Portrait of the Past: Aston Park Hospital operating room, circa 1940

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Aston Park Health Care Center grew out of Aston Park Hospital, located in Asheville on the northwest corner of what had been Aston Street and South French Broad Avenue. The hospital had opened in 1927 as the French Broad Hospital. The name change to Aston occurred in the 1940s when the street the hospital was on, Willow Street., was renamed in honor of Edward Aston, historic Asheville booster and mayor. The 1940s was also when the Asheville Colored Hospital was opened, leading Dr. John Walker to leave Aston Park, where he’d served as the only African-American physician in a local hospital. One of his specialties was administering anesthesia, which he did for operations in the room pictured in this 1927 photo by Ewart M. Ball.

Aston Park had 45 beds in the 1940s, whereas Mission Hospital had 134; St Joseph’s, 95; Biltmore Hospital, 50; Norburn Hospital, 120; and the Asheville Colored Hospital, 35 beds. The French Broad Hospital had itself gone through an expansion because the newspaper reported cases related to it before ground breaking took place in August. For instance, in March, a young woman was trying to recover at the hospital from peritonitis after Ralph Riddle had seduced her and then poisoned her to abort the fetus. In 1967, Aston Park Hospital began making the shift to nursing home care as Memorial Mission Hospital assumed acute care responsibility. Photo courtesy Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville. --Rob Neufeld, RNeufeld@charter.net, @WNC_chronicler

Source: Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, North Carolina), 11 June 2019.