Early years At the time of the founding of the hospital in 1852, other hospitals in
New York City discriminated against
Jewish people by not hiring Jewish doctors or nurses and by prohibiting Jewish patients from being treated in the hospitals' wards. Jewish doctors themselves faced restrictive quotas or outright refusal when it came to medical education and training in specialties. Originally called '''The Jews' Hospital in the City of New York''', it was the second Jewish hospital in the United States, after the
Jewish Hospital in
Cincinnati, Ohio, which was established in 1847. It was built on West 28th Street in Manhattan, between
Seventh and
Eighth Avenues, on rural land donated by Simson, and opened with 45 beds on May 17, 1955, two years before Simson's death. The cost of the new structure was $30,000 (). The Jews' Hospital felt the effects of the escalating Civil War in other ways, as staff doctors and board members were called into service. Dr. Israel Moses served four years as lieutenant colonel in the
72nd New York Infantry Regiment;
Joseph Seligman had to resign as a member of the board of directors, as he was increasingly called upon by
President Lincoln for advice on the country's growing financial crisis. The
New York Draft Riots of 1863 also impacted the hospital's resources, as it admitted many of the wounded. This again helped in community relations, as by accepting everyone as patients it helped undermine the stereotype that Jews only cared about taking care of their own people. Capacity was thrice that of before, Accordingly, the hospital and its associated entities have long considered usage around the name "Mount Sinai" to be important. Part of this is that in Mount Sinai publications and use, the flagship hospital's name is always preceded by a capitalized 'The', thus 'The Mount Sinai Hospital', even in running text, while the other hospitals in the health system, such as Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West, get no 'the' or 'The' at all.
20th century The Mount Sinai Hospital forged relationships with many physicians who made contributions to medicine, including Henry N. Heineman, Frederick S. Mandelbaum,
Bernard Sachs, Charles A. Elsberg,
Emanuel Libman, and, most significantly,
Abraham Jacobi, known as the father of American pediatrics and a champion of construction at the hospital's new site on Manhattan's
Upper East Side in 1904. Indeed, from the early years of the 20th century on, doing medical research became an active priority at Mount Sinai. The early 20th century saw the population of New York City explode. That, coupled with many new discoveries at Mount Sinai (including significant advances in
blood transfusions and the first endotracheal
anesthesia apparatus), meant that Mount Sinai's pool of doctors and specialists was in increasing demand. A $1.35 million ($ in current dollar terms) expansion of the 1904 hospital site raced to keep pace with demand. The opening of the new buildings was delayed by the advent of World War I. Mount Sinai responded to a request from the
United States Army Medical Corps with the creation of Base Hospital No.3. This unit went to France in early 1918, and treated 9,127 patients with 172 deaths: 54 surgical and 118 medical, the latter due mainly to
influenza and
pneumonia. For many years, the staff at Mount Sinai was disproportionately Jewish, in part due to many Christian-run hospitals being reluctant to hire those doctors. This was especially the case for Jewish hospitals in the period after World War I, when antisemitism ran high in the United States. These wartime roles were eclipsed, however, when the men and women of Mount Sinai's 3rd General Hospital set sail for
Casablanca,
Morocco, eventually setting up a 1,000-bed hospital in war-torn Tunisia. Before moving to tend to the needs of soldiers in
Italy and
France, the 3rd General Hospital had treated more than 5,000 wounded soldiers.
Postwar After World War II, the levels of antisemitism in the medical profession gradually declined, Indeed, it was said to be the first hospital in the world to do so, and the first of any type of organization within New York City. It was used for storing, retrieving, and processing administrative data as well as for scientific applications. A promotional photograph showed two men in suits over a computer terminal while three nurses in the white uniforms and caps of the time looked on. Once the Mount Sinai School of Medicine was in existence, it tended to have its own computer systems. The Laboratory of Computer Science was in existence within the school, It used
DEC PDP-11 minicomputers. The mid-to-late 1970s saw the first online applications appear at Mount Sinai, running at
IBM 3270 terminals under control of
CICS: these included admissions-discharges-transfers, outpatient visit recording, and some medical records, but in this era most applications were still run via
batch processing from manually submitted forms, so for instance while the pharmacy profile system was online, the drugs and stores inventory was batch. Indeed, the Mount Sinai data processing department was profiled in
Computerworld newspaper in 1980 as having been an early adopter, and still heavy user, of
computer output microfiche, including via the
Kodak Komstar, with some 188,000 frames of reports being produced per month for applications such as patient history, inpatient census, inpatient billing, outpatient records, personnel, and payroll. The initial site of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine was a converted and renovated bus garage, that previously kept in store the city's
Fifth and Madison Avenues buses. Located at 10 East 102nd Street, Mount Sinai paid $7 million (equivalent to $ million in ) for the facility, which would subsequently become known as the Cummings Basic Sciences Building. More than half of the new building was occupied by the medical school, with the balance allocated to various forms of advanced medical analysis and treatment. The building cost $117 million (equivalent to $ million in ); following substantial contributions by the businessman and diplomat
Walter Annenberg and his siblings, it was named for their mother, with some funds also coming from other private donations as well as from federal and state sources. The upper bound of the campus has long been found on the northern side of East 102nd Street. In the late 2000s the building underwent a substantial renovation, becoming the Center for Advanced Medicine. Opening in 2008 with the expanded address of 5–17 East 102nd Street, it houses various Mount Sinai medical functions including outpatient services. During the
1980 New York City transit strike, Mount Sinai avoided any interruption to its patient care by arranging various ways for employees to get to or stay at the facility, including expanded bicycle racks, overnight cots, and a dozen specially chartered bus routes from sites in the different boroughs to the hospital. By the early 1980s, Mount Sinai's hospital contained 1,200 beds and its medical school graduated 100 doctors a year and its budget was almost $300 million. Overall, the Mount Sinai campus was an "architectural hodgepodge", in the words of the
New York Times: there were 21 buildings in all, including some ornamented red-brick buildings, white-brick structures, service buildings, and various other structures. Many kinds of traffic went through these corridors: patients being transported, food carts being wheeled, staff going to meetings, visitors, security guards, all mixed together. and began a public fundraising drive to raise the monies necessary to make it possible. But then construction on the Mount Sinai project began in 1986. The new facility, which was architecturally coordinated by the firms
Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in conjunction with
Ellerbe Associates, while an assessment in
Architecture: The AIA Journal called it "an urban project that performs well both within Mount Sinai's sprawling complex and within Manhattan's Upper East Side." On the other side of Madison Avenue between 98th and 99th Streets was parking space run the by medical center; which opened in the late 1990s. By the end of the 20th century, Mount Sinai was seeing some 50,000 inpatient admissions and discharges per year, comprising about 400,000 inpatient-days in total, along with around 300,000 outpatient visits a year.
21st century In 1998, Mount Sinai had entered into a merger agreement with
New York University Medical Center. Nevertheless, the turnaround was successful and Mount Sinai survived the financial stress, Following a $200 million (equivalent to $ million in donation from the financier
Carl Icahn, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine was renamed to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2012. It opened in the mid-1990s, was refurbished in the early 2010s, and brings the hospital several million dollars a year in revenue. Two additional large buildings appeared during the early 2010s, as part of another major expansion. The medical facilities part of the building has the address 10 E. 102nd Street. Nonetheless, making use of the
New York State Housing Finance Agency's
80/20 housing and
421-a tax exemption provisions, twenty percent of the residential units were set aside for low-income residents. Later during the 2010s, there was a wave of consolidations within the health care industry, and Mount Sinai grew into the larger
Mount Sinai Health System which featured seven hospitals overall and a network of outpatient facilities. As with other hospitals in the city, in 2020 the nurses and other medical staff of Mount Sinai were soon celebrated as heroes during the dark initial period of the
COVID-19 pandemic in New York City.
Milestones 2000s • At Mount Sinai the staff performed the first successful composite
tracheal transplant, which was performed at the hospital in 2005. • First gene variant linked to
autism identified. • Zahi Fayad, PhD, and
Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, develop a technique called “black blood MRI” to detect vulnerable arterial plaque. • Published the first medical publication along with
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, antiretroviral treatments for HIV+ patients with renal failure. •
Bruce Gelb, MD, with collaborators, co-discovers that mutations in
PTPN11 cause
Noonan syndrome, inaugurating the Ras/MAPK “RASopathies” disease family. •
Fabrazyme approved by FDA to treat
Fabry disease, developed by
Robert Desnick, PhD, MD, David Bishop, PhD, and Yiannis Ioannou, PhD. • First successful composite tracheal transplant is performed by
Eric Genden, MD, using tissue from a donor and the recipient. • 1918 flu virus reconstructed by
Adolfo García-Sastre,
Peter Palese and colleagues for modern research. •
OLIG2 gene linked to
schizophrenia is discovered. • Proteins associated with
ALS are identified in
cerebrospinal fluid. • Advanced imaging of
leukocyte microdomains (white blood cell movement) developed. • Standard definitions for bleeding in trials established by
Roxana Mehran, MD.
2010s • In January 2013
David L. Reich was the first
openly gay medical doctor named interim president of Mount Sinai Hospital as reported by
The New York Times. In October of the same year he was named president. • Mechanism for a Parkinson’s gene mutation uncovered. • Vivek Reddy, MD implanted the first U.S. leadless cardiac pacemaker (St. Jude/Abbott Nanostim), launching the LEADLESS II pivotal trial. • First U.S. use of an FDA-approved drug-coated balloon for leg arteries. • Saadi Ghatan, MD, and team implant the NeuroPace RNS® system in a 14-year-old—then the youngest patient treated with this device—helping establish pediatric use of RNS for drug-resistant
epilepsy. • May, 20215 Kidney Stone Center opens for advanced and preventive care. • First
HIV-positive–to–HIV-positive organ transplant in New York State, performed by
Sander Florman, MD, and Susan Lerner, MD. • First tau-PET pattern of CTE reported in a living person. reavealing a CTE-typical tau pattern in a former NFL player—an early step toward in-life detection of the disease. • Immune map of eczema by
Emma Guttman, MD, PhD, and colleagues guides a breakthrough therapy. • Two strains of human herpesvirus are found in the brains of people with
Alzheimer’s disease at levels up to twice as high as in those without Alzheimer’s, as shown by Joel Dudley, PhD, and Samuel Gandy, MD, PhD.
2020s • Florian Krammer, PhD, and Viviana Simon, MD, PhD, lead a team that develops, validates, and launches a test that detects the quantity as well as the presence or absence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. • Common prostate cancer gene fusion identified, transforming diagnosis and research into disease subtypes. • Gustave L. Levy Stroke Unit earns certification as Comprehensive Stroke Center. • Mount Sinai doctors performed the first liver transplant in the US for a patient with
acute intermittent porphyria. • Institute for Health Equity Research established.
Recent acknowledgments 2024 •
Becker's Great Hospitals in America, 2024 •
Lown Institute's
2024-2025 Honor Roll •
Healthgrades'
Top 10% of U.S. Hospitals for Patient Safety in 2024 • Mount Sinai Doctors' Samuel J. Friedman Health Center for the Performing Arts,
2024 Tony Honor for Excellence in Theatre •
Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, ''The World Heart Federation's Lifetime Achievement Award for 2024'' • Beth Oliver,
Modern Healthcare's
50 Most Influential Clinical Executives •
Mount Sinai Morningside,
Mount Sinai South Nassau, and
Mount Sinai West, ''The Emergency Nurses Association's Top 94 emergency departments across the U.S.'' • The
Emergency Nurses Association's
2024 Lantern Award® •
Emma Guttman, ''
European Academy of Allergy & Clinical Immunology's Paul Ehrlich Award for Experimental Research''
2025 •
Brendan G. Carr and Jared Kutzin,
Becker's Great Leaders in Healthcare •
Mount Sinai Morningside, MSSN, and Mount Sinai Hospital,
American Heart Association's
Commitment to Quality Award • Emergency departments at
Mount Sinai Brooklyn and
Mount Sinai Queens,
Emergency Nurse Association's
Lantern Award® • Fanny Elahi,
Women's Health Longevity Redefiners •
Alon Harris, The Glaucoma Foundation's
Robert Ritch Award for Innovation and Excellence in Glaucoma • Franco Izzo,
American Society of Hematology's
2025 Scholar Award Recipients • Lauren Singelakis, Women We Admire's
Top 50 Women Leaders in Medicine for 2025 Controversies • Dr. Jack M. Gorman, formerly Department Chairman of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai, engaged in a long-term inappropriate sexual relationship with a patient prior to October 2005. • In August 2016,
Dennis S. Charney, then dean of the medical school, was shot and wounded as he left a deli in his home town of
Chappaqua, New York. Hengjun Chao, a former Mount Sinai medical researcher who had been fired by Charney for
research misconduct in 2010, was convicted of attempted second degree murder and two other charges in 2017, and received a sentence of 28 years. • In 2017, Dr. David H. Newman, a former emergency room physician at Mount Sinai Hospital, was sentenced to two years in prison for sexually abusing four female patients in the emergency room between 2015 and 2016, including touching their breasts. • Three doctors were convicted of violating anti-
kickback laws by accepting bribes disguised as speaker fees to write prescriptions to a highly addictive
fentanyl opioid painkiller. Gordon Freedman, an anesthesiologist at Mount Sinai, was convicted in December 2019 in Manhattan federal court. Alexandru Burducea, a pain management doctor and anesthesiologist who previously worked at Mount Sinai, was sentenced in January 2020 to 57 months in prison. • In April 2019, a lawsuit was filed against
Mount Sinai Health System and several employees of the hospital and the Icahn School's Arnhold Institute for Global Health. The suit was filed by eight current and former doctors and employees for alleged age and sex discrimination and based on a list of other allegations. The school denied the claims. == Mount Sinai Kravis Children's Hospital ==