Today it s licensed for 308. The word blacks would have been an insult then, even though it was the year the Supreme Court ruled that separate was not equal. About 300 people worked at the hospital and just under 9,500 received care there in 1953, the year Dr. Don Lomax joined the staff. A total of about 10,000 surgical procedures are performed in the operating rooms each year. And people then, like people now, complained regularly that their bills were too high.
Rooms cost too much.
Today, the hospital has no wards. By the 50s, treatment was changing, too. Eight technicians handled the hospital lab, and doctors used X-rays more and more. And two women were on the medical staff. Dr. Hilda Bailey, a native of Rowan who had already practiced medicine for four years in Banner Elk, opened her office in downtown Salisbury in 1952 with plans to specialize in pediatrics.