St. Charles is full of big moments. Of split second decisions that make the difference between things not going well, and everything working out perfectly.
Hospitals care for the sick. Churches care for the soul. But in hard times, the two can clasp hands to catch those tumbling through the gap in the middle. That’s what happened during the Great Depression. Lowell Jensen, a former board member of St. Charles, remembered. “There were 150 to 200 people riding the rails…
Tucked between the mountains and the high desert, Bend in 1918 lay hidden from much of the outside world. But isolation wouldn’t be enough to shield the booming lumber town from the Spanish influenza epidemic that killed an estimated 20 to 40 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1919. By some accounts, the toll from…
On a cold, bright sunny afternoon in 1917, five nuns boarded the Pennsylvania Railroad at Kokomo, Indiana and headed west. It was Christmas Day, but the women had a rendezvous to keep. Their itinerary had been forged through nearly a decade of letters and conversations between a frontier Cupuchan priest named Father Luke Sheehan and…
Though settlement of Oregon’s high desert had begun more than 50 years earlier, the region St. Charles now serves was raw when the first doctors and nurses came to Bend. Work of the time – logging, ranching and canal building – was dangerous. Men and women suffered horrible injuries far from medical help. Sanitation and…
Some of the most profound changes in its history lay ahead of St. Charles in 1969. Under the leadership of a Catholic sister and former nurse, the humble hospital on the hill would move into a new five-story facility on the east edge of Bend. But the change was more than bricks and mortar. The…
New approaches to care focus on better health, less time in hospitals
A Bend family’s connection to St. Charles runs four generations deep
Healing health care philosophy extends to everything St. Charles does
The Bend, Ore., Dr. Urling Coe stepped into the winter of 1905 was a world apart from anything he had experienced. Even in those days it was the type of place most people knew only from Western novels.