Baptist Hospitals.

Baptist hospitals started in 1890 with the founding of the Missouri Baptist Sanitarium, later the Missiouri Baptist Hospital, by W. G. Mayfield. In 1903, Len G. Broughton oversaw the construction of a Baptist hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, and Southern Baptists in other states pushed for a local hospital. In the 1915 Southern Baptist Convention in Houston, Texas established the Southern Baptist Hospital Conference, which later became the Southern Baptist Hospital Commission. About thirty hospitals started in the South, Midwest, and West for a total of thirty-nine in 1954. By 1949, the Convention adopted a policy to discourage its acquisition of future hospitals and instead promoted local and state sponsorship.