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    Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance
    Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance
    Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance
    Ebook137 pages1 hour

    Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance

    By Jane O'Boyle

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    This is the story of two centuries-old hospitals, Roper and St. Francis. They were neighbors that supported one another, where generations of doctors treated patients from the Civil War era through the civil rights era. Then the 1980s and 1990s changed the landscape in healthcare. National healthcare conglomerates came courting in Charleston, and the two hospitals that once supported each other became rivals in a swirl of lawsuits
    and distrust. Jane O Boyle interviewed scores of doctors and hospital staff to unravel a tale that is a touchstone of twentieth century Lowcountry history. Filled with colorful personalities and anecdotes, as well as black-and-white photographs, Healing All People is the heartwarming and entertaining story of community members who went beyond the call to save a cherished tradition. Charleston doctors and staff at Roper
    and St. Francis revered their mission to serve the community over profits. In order to preserve this mission, a handful of these medical professionals and sisters sought out the solution that would permit them to resolve old conflicts and build the foundation for a state-of-the-art healthcare system. In addition to a fascinating history, this story is an entertaining snapshot of Charleston in the days after Hurricane Hugo and before the onslaught of the widespread development of the 1990s.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateMar 1, 2009
    ISBN9781625842985
    Healing All People: The Roper St. Francis Healthcare Alliance
    Author

    Jane O'Boyle

    Jane O�Boyle is the author of nearly thirty books, including About Face with Greg Brown, MD, and the fourth edition of Fodor�s Compass American Guide to South Carolina. She is the former vice president of marketing for the largest division of Random House, Inc., where she worked for fifteen years. She now lives with her husband in Charleston, South Carolina.

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      Book preview

      Healing All People - Jane O'Boyle

      System

      Chapter 1

      SOUNDING THE ALARM, 1996

      The airport motel was a far cry from the celebrated Mills House or four-star Omni Hotel in downtown Charleston. Rather than graceful wrought-iron railings and pineapple fountains, the gloomy lobby featured carpet the color of pluff mud and one grimy plate-glass window that had lost its thermal seal. The boardroom off the lobby had dark green walls, a flickering fluorescent light fixture and dark unlined curtains drawn to hide another foggy window missing its seal. Behind the window was a rainy, bleak parking lot on a Wednesday morning in December. Management trainees or costume jewelry wholesalers might conduct business in this kind of meeting room, but it was not the kind of place to which this particular group was accustomed. But then again, Dr. Julian Buxton Jr. and Dr. Jim Hayes did not want to be recognized on this day, at this meeting. Anywhere else in Charleston, they would have been certain to see someone they knew, and word might get back to the hospital that something was afoot.

      Julian T. Buxton Jr., age sixty-nine, was a distinguished Charleston surgeon who was revered by fellow doctors, patients and friends. He was the head of the medical staff at Roper Hospital and, before that, chief of surgery at Baker Hospital. He was not tall but was considered a giant of a man, not so much for his great hands as his enormous heart. James M. Hayes, age fifty-nine, an internist and chairman of the board at Roper Hospital, had the squared shoulders of a Citadel cadet and favored heavily starched shirts with bow ties.

      Buxton was born in 1928 in Sumter, South Carolina, where his father was president of Williams Furniture Company. Young Buxton excelled at football at Woodberry Forest School in Virginia. He had been such a good athlete that he was scouted by none other than Paul Bear Bryant during his years at the University of Kentucky, where Buxton was offered a full scholarship. But the high school senior turned down the athletic scholarship and followed his father’s advice, choosing Princeton instead. As the Ivy League did not have football scholarships, Buxton worked his way through college with a long line of part-time jobs, while still playing football. As it happened, Buxton’s team included a tailback two years his junior, Dick Kazmaier, who would win the Heisman Trophy in 1951.

      Buxton graduated cum laude with a degree in history, but the Princeton football team’s doctor suggested medical school. In 1954, after getting a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Buxton served in the navy and completed his residency at the Medical College of South Carolina. His first job was as a surgeon at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. A young intern there named Jack Wallace introduced Buxton to his younger sister, Louise Anne Wallace.

      I was visiting from Spartanburg, Anne said, years later. I was just in town to babysit. Next thing I know, I’m on a date with an older man!

      Julian was thirty-two and Anne was twenty-one when they married, and they raised seven children on James Island. In 1996, they’d been married for more than thirty-five years. The Buxtons were favorites of the Charleston social scene, always at fundraisers and lending a hand to patients in need. Dr. Buxton was among the first to cross the color line at Roper Hospital, treating an African American patient there in the early 1960s when no one else would. Before Buxton came along, segregated blacks were treated at the Old Roper building behind the hospital.

      Dr. Buxton was widely respected in the medical profession and participated in several surgical missions in the 1970s and 1980s to Vietnam, Kenya, Russia and the Dominican Republic. This time, in North Charleston, his mission was closer to home but no less important to him. His hospital was at stake.

      Days earlier, Dr. Buxton had driven to Charlotte to visit Austin Letson. He had telephoned Letson out of the blue one late afternoon in December and asked if he could call at his home. He drove through Charlotte and pulled up at Letson’s home on Wendwood Lane. Letson ushered him into the kitchen, where his wife, Lynn, said hello and then left the gentlemen alone. Letson, a native Atlantan with a soft voice, offered Buxton a chair at the kitchen table.

      What can Roper do? Buxton asked as he pushed his chair back. I never thought I’d say this, Austin, but we need your help.

      Dr. and Mrs. Julian T. Buxton Jr. were married at the Episcopal Church of the Advent in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

      Sitting next to Buxton, Letson had a slighter build and fewer strands of silver hair, even though he was only fifty-two years old. Letson was an executive at Carolinas Medical Center and former chief executive at Roper. His specialty was forming healthcare systems, which he’d done in Monroe, Shelby and Boone. But he’d had a recent failure in South Carolina: Carolinas HealthCare had lost a bid for the Piedmont Medical Center in Rock Hill, which was managed by Tenet Healthcare.

      Here, perhaps, was another chance. Carolinas HealthCare wasn’t planning to expand beyond the Charlotte area, but now that Julian was there, maybe the idea was not beyond consideration. How ironic, Letson thought, that it would be Roper. But then, there never was a finer group of doctors.

      The two men talked in Letson’s kitchen for a couple of hours. They were both men who smiled easily and were modest in demeanor, diplomats in their respective communities, dedicated to healthcare. They shared stories of hospital battles, the sea changes in healthcare management and recent frustrations. Over the course of the evening, the two men made a plan. Buxton said goodbye and started on the three-hour drive back to Charleston. It was past ten o’clock, but Letson picked up his kitchen phone and called his boss, Harry Nurkin. They’d known each other since the days when they both worked in Alabama. We need to go to Charleston, he told Nurkin. Roper needs us, and more than that, I think we need Roper.

      A few days later, Letson was at the North Charleston airport motel, introducing Dr. Buxton and Dr. Hayes to his associates from Carolinas HealthCare System, Harry Nurkin and Mike Tarwater.

      Dr. Buxton.

      James M. Hayes at The Citadel.

      Jim Hayes knew that Buxton had gone to see a friend in Charlotte, taking what he’d called a midnight ride in a last-ditch effort to avoid a potential disaster for Roper. He thought Julian had gone to see his Princeton buddy, Stuart Dickson, who was chairman of the Carolinas board. Dr. Hayes’s Irish blue eyes twinkled when he realized that Buxton’s contact in Charlotte was someone he knew quite well himself. After all, Austin Letson had been chief executive officer at Roper Hospital in Charleston only a few years earlier. But he was the last person Hayes had expected to see at this hush-hush rendezvous in a motel eight miles north of downtown.

      Dr. Jim Hayes, chairman of Roper Health System beginning in 1995.

      Dr. James M. Hayes was born at St. Francis Hospital, where his mother had graduated

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