At the end of the nineteenth century, inmates at the Minnesota State Prison in Stillwater began publishing a newsletter written and edited by fellow prisoners. For the first time in US history, inmates at a state institution created a regular periodical that was fully their own at every level of production. They used it to discuss news, share their literary and artistic works, and organize for institutional change. Called the Prison Mirror, the newsletter served as a model for similar publications produced by inmates at nearly all of Minnesota’s state hospitals, correctional facilities, and state schools.
"If not fully satisfied, your money cheerfully refunded." We take statements like this for granted today, but when twenty-eight-year-old entrepreneur Joseph Ray (J. R.) Watkins of Plainview, Minnesota, put that message on a bottle of his Red Liniment, he was a trailblazer.
The Kline Sanatorium was built in 1902 by Dr. James Kline and served hundreds of patients before it closed in 1935. Serving as a shelter for those left without homes in the wake of a 1939 tornado, the building again provided relief for people in the area. Later, it served as a hotel and then as a private residence and apartments. It remains one of the city of Anoka’s more iconic structures, clearly visible as you enter the city from across the Mississippi River.
When Minnesotans think about leprosy, they may recall Biblical references to the “unclean,” the National Leprosarium in Louisiana, or a Hawaiian leper colony. In our state, however, leprosy was a medical concern during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when many of the affected were Norwegian immigrants.
Dr. C. Walton Lillehei was a world-famous professor of surgery at the University of Minnesota and an innovator in the field of open-heart surgery. He participated in the world's first successful open-heart operation, developed techniques and devices that made open-heart surgery more successful, and pioneered the use of pacemakers and artificial heart valves.
In 1904, Charles W. Malchow was a professor of medicine at Hamline University Medical School who had studied abroad in Germany and England. He had a happy marriage, a medical practice in downtown Minneapolis, and a house near Lake of the Isles. He was young, handsome, successful, and ambitious. Then he went to prison.
The name of Dr. William Worrall Mayo is synonymous today with high-quality, compassionate health care. Dr. Mayo and his sons, William and Charles, helped put Minnesota on the map when they founded Mayo Clinic in Rochester.
The Medtronic medical device company was founded in 1949 by Earl Bakken and Palmer Hermundslie. From its beginnings in a converted garage, it has grown into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise and one of Minnesota’s leading businesses.
Founded at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Minnesota by a small group of gay volunteers, the Minnesota AIDS Project (MAP) provided education, prevention, and services for HIV-positive people and people with AIDS during the tumultuous early years of the epidemic. Organized on a grassroots level within the communities most affected by the virus, MAP became a model for successful community responses to public health crises. Its activities led directly and indirectly to a huge expansion of services and organizations serving HIV-positive people and people with AIDS in Minnesota and beyond.
Minnesota Men of Color (MMC) was a non-profit organization that served gay and bisexual men of color, women of color, and gender-non-conforming people of color between 1998 and 2003. From its headquarters in Minneapolis, MMC reached clients that majority-white LGBTQ groups had overlooked, focusing specifically on those who were Native, Latinx, African American, and Asian American.
The Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children operated from 1886 to 1947. The campus is one of the most intact examples of a state cottage school standing in the United States, and is significant on a national level.
In 1906, construction began for the Minnesota State Sanatorium for Consumptives, or Ah-Gwah-Ching, about three miles south of Walker in Cass County. Overlooking Shingobee Bay on the south shore of Leech Lake, the hospital evolved into a massive complex of distinctive buildings.
Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis was among the first private hospitals in the Twin Cities to admit minority doctors on its medical staff. The Jewish community opened it in 1951; by the time it closed in 1991, local hospitals were open to doctors of all races and religions.
Begun in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco in 1987, the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt grew into a nationwide community art project memorializing those who had been killed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Lovers, families, and friends of people who had died sewed quilt panels; others created them for individuals they had never met. In 1988, the quilt embarked on a national twenty-city tour and arrived at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis on July 16.
The Coast Guard station at Grand Marais was built in 1928 to aid the people who traveled and worked on the sometimes turbulent waters of Lake Superior. Since the opening of the station in 1929, Coast Guard personnel from the station have rescued hundreds of fishermen, boat crews and passengers, and recreational boaters from the lake.
Constructed in Minneapolis in 1919, the Northeast Neighborhood House (NENH) served both as a portal into American society for newly arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe and as an advocate for the neighborhood's underprivileged. It is a notable example of a social institution created solely for the betterment of the disadvantaged.
Though his life was tragically short, Colorado Pete made his mark on the history of Clearwater County, Minnesota, through both his civic activities and his poetry.
For most of its history, nursing was an unregulated profession. To raise both their reputation and their standard of care, Minnesota nurses during the Progressive Era founded local and statewide nursing associations. Using these to create community among members, influence training schools, and engage in legislative advocacy, these nurses transformed what had been a mixture of skilled and unskilled work into a full, licensed profession.
Expert Essay: Jennifer Gunn, Director of the Program in the History of Medicine at the University of Minnesota, touches on more than 300 years of state history to explain what has made Minnesota a medical mecca.
Over the course of their history, Minnesota’s state hospitals were home to tens of thousands of people with disabilities or diagnoses of psychiatric conditions. Around 13,000 of those who died at these institutions were buried in hospital cemeteries, in graves marked only with numbers. Remembering With Dignity is a group formed from members of Advocating Change Together and other self-advocacy organizations in 1994 with the goal of installing new gravestones in these cemeteries marked with names and dates in order to restore personhood to those denied it in the past.
Dr. Martha Ripley was an early advocate for women's health and welfare. She and her family moved to Minneapolis in 1883, just after she completed medical training at Boston University School of Medicine.
Rochester State Hospital opened on January 1, 1879, as Minnesota’s second hospital for the insane. It served as part of Minnesota’s state hospital system until 1982, when changing trends in treatment for the mentally ill and lack of funding led to its closure.
The Cottonwood County village of Westbrook is home to the smallest hospital in Minnesota: Dr. Henry Schmidt Memorial Hospital. Four months before it opened in January 1951, a women’s auxiliary officially organized and immediately began gathering supplies for the new facility.
Henry Schmidt’s dream of becoming a physician in his hometown of Westbrook, Minnesota, came true in 1910. His dream of opening a hospital, however, was postponed when he died during the 1918 influenza epidemic. Schmidt’s father was instrumental in opening Westbrook’s Henry Schmidt Memorial Hospital in 1951.
Seminary Fen is located between the cities of Chaska and Chanhassen, just across the river from Shakopee. In the twenty-first century, the site is a rare wetland, but the site was used long before the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) took control in 2008.