Medicine: Peddler's Will

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Everybody on Chicago's South Side—and in U.S. medicine—knows what Michael Reese is: a first-rate hospital center that treats countless charity cases as well as paying patients.

But if anybody in the neighborhood is asked about Michael Reese, whose name is carved in bold stone above the main entrance, he has a hard time answering. "A German immigrant who made his fortune in California real estate," is the accepted version. The cynical have more colorful addenda. Reese (ne Ries) was a peddler who went to California in the wake of the Forty-Niners and, some say, made himself a stake by rolling gold-laden drunks as a sideline.

After he had piled up millions in San Francisco real estate, Reese still refused to pay a nickel for a streetcar ride and thought 25¢ too much for a dinner. A contemporary described him sitting in his shabby office, "before him a large pile of $1,000 U.S. Government bonds, and he was clipping off the coupons. That face! Like a hungry boy taking into his mouth a ripe cherry, or a mother gazing down into the face of her pretty sleeping child." To a Methodist preacher, Reese once said: "My love of money is a sort of insanity, but it is as good a form of madness as any."

Getting on in years, Reese decided to visit his parents' grave in Germany. But he would not pay a few pfennigs to the cemetery gatekeeper. One legend has it that he tried to climb the fence, impaled himself on a rusty iron spike and died of blood poisoning. Another version: he died of apoplexy when asked to pay.

Barbery Coast. Bachelor Reese's will said that his heirs (mostly in-laws) should use $200,000 of his $2,000,000 fortune for charity. They decided in 1879 to back a hospital, adding carefully that it was "to be called the Michael Reese Hospital for all time to come." Also they ruled "that the hospital be nonsectarian, that the sufferers, no matter of what religion or nationality, if found worthy and there be room, be admitted." The site, 29 blocks south of the Loop, was then on the lake shore and in the city's most fashionable residential area. But the district hit the skids, and wealthy residents moved to the near North Side. In the 1920s, mansions were cut up into tenements, populated mostly by poverty-stricken Negroes teeming in from the South. With poverty went crime, and the former Gold Coast became as raffish as any Barbary

Coast that old Reese had known: murder and rape, stabbings and gang brawls were the order of any night. The hospital declined with the neighborhood.

By the end of World War II, material as well as philanthropists' money for rehabilitation became available, and the board of directors (still dominated by Reese's kin) had to choose: whether to move the hospital at great expense to another district or try to pull up the near South Side by its bootstraps. The board voted for bootstraps.