Episcopal-founded hospital at 4401 Wornall Road, established in 1882 and relocated to its Wornall Road campus in 1923. Home to the Mid America Heart Institute — one of the country’s leading cardiac centers and the site of early pioneering work in coronary angioplasty. Flagship hospital of what became Saint Luke’s Health System.
History
The origins of Saint Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City trace to July 7, 1882, when Episcopal priest Rev. Henry David Jardine convened a meeting of Kansas City businessmen in a small wooden church to discuss the city’s need for better hospital care. That gathering established the Church Charity Association of Kansas City, the institution’s founding body.
The first Saint Luke’s hospital opened in October 1902 on the second and third floors of a store at Fifth and Delaware Street — a branch of Episcopalian charities with twelve beds, a kitchen, an operating room, a laboratory, and living quarters for nursing staff. A nursing school followed in 1903, the predecessor of Saint Luke’s College of Nursing and Health Sciences.
The hospital moved through several locations in its early years, including a house at Fortieth and Baltimore Avenue and then a large brick home at the southeast corner of Eleventh and Euclid Street, where it remained for roughly seventeen years. On March 1, 1923, a new facility opened on a four-acre tract extending from the west side of J.C. Nichols Parkway at Forty-Fourth Street west to Wornall Road. The 150-bed Georgian-tradition brick building was designed by architects Keene and Simpson. That Wornall Road campus — near Mill Creek Parkway and adjacent to the Country Club Plaza — has remained Saint Luke’s home ever since.
Among the institution’s early incorporators and guiding figures was Right Rev. Edward Atwill, the first bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of West Missouri, who assumed sponsorship of Saint Luke’s after an earlier short-lived Episcopal hospital (All Saints Hospital, 1885–1890s) had closed. The Episcopal Diocese of West Missouri has maintained oversight since that time, with the bishop serving as chairman of Saint Luke’s Hospital’s Board of Directors.
Mid America Heart Institute
The Mid America Heart Institute (MAHI) stands as Saint Luke’s most nationally significant program. Commissioned in 1975, construction began in 1979 and the dedicated heart hospital was formally dedicated in 1981 — one of the first facilities in the United States designed and built specifically for cardiovascular care. It operates as a not-for-profit subsidiary of Saint Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City and is affiliated with the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine.
The cardiac program’s national profile was shaped in large part by Dr. Geoffrey O. Hartzler, who joined MAHI in 1980 alongside his former Mayo Clinic mentor Dr. Barry Rutherford. Hartzler is recognized as a pioneer of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) — the balloon angioplasty technique for treating coronary artery disease. During his first six months in Kansas City he performed 55 angioplasty procedures, one of the largest early volumes in the world, and he later became the first physician to use PTCA to treat an acute heart attack, significantly expanding the procedure’s application. His work at MAHI helped establish Kansas City as a center of interventional cardiology.
MAHI subsequently developed the Kansas City region’s first cardiac transplant program and has performed over 1,000 heart transplants, placing it among the top-volume cardiac transplant centers in the country. The Joint Commission has certified MAHI as a Comprehensive Cardiac Center.
The campus
Saint Luke’s Hospital sits at 4401 Wornall Road in the area immediately south of the Country Club Plaza and within the broader Country Club District and Volker neighborhood context. The Wornall Road location has been home to the hospital since 1923; successive expansions through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries added the MAHI building, additional clinical towers, and outpatient facilities across the campus. The original 1923 Georgian building by Keene and Simpson is surrounded by later additions reflecting each era of the hospital’s growth.
See also
midtown-kc, childrens-mercy-hospital, country-club-plaza, country-club-district, volker, The KS.City Wiki