Origins Northwestern Memorial Hospital's roots date back to 1865 when the then Deaconess Hospital of Chicago was established by local reverend William A. Passavant Sr. and Lucy Rider Meyer of the Chicago Training School (later Garrett Theological Seminary), with a capacity of 15 beds. In the first year, the hospital had treated 75 patients, with most receiving care free-of-charge. A few years later in 1871, Deaconess Hospital was destroyed in the
Great Chicago Fire, and Passavant could not afford the cost of a rebuild. In 1897, a group of local women formed the Passavant's Woman's Aid Society to raise money for the continued operation of the hospital. The society was later renamed to the "Woman's Board of Northwestern Memorial Hospital" after the merger between Passavant and Wesley. The society is now one of Chicago's oldest charities. In 1901, both Passavant Memorial Hospital and Wesley Hospital completed building expansion and renovation projects, expanding patient capacity to 65 and 181 beds, respectively. In 1914, local philanthropist
James Deering made a $1 million donation to Wesley Memorial Hospital to help formalize the hospital's affiliation with
Northwestern University Medical School and to support the care for those that could not afford. In 1942, doctors and nurses from both Passavant Memorial and Wesley were once again enlisted to help tender aid to soldiers during
World War II. In 1968, planning and fundraising commenced for a proposed joint women's hospital (Prentice Women's Hospital) that was to be controlled by Northwestern, Wesley Memorial, and Passavant Memorial Hospital. In 1971, staff from Passavant Memorial and Wesley Memorial gained admitting and hospital privileges at both hospitals; but the two hospitals voted to investigate the possibility in May 1972 and had already announced the consolidation of their two nursing schools.
Merger On September 1, 1972, Passavant Memorial Hospital and Wesley Memorial Hospital officially merged to become Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The 1,000-bed hospital became one of the largest private nonprofit healthcare institutions in the Chicago and the Midwest region; In 1975, the
Prentice Women's Hospital and
Northwestern University's Institute of Psychiatry were absorbed into Northwestern Memorial Hospital. A few years later, In 1979, the Olson Critical Care Pavilion opened adjacent to both the Passavant and Wesley Pavilions. Construction on the new facility began in 1994 on the block bordered by Fairbanks Court, St. Clair, Huron and Erie Streets. In 1996, surgeons from Northwestern Memorial Hospital became the first in Illinois to perform an
islet cell transplantation. On May 1, 1999, Northwestern Memorial Hospital opened the 17-floor Feinberg Pavilion and 22-floor Galter Pavilion at its current location in
Streeterville. The new construction became a model facility for hospital construction attracting healthcare providers to the hospital. The new hospital consisted of 492-all-private-patient-rooms and an emergency department that has the capacity to treat 70,000 patients per year. At the end, the replacement hospital cost a total of $580 million and consisted of over 2 million square feet of space. In 2001, demolition on the Passavant Building proceeded as the university had plans to replace the building with a new research facility. The new research facility was completed in 2005 and has since been named the "Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center" to honor the $40 million donation from the Ann Lurie Foundation in honor of her late husband. Currently, all that remains from the former Passavant Pavilion is pieces of the wall preserved at the Feinberg Pavilion. In 2005, the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute was established at Northwestern Memorial after local philanthropist Neil G. Bluhm donated $10 million to Northwestern to establish a heart institute.
Modern day In October 2007, after years of construction, the new
Prentice Women's Hospital opened at 250 East Superior Street, the same site that held the former Wesley Hospital. This facility would replace the old
Prentice Women's Hospital Building which later was demolished in September 2014 for new campus construction. The new hospital doubled the size of the previous women's hospital at , with one of the largest
neonatal intensive care units in the country. In 2009 the
William Wirtz family (former owner of the Chicago Blackhawks) donated $19.5 million to Robert H. Lurie Cancer Center at Northwestern Memorial Hospital for cancer research. The American College of Healthcare Architects recognized Northwestern Memorial for forward-thinking design as it was one of the first hospitals to dedicate private rooms to patients in the main Feinberg and Galter Pavilion buildings. To date, Northwestern Memorial Feinberg and
Galter Pavilion buildings make it the third tallest hospital in the United States and the eighth tallest hospital in the world. The neighboring
Lurie Children's Hospital, also affiliated with Northwestern, is the sixth tallest hospital facility in the country. In 2011, demolition began on the building that was occupying 259 E. Erie Street to make way for the construction of the new Northwestern Outpatient Pavilion. The next year, in 2012, Northwestern began construction on the $334 million, building. The new building contains the Northwestern Musculoskeletal Institute, outpatient operating rooms, a center for diagnostics, eight floors of doctors offices, and a 575-car garage. The new building officially opened on October 13, 2014. In January 2015, Northwestern Medicine announced that they would convert the 11-floor of the building from doctors offices to additional operating rooms due to higher-than-expected demand of outpatient surgeries. In October 2015, the Northwestern Outpatient Pavilion was renamed to the Lavin Family Pavilion to honor the philanthropic efforts of the Lavin Family Foundation towards Northwestern Medicine. On October 12, 2015, Northwestern Memorial Hospital named Julie L. Creamer as its first female president. Creamer received her BSN from
Marquette University and holds a Master of Science Degree from the
University of Illinois at Chicago. With construction beginning in 2015 and completed in 2019, the Simpson Querrey Biomedical Research Center is a building on the hospital campus that houses laboratories dedicated to biomedical research. Future expansion of the 14-story building will bring total dedicated research square footage to roughly 1.2 million. The project was partially funded and eventually named after Louis Simpson and his wife, Kimberly Querrey who made a $92 million donation to the center. In February 2020, it was announced that Northwestern Memorial Hospital would once again expand bed capacity, building a three-story addition between the Galter and Feinberg Pavilions with 49 new beds.
Cyber attack In April 2021, a breach at Elekta Inc., a company who handles cancer patient data for Illinois, involved unauthorized access to patient information from the Northwestern Memorial Healthcare system. Hospital officials claimed that
personally identifiable information including social security numbers were involved in the leak. == About ==