(spirited music) (spirited music continues) - [Narrator] Along the Illinois River, Peoria grew from frontier settlement to industrial city, and its medical story grew with it.

In the early 1800s, care was scarce.

From the Mississippi River to the Indiana border, from the Great Lakes south towards Springfield, one physician, Dr.

Augustus Langworthy, served an enormous stretch of young state.

By the 1830s, another physician, Dr.

Rudolphus Rouse, a surgeon in the War of 1812, helped lay the groundwork for organized medicine in Peoria.

In those days, medicine often came to the home.

Doctors traveled to patients.

Families relied on neighbors, remedies, and faith.

But after the Civil War, cities across America began to redefine healthcare, not only as a calling, but as an institution.

In Peoria, that transformation began with six Franciscan sisters.

Escaping religious persecution in Germany, Sister Mary Frances Krasse and a group of sisters from the Third Order of Saint Francis immigrated to Iowa City and began an orphanage.

On begging trips throughout the Midwest, they met Father Bernard Bach, a pastor stationed in Peoria.

He asked if the sisters would come to start a hospital.

They agreed, and upon arrival in 1876, converted a rented house on South Adams Street into Saint Francis Hospital.

The need was immediate.

By 1878, Saint Francis had expanded into a new property and opened a 35-bed hospital.

But Peoria's medical future was not shaped by one institution alone.

In 1882, three local physicians opened Cottage Hospital in a 15-room house.

Their goal was bold for its time: to bring antiseptic surgery to Central Illinois, applying ideas pioneered by Joseph Lister.

That same year, Cottage Hospital became the site of what has been described as the first antiseptic surgery in Central Illinois.

Philanthropy soon joined science.

John C. Proctor helped organize and expand Cottage Hospital, and after his death in 1907, the institution was renamed in his honor.

As Peoria pushed northward in the 20th century, Proctor followed the city's growth, eventually building a new campus on Knoxville Avenue.

A third story rose from a different tradition of service.

In 1900, Minna Riggs and the Methodist Deaconess Movement helped open the Deaconess Home and Hospital near Glen Oak Avenue.

By 1917, it had become Methodist Hospital of Central Illinois.

Across the decades, Peoria's hospitals grew upward, outward, and into networks.

Saint Francis became the flagship of OSF Healthcare, with deep roots in the sisters' original mission.

Proctor and Methodist became part of Carle Health, carrying forward two local legacies of innovation, access, and community care.

From a rented house on Adams Street to regional medical centers serving thousands, Peoria's medical history reminds us that progress is measured not only in buildings, beds, and technology, but in the promise to care.

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