An 1906 earthquake in San Francisco touched off fires that wiped out part of the city and forced the evacuation of St. Mary’s Hospital to a river paddle steamer called Medoc that had been transformed into a floating hospital, according to a "Throwback Thursday" article on the Health and Hospital Networks website.
“Surgical dressings, trolleys, instruments, [and drugs] were dumped into laundry boxes, loaded onto trucks and rushed to the Pacific Mail dock,” wrote Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts in their book, The San Francisco Earthquake.
Rows of mattresses stretched across the deck for about 150 patients. Those who died were laid inside a lifeboat. The Sisters of St. Mary’s later set up a tent hospital near Golden Gate Park.
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