In the late 1880s a group of caring and farsighted New Orleanians saw a pressing need for indigent eye and ear care in the city. Guided by a leading physician of the time, they created a specialty hospital to serve these citizens.

The doors to the Eye, Ear, Nose & Throat Hospital opened to the poor of New Orleans on December 5, 1889. The new EENT Hospital was situated in a rented two-story former boarding house on the river side of South Rampart Street between Canal and Common Streets, a location that is now part of the parking lot behind the Orpheum Theatre. The community response to the new hospital was overwhelming - 4,816 patients received 33,016 free treatments in the first year - and the need for larger quarters was immediate.

A fundraising campaign was undertaken, and in 1892 the Hospital purchased a three-story building which had also been a boarding house. This building was on the other side of Canal Street, on the downtown lake corner of Customhouse (now Iberville) Street and North Rampart Street at what is today 203 North Rampart.

This second building indeed served more patients, but it was soon found to be wanting in several respects. So plans were formulated to construct a brand new, purpose-built hospital with a separate accompanying clinic.

For this grand project the EENT directors set their sights back across Canal Street, this time on the intersection of Tulane Avenue and Elk Place. The directors began an ambitious fundraising campaign that ran over many years, but funds did not come in at a fast pace. By July of 1905, when the city's last significant yellow fever epidemic intervened, only one third of the hoped-for amount had been received. At that point the directors decided to change the building plans. They would focus on constructing the new clinic, and they would use the existing buildings next door to the clinic for the hospital facilities until more money could be found.

Today the city square bounded by Elk Place, Tulane Avenue, South Saratoga Street, and Cleveland Avenue is entirely occupied by a Tulane Medical School dormitory. In 1905, however, that square was filled with a mix of residential dwellings, boarding houses, and commercial buildings such as groceries, bars, and restaurants. On the uptown lake corner of Tulane and Elk, across Tulane Avenue from where the main New Orleans Public Library now stands, was a former saloon. Using all of the limited funds then available, the modern new EENT Clinic was constructed on Tulane Avenue between the saloon and South Saratoga Street, and the saloon and the boarding house next to it on Elk Place were renovated and became the EENT Hospital.

These facilities opened in 1907. In the accompanying 1907 photograph, the brand new clinic building can be seen on the left, and the two renovated hospital buildings are at the center and right.

Efforts to complete the 1905-1907 building program got under way immediately following the World War, and still another fund-raising campaign was embarked upon. At last, in 1922 the new four-story EENT Hospital building was opened at the corner of Tulane and Elk, and the dream of the EENT directors for nearly thirty years was finally a reality.

The 1922 photo shows the new Hospital building on the corner with the Clinic to the left, a little farther up Tulane Avenue. The big new bulding dramatically increased the number of beds available, and in 1923 EENT began to accept paying patients so that revenue from the "pay patients" could help support the Hospital's charity patients.

The final expansion of EENT's central business district facilities came in 1950, with the completion of another four-story building on Elk Place. This new building was adjacent to the 1922 building on its downtown side. In the photo from 1955, the 1907 Clinic building, the 1922 Dibert Memorial hospital building, and the 1950 Stauffer Memorial hospital building appear left-to-right. These buildings served the community faithfully for many more years.

In 1988 the Hospital and Clinic moved uptown. A brand new hospital building was constructed on the uptown lake corner of Napoleon Avenue and Magnolia Street. The Clinic was reopened in a leased building several blocks away, on the uptown river corner of Napoleon and South Claiborne Avenues. The new EENT Hospital housed six state-of-the-art surgical suites but had relatively few rooms with in-patient beds. This compact and efficient building design reflected an increasing focus on out-patient care, one of the many significant changes which had been taking place in the field of hospital administration.

The economics of managing bricks-and-mortar healthcare facilities grew more challenging in the 1990s, and after much deliberation the EENT directors decided that the best way to sustain the organization's mission of serving the city would be to turn the physical assets into financial assets. In 1997 the uptown building was sold and the EENT Foundation took up the responsibilities which had first been assumed 108 years before by the founders of the EENT Hospital.

The last Hospital building became an important part of the Ochsner Baptist medical campus, and the site of the last Clinic was redeveloped and now hosts a Walgreen's drug store.

An historical account that tells the stories of some of the physicians involved in founding and nurturing the Eye, Ear, Nose & Throat Hospital was written by Dr. George D. Lyons and published in the Journal of the Louisiana State Medical Society in 2016. A copy of that paper is available here. Medical technologies evolved rapidly in the last half of the twentieth century, and these physicians enabled the Hospital to play a leading role in advancing the development and use of a number of them, including multichannel cochlear implants and CO₂ surgical lasers.

For more than a century, compassionate New Orleanians supported the EENT Hospital's building campaigns and supplemented its operating budget, and dedicated physicians and staff devoted themselves tirelessly to the Hospital's patients. Those many selfless years of time, effort, and money are manifested today in the EENT Foundation.

Now in the 2000s the EENT Foundation supports vision, hearing, and otolaryngological testing and care for needy New Orleanians through its network of approved physicians and service providers. The Foundation also supports education in these fields.  And looking further to the future, under its Competitive Biomedical Research Grant Program the Foundation makes funds available to New Orleans universities and non-profit healthcare organizations for the use of the institutions and their researchers, clinicians, and students who are working to discover new ways to prevent and treat disorders and diseases of the eye, ear, nose, and throat.

The Eye, Ear, Nose & Throat Foundation looks forward to serving New Orleans for many more years to come.