The story
History
Creation of The Jews' Hospital
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. Orthodox Jewish philanthropist Sampson Simson worked with eight other Jewish benefactors to found the hospital in order to address the needs of New York's rapidly growing Jewish immigrant community, needs which included communicating with immigrants in the German language, the availability of kosher foods, and the understanding of Jewish burial customs.
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 opened with 45 beds on May 17, 1855, on West 28th Street in Manhattan between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, two years before Simson's death. In 1856, its first full year of operation, the new entity saw a total of 216 admissions, with five surgeons and physicians on staff and six more that had consulting positions.
The board of directors of the Jews' Hospital initially comprised Portuguese and English Jews, but soon educated German immigrant Jews were added as well.
The hospital accepted only Jewish patients on a regular basis but was open to non-Jews for emergency cases. Most of these patients were poor and could not pay for any care, and by taking them in it relieved the burden on non-Jewish services to care for them and thus helped in relations between Jews and the larger community.
Civil War
Four years later, it was unexpectedly filled to capacity with soldiers injured in the American Civil War.
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.
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Change to The Mount Sinai Hospital
More and more, the Jews' Hospital was finding itself an integral part of the general community, and the experiences during the Civil War convinced the hospital to adopt a more secular outlook. In 1866, to reflect this new-found role, it changed its name to Mount Sinai Hospital. 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. Becoming non-sectarian also qualified the hospital to receive public fundings.
But despite becoming non-sectarian, Mount Sinai would clearly be for many years a Jewish hospital, in that it was supported by Jewish benefactors from New York, one of its main goals was to treat poor Jewish patients, it provided training for Jewish interns and residents, and it provided long-term hospital privileges for Jewish physicians.
Move to the East Side
Seeking more space, the hospital then moved uptown to the east side of Lexington Avenue between East 66th and 67th streets, with the new facility opening on May 29, 1872. Capacity was thrice that of before.
With the larger space, the hospital was able to expand the specialties it handled, including dermatology, eye and ear issues, neurology, and pediatrics, as well as offering outpatient services.
When the pediatrics department was created in 1878, it was the first one to exist within a general hospital, and when a neurological service was established in 1900, it became the first hospital in the city to do so.
The hospital would concentrate on free care for patients throughout the rest of the 19th century. Mount Sinai was not the only Jewish hospital in the city; in particular, there was Beth Israel Hospital on the Lower East Side. Nonetheless, Mount Sinai continued to draw patients; its Lexington Avenue site would expand in size to contain 225 beds, but still more space was needed.
Move to the Upper East Side
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, a champion of the move to the hospital's new site on Manhattan's Upper East Side at the beginning of the century. The motivation for changing locations was to obtain more space to accommodate the greater number of people seeking hospital services. The new location was opened on March 15, 1904, taking up the whole block between 100th and 101st Streets and Fifth and Madison Avenues, and providing a total of 456 patient beds. Contemporary reports described it as the country's largest hospital by physical size and the third-largest by patient capacity.
In 1903, S. S. Goldwater, a doctor, was appointed superintendent of the hospital, and as such became the first professional medical hospital administrator anywhere in the United States. He served in that role until 1916, after which he served as a director of the hospital until 1926.
Staff at Mount Sinai saw that social problems were often linked to medical ones, and in 1906, the first social worker was hired. A social service department was created under Goldwater's leadership, which would subsequently become known as the Department of Social Work Services. A decade later it had a staff of eighteen and a decade after that forty, growing to become one of the largest social service departments in any hospital in the nation – with a role that was especially important during traumatic periods such as the Great Depression.
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.
World War I
Mount Sinai responded to a request from the United States Army Medical Corps with the creation of Base Hospital No.3 of the American Expeditionary Forces, built around a group of doctors and nurses from Mount Sinai. 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.
The aftermath of the war saw the hospital dealing with not only the influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920 but also the 1919–1930 encephalitis lethargica epidemic that followed it as well as the problems of pleural empyema that could follow post-influenzal pneumonia.
A focus on research
From the early years of the 20th century on, doing medical research became an active priority at Mount Sinai. Over twenty diseases and other medical tests and techniques have been named after the doctors at Mount Sinai who discovered them, including Burrill Bernard Crohn for Crohn's disease, Bernard Sachs for Tay–Sachs disease, Gregory Shwartzman for the Shwartzman phenomenon, and Isidor Clinton Rubin for the Rubin test. At first, findings from research activities were published as part of the biennial Mount Sinai Hospital Reports series. In 1925, the hospital established a long-term research endowment fund and a medical journal in which to publish research results, as well as postgraduate teaching programs emphasizing both general care and various specialty areas. Subsequently, the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine was founded in 1934 and would publish as a general medical journal until 2007. The demographics of the East Harlem neighborhood around two sides of Mount Sinai started changing in the 1920s, with a large influx of Puerto Ricans coming in; the hospital provided ward medical service to them.
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. Not only were Jewish quotas in effect for medical schools, but hiring into internship and residency programs was even more difficult, as was getting admitting privileges at hospitals. This was especially the case in the period after World War I, when antisemitism ran high in the United States. It was these barriers that made the existence of Jewish hospitals so important, and of all the Jewish hospitals in the United States, The Mount Sinai Hospital was the most preeminent in clinical and research terms and as such attracted the brightest Jewish medical school graduates from around the country. Nonetheless, staff positions at Mount Sinai were filled via a highly competitive process designed to be impartial, and substantial numbers of non-Jews were hired as well.
World War II
With tensions in Europe escalating, a committee dedicated to finding placements for doctors fleeing Nazi Germany was founded in 1933. With the help of the National Committee for the Resettlement of Foreign Physicians, Mount Sinai Hospital became a new home for a large number of émigrés. When World War II broke out, Mount Sinai was the first hospital to throw open its doors to Red Cross nurses' aides; the hospital trained many in its effort to reduce the nursing shortage in the United States. Meanwhile, the president of the medical board, George Baehr, M.D., was called by President Roosevelt to serve as the nation's chief medical director of the Office of Civilian Defense.
These wartime roles were eclipsed by the 3rd General Hospital of the United States Army, again built around a group of doctors and nurses from Mount Sinai. 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
Once the war was over, The Mount Sinai Hospital continued to expand its facilities.
Creation of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine
After World War II, the levels of antisemitism in the medical profession gradually declined, and after a while Mount Sinai no longer had a large advantage in being able to hire the best Jewish physicians. This posed a particular threat to Mount Sinai, with its lack of an affiliated medical school to interest academically and scientifically oriented Jewish physicians. For several decades Mount Sinai had had an arrangement with the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons to provide training of some doctors. This connection was made more formal in the 1950s, but the number of medical students involved was still small and did not make up for the lack of a medical school. In addition, the kind of medical research that Mount Sinai physicians had long excelled at, based on observations of patients in the clinical wards combined with use of the hospital's laboratory facilities, was being overtaken by more sophisticated analyses with roots in the latest biomedical science.
The solution to both these trends was seen to be the creation of an affiliated medical school, even though that being done by a hospital rather a university was quite unusual. Thus in 1963, the hospital created a medical school, and in 1968, it welcomed the first students of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The City University of New York was affiliated to the school for the purpose of granting degrees.
The Mount Sinai School of Medicine became the seventh medical school within New York City.
A large new structure, the Annenberg Building, opened in 1974 to house the school.
Advent of The Mount Sinai Medical Center
Almost from the time the medical school was first approved, the overall combined entity began to be known as the Mount Sinai Medical Center.
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.
Redevelopment of campus
By the early 1980s, the hospital was dealing with an aging physical plant, as several from the original 1904 opening were still in active use. Mount Sinai began a large-scale redevelopment of its Upper East Side site.
At first there were delays in gaining approval from New York State for this and other major expansion and renovation plans for hospitals within New York City. The decade of the 1980s also saw large-scale changes in how hospital funding was done due the adoption by the U.S. government of diagnosis-related groups (DRG) in connection with Medicare reimbursements as a result of a 1982 change in federal law and regulation; as a result, Mount Sinai began to focus more on marketing and the management of patient throughput. But construction on the Mount Sinai project began in 1986, and the result, centered around the large, new Guggenheim Pavilion, was opened in 1992.
By the end of the 20th century, Mount Sinai was seeing some 50,000 inpatient admissions and discharges per year, about 400,000 inpatient-days in total, along with around 300,000 outpatient visits a year.
Among the innovations at Mount Sinai were performing the first blood transplant into the vein of a fetus in 1986, and the development of a technique for inserting radioactive seeds into the prostate to treat cancer in 1995.
Failed merger, financial crisis and recovery
By the mid-1990s, many hospitals were under significant financial stress and looking for form alliances or join hospital networks with larger entities such as Mount Sinai. In 1997, one such alliance and academic affiliation took place between the Saint Barnabas Health Care System of New Jersey and Mount Sinai.
A potentially much more significant transaction occurred in 1998, when Mount Sinai entered into a merger agreement with New York University Medical Center. The initial goal was to merge both the two medical schools as well as the two hospitals, but the arrangement soon ran into trouble. Subsequently, the idea was to keep the medical schools separate but merge the hospitals. But beginning in 2001, the merger was in the process of falling through completely and the two entities began to separate whatever parts they had started to merge. This turn of events left Mount Sinai in a prolonged state of organizational indecisiveness.
Furthermore, the medical center was in a period of financial crisis; by 2002, it had a budget deficit of $100 million and was cutting staff and services. Nevertheless, the turnaround was successful and Mount Sinai survived the financial strain, soon reaching a stronger state than it had been in when the merger discussions first began.
Following a $200 million (equivalent to $280 million in 2025) 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.
Advent of the Mount Sinai Health System
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.
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.
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.
President and COO Reich announced in March 2020 that the hospital was converting Guggenheim Pavilion lobbies into extra patient rooms to "meet the growing volume of patients" that contracted COVID-19.
As with other hospitals in the city, 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.
Efforts at Mount Sinai regarding realizing some of the goals that would later become known as diversity, equity, and inclusion began in 2000 and were renewed in 2016. They then gained special emphasis with the creation of a Task Force to Address Racism in 2020 in reaction to the murder of George Floyd.
In August 2024, Moody's Investor Service downgraded Mount Sinai Hospital and Icahn School of Medicine to its lowest investment grade, Baa3. Moody's cited $1.8 billion in debt by the end of 2023, initial delays in closing the merged but struggling Mount Sinai Beth Israel, and cash flow damages due to a cyber-attack in February 2024 at Mount Sinai’s payment system, Change Healthcare.
In early 2026, there was a strike by nurses of the New York State Nurses Association against both the main campus of The Mount Sinai Hospital as well as two other hospitals within the Mount Sinai Health System. The strike, which lasted a month before being settled, caused serious disruptions, with elective surgeries not taking place and patients sometimes being moved to uninvolved hospitals; Mount Sinai spent many millions of dollars hiring temporary replacement nurses during the work outage. The labor action was over not just pay rates but demands by the nurses for increased minimum staffing levels at the hospitals, for better protections against violent patients, and for safeguards against certain uses of artificial intelligence.
Information science trends
The hospital had opened a medical library in 1883, and within a couple of years it had around 10,000 volumes. In 1910, the library had been renamed the Abraham Jacobi Library to honor of one Mount Sinai's most significant figures. The field of medical librarianship became established in the 1940s, led by courses at the Columbia University School of Library Service, and the hospital hired its first full-time, professional librarian in 1946. The library continued to grow, and by the 1960s had eight librarians and two dozen either full- or part-time staff members working there.
In 1965, Mount Sinai became the first hospital in the United States to install an IBM System/360 computer, seeking to expand the capacity and speed of its data processing operations. 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, having been created during the early 1970s.
It used DEC PDP-11 minicomputers. It featured access using early video display terminals for some medical personnel, while others accessed it via Teletype Model 33 machines.
In contrast, for administrative applications, the Mount Sinai Hospital, and the Mount Sinai Medical Center as a whole, remained an IBM mainframe shop. 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.
With the creation of the medical school and the opening of the Annenberg Building, the Gustave L. and Janet W. Levy Library was created in 1974. Libraries sometimes existed elsewhere in the hospital as well, such as a professionally run one in the data processing department for documentation and other process functions. The Levy Library began a years-long course of improving its computer technology services, especially regarding the provision of computer-assisted instruction and associated study areas and the availability of resources from across the Internet and various research databases.
In January 2026, the Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Center launched PRISM, an artificial-intelligence platform developed by Triomics that analyzes electronic health records to identify patients who may qualify for cancer clinical trials across the health system.
From Wikipedia’s article on Mount Sinai Hospital (Manhattan), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5