Our legacy

Our story starts with two great hospitals – St. Luke’s Hospital, which admitted its first patient on June 27, 1881; and Presbyterian Hospital, which opened in 1926.

From the earliest days of “modern healthcare,” the idea of a community hospital innovating medicine was something new.

But the founders of Presbyterian Hospital set out to create a new kind of community hospital, one that pursued cutting edge research and care.

As early as the 1920s, our founders introduced state-of-the-art X-ray machines, and cancer patients benefited from new radiation treatments.

The early Presbyterian Hospital also featured an operating theater with six major and two minor operating rooms, two maternity delivery rooms and the most current physician scrub rooms.

In 1933, St. Luke’s opened its cancer clinic – the first center in the Rocky Mountain Region, and one of the first centers of its kind in the U.S., dedicated exclusively to the treatment of cancer.

In 1961, St. Luke’s opened the region’s first Intensive Care Unit. Presbyterian followed the same year with one of its own. The Intensive Care Unit joined the Emergency Room as highly specialized arms of the hospital, each providing critically needed, life-saving care.

At HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke's, we have a tradition of caring for the most critically ill patients, and we thought it interesting to look back at some of the serious diseases and conditions that have challenged the top medical minds here over the last 125 years.

In 1881, tuberculosis, silicosis (a serious lung disease) and pneumonia were prevalent among Denver area and regional residents. St. Luke’s Hospital treated these patients along with women who, at the time, faced serious risks related to routine childbirth.

Doctors at St. Luke’s also treated patients for a widespread Spanish flu pandemic in late 1918 and early 1919. While many lives were saved, all told, this largest flu pandemic in world history claimed the lives of about 8,000 Colorado residents – nearly two percent of the national death toll.

Tuberculosis persisted in the Denver area as Presbyterian Hospital opened its doors in 1926. The development of an effective antibiotic in the 1940s had a significant impact on tuberculosis, helping us save more lives.

In the early 1930s, St. Luke’s Hospital opened one of the first cancer clinics in the country to address the growing problem of this pervasive disease. Time Magazine featured cancer on its cover the same year naming cancer the most baffling of the major disease issues at the time. Today, HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke's remains a leading comprehensive regional Cancer Center, serving as the region’s leading center for blood malignancies and disorders, as well as for solid tumor and pediatric cancer.

By the 1970s, diabetes became a serious focus for HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke's when diabetic patients checked in to the hospital for a week of education about how to live with the disease. Today we offer one of the most comprehensive outpatient education and treatment programs available.

In the early 1980s, HIV/AIDS emerged as a serious infectious disease, and HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke's infectious disease specialists started providing advanced care for patients affected locally. The disease peaked in diagnosis and death rates in the mid-1990s, but it’s far from eradicated. Thanks to ongoing education programs and continually evolving treatment options available at HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke's, we are working to improve the quality of life for people with HIV/AIDS.

During the mid-1980s, treating kidney disease through transplantation became another specialty at HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke's, ushering in a new era for the hospital as a major transplant center.

Even before our doors opened in 1881, heart disease was a major health issue - still ranking as the top cause of disease-related death among Americans. Today, the Advanced Cardiac Center at HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke's is known as a major heart hospital, recognized several times over by the American Heart Association for excellence and for its success in implementing a higher standard of cardiac care that effectively improves treatment of patients hospitalized with heart disease.

Since delivering our first baby in 1882 at St. Luke’s Hospital, we have focused on providing exceptional baby care. Today, HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke's offers the region’s most advanced maternal-fetal care, focusing on rare conditions that put mothers and their developing babies at high-risk. HCA HealthONE Rocky Mountain Children's at Presbyterian St. Luke's's 84-bed Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is the largest in the Region.

While the tools are ever changing and our ability to care for patients is always advancing, one thing remains constant - putting our patients first, with quality, respect, safety, and teamwork.