The Seton in Seton Medical Center

“Every portion of available space was used for the influenza victims,” Mahoney wrote in “Reflections: Mary’s Help Hospital and Seton Medical Center, 1893-1985.” The work was cited in a recent edition of the newspaper Catholic San Francisco that carried a two-page spread about religious sisters in the 1918 crisis. The story also recognized the work performed by the Sisters of Mercy at St. Mary’s Hospital, the oldest hospital in San Francisco and a ministry of the Sisters of Mercy in Burlingame.

Mahoney said home care had always been an integral part of the Daughters’ services, and mentioned a letter asking for help in Menlo Park that was dated Oct. 10, 1918. The sisters bound for Menlo Park were warned to “wear masks, use spray and gargle.” Sound familiar? It should.

In addition to constantly being reminded to wear masks, masks were in the news recently when San Mateo County delivered thousands of them to Seton, which is now operated by Verity Health System with the state leasing some beds. Verity filed for bankruptcy in 2018 but local officials, led by Supervisor David Canepa, insisted closing the facility would abandon the nearly 27,000 people who use the hospital each year.

The Daughters of Charity haven’t been involved with the hospital since Dec. 14, 2015, according to Tina Ahn, Seton’s director of business development. That’s when Seton, previously a nonprofit religious corporation, became a nonprofit public benefit corporation under Verily.

Mary’s Help was renamed Seton Medical Center on April 17, 1983, Seton being about the only salient tie left to the facility’s religious pioneering past. According to the National Women’s History Museum, Elizabeth Ann Seton, who died in 1821, founded the Daughters of Charity as well as Catholic schools and hospitals. The first American-born saint, Seton, a convert to Catholicism, is the patron of Catholic schools, widows and seafarers.

The work of the sisters received high praise from Daly City Mayor Sal Torres in 2012 when both Daly City and Seton celebrated centennials. In a newspaper article, he outlined the hospital’s history from its San Francisco days to its present location on a hilltop in Daly City where it is a landmark for drivers on Interstate 280.

Mary’s Help was supposed to debut in 1906, “but before one patient could be admitted, the hospital was destroyed by the Great San Francisco Earthquake and fire,” Torres wrote. “It took another six years for the Daughters of Charity to build a new structure.” On July 2, 1912, Mary’s Help was ready to admit patients on Guerrero Street in San Francisco.

“Over the years, as Mary’s Help grew, so did the work of the sisters,” Torres said, noting that in addition to work at the hospital they also fed the hungry and visited the sick in their homes, bringing them food, clothing and medicine.

Faced with the increasing number of patients, as well as another earthquake in the late 1950s, the sisters decided to build a new hospital on a larger site, the present medical center on Sullivan Avenue which opened on Dec. 12, 1965.

Torres praised the Daughters of Charity for fulfilling their mission of “serving the sick and poor and the underserved.” That is quite a challenging legacy.

The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.