were made in the past if we knew better what happened.”
Collecting and Presenting the Data
Before the project could kick off, Lutz and the team had to define what they were even looking for. ‘Hospital’ has meant a lot of different things historically, so to make sure the project captures as many facilities as possible, they’ve widened the scope to include several types of organizations that have provided different aspects of care.
Lutz noted that modern places that specialize in things like cancer treatment or outpatient surgeries aren’t considered hospitals now, but those are types of care that would’ve occurred in hospitals in the past. The research has also highlighted how the idea of care for the sick or injured has significantly evolved, which can be seen through things as simple as what healthcare facilities used to be called.
“We’ve had to define it (the facilities they’re researching) as a place that’s either providing emergency care, inpatient care, or highly invasive outpatient care,” Lutz said. “We have definitely noticed that there is an interesting shift over time with the idea of what a hospital is. In the old days, for example, we were barbaric. There was the county house where poor people would pretty much just be sent to die. We were opening pest houses, detention hospitals, and contagious disease hospitals all over the county where we didn’t really understand the disease, so they were just sent to die. Even the language around it was pretty brutal: ‘If you get sick, you’re a burden. You’re a pest. You’re in detention.’ And these places were designed as such too. They had barbed wire around them, it was more like a prison than anything.”
Although the website is incomplete because the team is still collecting and adding data, a prototype version is live that shows some of the capabilities and information that has been gathered. It includes a map with a slider so that users can see facility locations by year. A time chart allows users to search for facilities and see how their timelines overlapped each other.
The tools show a wide range of phenomena in Genesee County, including when facilities started to break off and focus on specialized areas (like psychiatric care, or endoscopy). It also shows facilities being concentrated in or near the city of Flint and eventually spreading to other parts of the county as the population grew and economic shifts occurred.
“For a while, it was spreading in all directions, Flint Township had a lot of development, Burton had a little bit, north Flint had a lot,” Lutz said. “But now it’s really starting to move south. So we’re noticing that Grand Blanc specifically is where a lot of things are starting to shift to. There’s one area that’s over by the corner of U.S. 23 and Hill Road where there’s like three surgery centers there alone. Another interesting thing that we connected the movement of hospitals to was we can see major events happen. You can see the Spanish Flu happen on the map we’re building because, for example, we have emergency hospitals open, which were places where it’d just be a regular building. One was St. Paul Episcopal Church, where they just opened the doors of one of the buildings next door as a hospital where they staffed doctors and sick people could come stay and get care. Another was the open-air school on Flint’s southside, which also opened up during that time. It’s really interesting to see how we can relate the opening of hospitals or the closing of hospitals to these major events and shifts throughout time.”
Finding Unique Stories
The team’s research shows that historically, although Flint emerged as a major industrial hub in Michigan, it wasn’t the only center of medical care in the region. At different times, there were full-service hospitals in places like Mt. Morris and Davison, a Tonsil and Maternity Hospital in Flushing, and several hospitals and maternity homes in Fenton.
The Tonsil Hospital was especially notable because tonsillitis was once considered a serious and potentially deadly illness, particularly in rural areas where access to doctors was limited. Patients would travel to places like Flushing specifically to have their tonsils removed before returning home.
The Fenton Community Hospital is an example of a small-town hospital, often established by doctors or nurses who wanted to help a community. Its founder moved through several Michigan communities before eventually establishing the hospital in Fenton and later moving it to Flint, where it became the Flint Community Hospital.
Another part of the area’s medical history was the County Hospital for the Care of the Insane. During Prohibition, state psychiatric facilities became overcrowded because people experiencing alcohol intoxication or withdrawal were often classified as insane. Genesee County housed people considered mentally ill in its jail, and eventually placed some of them in the Genesee County Detention Home, a facility otherwise used to house children involved in criminal cases or custody disputes. After the children were moved to a new detention facility, the building was used entirely as a government-funded hospital for people considered insane.
“Insane hospitals were not uncommon, unfortunately, because insanity is another terribly defined thing in the past,” Lutz said. “So we had plenty of insane hospitals. But this one was notable for being government-funded because government-funded insane hospitals were not really something that was seen a lot around Michigan at the time.”
The city also operated the Smallpox Pest House on Flint’s southside, which functioned more as an isolation facility than as a conventional hospital.
The Coggshall Sanitarium in Carriage Town was also an interesting connection to Flint’s medical history. People were treated for mental illnesses and supposedly incurable diseases, using treatments such as therapeutic baths. Its founder, Dr. Coggshall was also unusually forward-thinking about tuberculosis, which was then known as “consumption.” In 1881, a year before Robert Koch identified the tuberculosis bacterium, Coggshall published and presented an article arguing that consumption was a contagious disease and discussing ways to prevent it. Although he ultimately believed tuberculosis was caused by a parasite and did not prove the disease’s true cause, his early recognition that it was a disease rather than an inherited defect was significant.
“That makes him actually among some of the first doctors in the U.S. to truly believe that tuberculosis was a disease, which is a really random but significant piece of history (that happened in Flint),” Lutz said. “He ended up not actually proving anything himself. He later doubled down claiming it was a parasitic infection. But it still had the potential to have been something significant. Had things played out a little bit differently, his work could have likely led to the discovery of tuberculosis, and he still was one of the most forward-thinking people about it at the time.”
Next Steps With the Project
Eventually, in addition to the web tools that are being developed, Lutz is hoping to also release a book and possibly even partner with a museum in Genesee County as ways to share the information with the public.
“The book is gonna be essentially just the raw information,” he said. “It will be heavily sourced and separated by article, where each institution has its own chapter. We’re going to develop the website to a state where we can share it publicly, and that’s gonna include that map tool and the stacked bar chart tool that is a timeline of all of the different hospitals that have existed laid on top of each other. And then lastly, we want to do an annotated map, which would be a map that you could explore, and then certain places would have photos laid onto the map itself, maybe pinpoints that you click on, and a dropdown of information about what was specifically right there.”
One thing Lutz is hoping the community can help him with is specific photos that help document what the different facilities looked like, especially the ones that no longer exist today. He can be reached at noahlutz@umich.edu to share information and connect.
“Unfortunately, the big issue is that photos don’t really exist of some of them,” Lutz said. “Another issue is because this is a research project, we have to be careful on using things which aren’t copyright protected, so we can’t just go online and grab them. We have to specifically either take stuff that’s been archived, donated to us, or we can get through fair use newspaper publications. We’re really hoping that we may be able to source photographs from people in the community, and we’re not fully set up for it right now, but we would also like to start making connections to take in oral histories. So people could talk about their time working at a place, maybe they visited a place, things like that.”
Lutz, who is originally from the Grand Rapids area, is grateful for all of the faculty and community support he’s received so far on this project. It re-affirmed for him why he chose to attend UM-Flint in the first place.
“It is actually the first university I ever toured and the only university I applied to,” Lutz said. “I grew up not even knowing about UM-Flint, but there’s a website I was using to try to learn more about UM-Ann Arbor, and I accidentally got to the UM-Flint page, and I saw the picture of the arches on Saginaw Street at night with the pavilion in the background, and I just thought that was so beautiful. I started looking into it, and the university had my exact program I wanted, and it was very personal. They were the only university through my entire touring process that gave me\ a personal tour. Everybody was just so kind to me, and they really emphasized that they were here to help me.”
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