Monday, July 02, 2007

It's Monday, who knows if this is a waste of time or not...

It's a site to determine your risk of certain diseases -- something to do while chopping down your break-time Hostess Twinkie.

It all has some credibility because it 's on the website of the Siteman Cancer Center in St. Louis, past of the Washington University medical complex.

See if you can follow this:

Barnes Hospital is named for the banker who long ago put together the corporate structure of Anheuser-Busch.

Jewish Hospital moved next door.

St. Louis Children's Hospital was also adjacent.

All three merged, with Barnes-Jewish as the adult teaching hospitals for the Washington University School of Medicine and Children's the children's teaching hospital.

Then a holding company was formed: Barnes-Jewish-Christian when Christian Northwest Hospital was acquired.

Then, they acquired Missouri Baptist Hospital! What a great name it would have been: Barnes-Jewish-Christian-Missouri Baptist Hospital. That's a lot to put on a logo, however, so it all became BJC Heathcare.

Along the way, they got the Queeny fortune (founders of Monsanto) and Danforth fortune (founders of Ralston Purina).

5 comments:

Jay Noel said...

Lots of merging and stuff going on with hospitals in the last couple decades. It's mind blowing.

I work with hospitals, and the BJC hospital out in Flora, IL is tiny. Only 20 beds or something. But it feels pretty new.

When walking through there, I had a tough time with the fact that it was a BJC hospital.

Anonymous said...

You can actually get lost underground in the passageways of those buildings. I did.

Jim said...

foen -- I assume it's like the 'Doc-in-a Box' places that used to be in the shopping centers, it's just a way to feed patients to the main hospitals -- they have one in Sullivan also.

Moni -- they somehow cut a single hallway through all of those building (Barnes, Jewish, Children's), a real engineering masterpiece, it starts at the new lobby on what was the 2nd or 3rd floor of barnes -- a major Easter Eggs for those of you in St. Louis, in the barnes lobby, go past the fountain and down the stairs to the right, wind around a little downstairs, it's the old main lobby of Barnes, although that big lobby is all cut up, what are still in place are the overwhelming bronze doors and surrounds for the old elevator bank, WOW--

Moni -- I tried to leave a message on your site but Vista would not let me download the needed plugin?????????

stan said...

With all of those inherited fortunes, they oughta charge $0 for their services.

Jim said...

Stan -- like most hospitals, they never stop building and remodeling