Leading a Rescue Operation : Nun saves records of L.A.’s oldest hospital--which also chronicle city’s history--from the trash heap, sparking plan for an unusual museum.

In her 50 years of medical work, Sister Helen Carmody has seen her share of emergencies roll through hospital corridors.

But nothing prepared her for the trauma she experienced the day she noticed workmen pushing dollies down a basement hallway at St. Vincent Medical Center near downtown Los Angeles.

Workers were disposing of boxes of tattered papers, old photos and frayed, leather-bound ledgers filled with elegant handwritten script so distinctive of the 19th century.

Carmody was startled as she surveyed the dumpster-bound trash. Piled in front of her was an irreplaceable history of the city’s oldest hospital--not to mention an unexpected chronicle of life in early Los Angeles.

Spelled out in detail were the early workings of the medical center--which started out as “County Hospital” when six Roman Catholic nuns set up shop 140 years ago in a leaky adobe building near Olvera Street.

More compelling was the portrait sketched in the paperwork that depicted the community that was quickly emerging around the old pueblo.

Besides dispensing good medicine, it turns out that the Sisters of Charity nuns kept good records. They kept tabs on the area’s growth (3,000 residents in 1856) and on such things as the town’s first electric light (atop a 100-foot pole at Commercial and Main streets). They took special note of scourges such as the smallpox epidemic of 1886 and the typhoid fever outbreak of 1905.

Patients’ old files were especially rich in detail.

Office clerks checked themselves into the hospital and discovered that the “cold and persistent coughing” they had suffered for months was actually pulmonary tuberculosis. Children routinely grappled with the grippe, mumps and diphtheria.

Railroad workers helping to connect Los Angeles with the East fell from boxcars or crushed their hands in train switches. Rowdy young men were beaten in scuffles or wounded in shooting accidents. A fireman knocked unconscious for 3 1/2 days by a flying hose connection is noted in one ledger.

“I’m Irish. We’re prone to knowing the value of heirlooms,” said Carmody, 88.

So with a no-nonsense determination that only a veteran nun can summon, she put a stop to dumping last summer at the hospital at 3rd and Alvarado streets.

In the process, she set in motion a plan to create an unusual history center and museum run by a full-time, professional archivist that will eventually be open to the public and to researchers.

The center will be the first of its kind in California and perhaps the West, according to Cal State Northridge archivist Robert Marshall, who is assisting in its planning. “This is a good, rich collection. Their records go back to Day 1,” Marshall said.

The documents trace the hospital’s odyssey as it grew from its dirt-floor adobe into a 385-bed acute care facility that has an international reputation as an organ transplant center. Now at its fifth site, St. Vincent is among the state’s highest volume cardiac surgery and kidney transplant centers, according to its current operators, who also say its liver disease treatment program is the first of its kind in the country.

*

But St. Vincent is 140 years late in starting a museum, acknowledged Cathy Waymost, a hospital volunteer who is helping to collect antique medical equipment and early hospital furnishings to display along with the records.

Like other hospitals, it routinely junked old equipment as newer devices were purchased. And tons of still-usable gear were donated to Mexican clinics over the years, said Waymost, 50, of Tarzana.

Waymost is the wife of a St. Vincent doctor and president of the hospital auxiliary. She is also the one Carmody hurriedly called last summer when she discovered the basement being cleaned out as part of a remodeling project.

Carmody remembered that Waymost had admired her for salvaging pieces of custom-made tile and brass elevator emblems from a 45-year-old wing of the hospital that was demolished in the 1970s. Carmody had confided to Waymost that she had retrieved other old hospital castoffs as well--stashing them in an old steamer trunk kept hidden in a room off the hospital’s roof.

*

Those treasures will also become part of the museum.

“They were always getting the newest things and throwing out the oldest,” Carmody said as she demonstrated a no-frills doctor’s stethoscope from the 1950s.

“I wanted to at least save some relics. Things like this tell you something of the era they’re from.”

Some of the antiques were marvels in their day. A white-painted combination bedside reading and night light used in the 1920s in patients’ rooms still switches on and off. A pair of turn-of-the-century mahogany examination tables, complete with movable cast-iron stirrups, seem ready for use today.

A 75-year-old hospital chapel baptismal font most recently used by a nun who grew philodendrons in it in her room will be displayed. So will replicas of the wing-shaped head coverings that the original Sisters of Charity wore from their arrival in Los Angeles until 1965.

Outsiders are also contributing. “Physicians are coming back saying, ‘I’ve kept this in my garage all these years,’ and giving us stuff,” Waymost said.

“But a lot of medical equipment is gone. The first kidney dialysis machine used in the West, probably dating from the ‘50s, was sitting in a corner six or eight years ago. It’s gone forever now.”

*

The recollections of the hospital’s founders and those who have operated it for 14 decades have survived, however.

The first six nuns who waded ashore from a ship’s dinghy that beached at San Pedro traveled by stagecoach to the Los Angeles pueblo, according to hospital records. The nuns’ sea voyage from Maryland had included a trek over the isthmus of Panama.

In the hospital’s early days, flour sold for $30 a barrel “and no potatoes were to be had except on Steamer Day.” On those days a cannon would be fired at the intersections of Main, Spring and Temple streets to alert the pueblo that a ship had arrived at Wilmington.

The original adobe hospital building leaked so badly that the nuns had to cook their meals in the kitchen under an umbrella on rainy days. They helped support their hospital by raising cattle and fruit from “a grand orchard” that was next to an orphanage and a school they ran for local children.

Evolution from a general hospital into a facility known for its specialized medical services may have spared St. Vincent from the cutbacks and consolidations that have affected many of its neighboring hospitals.

“The most valuable thing we’ve done is stay alive. A lot of other hospitals have come and gone,” Carmody noted.

*

The museum will answer many questions about Los Angeles’ past, she added. But it may also cause some to walk away wondering how the city’s medical pioneers “did so much with so little.”

Waymost said: “You talk about the fabric of Los Angeles: This hospital is a very important thread. It’s woven throughout the history of the city.”