“Healing Humanity’s Hurt”
Five Days at Memorial“Healing Humanity’s Hurt” was the decades-old motto of Southern Baptist Hospital. Its disappearance marked more than a change in institutional branding: as the hospital merged and was sold, the phrase belonged to a community identity increasingly displaced by corporate language about budgets, productivity, and financial performance.
A Motto of the Earlier Hospital
The motto belonged to the hospital life in which Susan Mulderick had spent most of her working life. She began her nursing career in Baptist’s intensive care unit in 1973 and remained at the hospital for more than three decades. Her family was closely bound to the institution: one brother died there after back surgery, a sister survived a brain aneurysm there, another sister worked there, and her housemate was a nursing coordinator. The motto’s long use places it within that durable relationship between hospital and community, rather than presenting it as a new slogan devised for a later corporate identity.
Institutional Change and Disappearance
Under financial pressure, Southern Baptist Hospital merged with the New Orleans Catholic hospital Mercy in the early 1990s. In 1995, the combined institution was sold to Tenet Healthcare Corporation. The sale was announced with a warning that market-driven health-care reform would leave few stand-alone community hospitals. With the changes, Christmas decorating contests and the motto “Healing Humanity’s Hurt” disappeared; the Baptist name also vanished on paper, although calling the institution Baptist persisted as a small act of rebellion.
From Care Language to Financial Language
The phrase’s disappearance coincided with a change in the vocabulary used to describe the institution. Press releases for Memorial Medical Center praised its “fiscally sound partnerships” and “stronger financial performance.” Patient-care managers, meanwhile, received monthly budgets and productivity goals and were criticized when they failed to meet them; meeting expectations could bring progressively tighter budgets. Mulderick adapted to the new system and remained in her position, but the contrast between the motto and the later managerial language gives the old phrase its force: it named a public-facing ideal of healing, while the institution’s new language emphasized financial performance and measurable productivity.
