The Mount Sinai Hospital is a nonprofit teaching hospital on Manhattan's Upper East Side in New York City that provides advanced and specialized medical care. Located beside Central Park between East 98th and 102nd streets, it is the flagship hospital of the Mount Sinai Health System and is affiliated with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The hospital provides adult and pediatric care across medical and surgical specialties and is designated by New York State as a Designated AIDS Center, Sexual Assault Forensic Examiner (SAFE) hospital, Comprehensive Stroke Center, and Regional Perinatal Center.

The institution was founded in 1852 as The Jews' Hospital in the City of New York by Jewish philanthropists seeking to provide care for the city's Jewish immigrant population and professional opportunities for Jewish physicians, who faced discrimination at other medical institutions. It opened on West 28th Street in 1855, changed its name to Mount Sinai Hospital in 1866 as it became a nonsectarian institution, moved to Lexington Avenue between East 66th and 67th streets in 1872, and moved to its present Upper East Side campus in 1904. The hospital later established the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, which admitted its first students in 1968 and at which point the overall entity became known as The Mount Sinai Medical Center.

Mount Sinai is known for the large number of medical breakthroughs it has pioneered and has long been considered one of the preeminent medical institutions in the country. For instance, Abraham Jacobi is widely regarded as the father of American pediatrics, while Mount Sinai physicians and researchers have contributed to the description, and hence naming, of Crohn's disease, Tay–Sachs disease, the Shwartzman phenomenon, and the Rubin test. In February 2026, the hospital was ranked 22nd among over 2,500 hospitals in the world and the best hospital in New York state by Newsweek/Statista. Also included on the campus are the Mount Sinai Kravis Children's Hospital and clinical facilities associated with the Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Center. The campus has seen much redevelopment over the decades; well-known structures on it include the Annenberg Building and the Guggenheim Pavilion.

Naming

There are, or have been, a number of different and unrelated healthcare institutions in North America called "Mount Sinai Hospital" – all named after the Mount Sinai of the Hebrew Bible – including one in Cleveland (opened 1903), one in Milwaukee (opened 1903), one in Philadelphia (opened 1905), one in Montréal (opened 1909), one in Chicago (opened 1912, changed to name 1919), one in Norfolk (opened 1921), one in Hartford (opened 1923), one in Toronto (opened 1923, changed to name 1924), one in Los Angeles (opened 1923, changed to exact name in 1926), one in Miami Beach (opened 1946), and one in Detroit (opened in 1953). But the one in New York was first.

Accordingly, the hospital and its associated entities have long considered usage around the name "Mount Sinai" to be important. See also access to Brand Center. Part of this is that in Mount Sinai publications and use, the flagship hospital's name is always preceded by a capitalized 'The', thus 'The Mount Sinai Hospital', even in running text, while the other hospitals in the health system, such as Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West, get no 'the' or 'The' at all.See for instance or or

History

19th century Creation of The Jews' Hospital At the time of the founding of the hospital in 1852, other hospitals in New York City discriminated against Jewish people by not hiring Jewish doctors or nurses and by prohibiting Jewish patients from being treated in the hospitals' wards. Jewish doctors themselves faced restrictive quotas or outright refusal when it came to medical education and training in specialties. Orthodox Jewish philanthropist Sampson Simson worked with eight other Jewish benefactors to found the hospital in order to address the needs of New York's rapidly growing Jewish immigrant community, needs which included communicating with immigrants in the German language, the availability of kosher foods, and the understanding of Jewish burial customs.

Originally called The Jews' Hospital in the City of New York, it was the second Jewish hospital in the United States, after the Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was established in 1847. It opened with 45 beds on May 17, 1855, on West 28th Street in Manhattan between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, two years before Simson's death. In 1856, its first full year of operation, the new entity saw a total of 216 admissions, with five surgeons and physicians on staff and six more that had consulting positions.

The board of directors of the Jews' Hospital initially comprised Portuguese and English Jews, but soon educated German immigrant Jews were added as well.

The hospital accepted only Jewish patients on a regular basis but was open to non-Jews for emergency cases. Most of these patients were poor and could not pay for any care, and by taking them in it relieved the burden on non-Jewish services to care for them and thus helped in relations between Jews and the larger community.

Civil War Four years later, it was unexpectedly filled to capacity with soldiers injured in the American Civil War.

The Jews' Hospital felt the effects of the escalating Civil War in other ways, as staff doctors and board members were called into service. Dr. Israel Moses served four years as lieutenant colonel in the 72nd New York Infantry Regiment; Joseph Seligman had to resign as a member of the board of directors, as he was increasingly called upon by President Lincoln for advice on the country's growing financial crisis.

The New York Draft Riots of 1863 also impacted the hospital's resources, as it admitted many of the wounded.

Change to The Mount Sinai Hospital

More and more, the Jews' Hospital was finding itself an integral part of the general community, and the experiences during the Civil War convinced the hospital to adopt a more secular outlook. In 1866, to reflect this new-found role, it changed its name to Mount Sinai Hospital. This again helped in community relations, as by accepting everyone as patients it helped undermine the stereotype that Jews only cared about taking care of their own people. Becoming non-sectarian also qualified the hospital to receive public fundings.

But despite becoming non-sectarian, Mount Sinai would clearly be for many years a Jewish hospital, in that it was supported by Jewish benefactors from New York, one of its main goals was to treat poor Jewish patients, it provided training for Jewish interns and residents, and it provided long-term hospital privileges for Jewish physicians.

Move to the East Side

Seeking more space, the hospital then moved uptown to the east side of Lexington Avenue between East 66th and 67th streets, with the new facility opening on May 29, 1872. Capacity was thrice that of before.

With the larger space, the hospital was able to expand the specialties it handled, including dermatology, eye and ear issues, neurology, and pediatrics, as well as offering outpatient services. When the pediatrics department was created in 1878, it was the first one to exist within a general hospital, and when a neurological service was established in 1900, it became the first hospital in the city to do so.

The hospital would concentrate on free care for patients throughout the rest of the 19th century. Mount Sinai was not the only Jewish hospital in the city; in particular, there was Beth Israel Hospital on the Lower East Side. Nonetheless, Mount Sinai continued to draw patients; its Lexington Avenue site would expand in size to contain 225 beds, but still more space was needed.

20th century Move to the Upper East Side The Mount Sinai Hospital forged relationships with many physicians who made contributions to medicine, including Henry N. Heineman, Frederick S. Mandelbaum, Bernard Sachs, Charles A. Elsberg, Emanuel Libman, and, most significantly, Abraham Jacobi, a champion of the move to the hospital's new site on Manhattan's Upper East Side at the beginning of the century. The motivation for changing locations was to obtain more space to accommodate the greater number of people seeking hospital services. The new location was opened on March 15, 1904, taking up the whole block between 100th and 101st Streets and Fifth and Madison Avenues, and providing a total of 456 patient beds. Contemporary reports described it as the country's largest hospital by physical size and the third-largest by patient capacity.

In 1903, S. S. Goldwater, a doctor, was appointed superintendent of the hospital, and as such became the first professional medical hospital administrator anywhere in the United States. He served in that role until 1916, after which he served as a director of the hospital until 1926.

Staff at Mount Sinai saw that social problems were often linked to medical ones, and in 1906, the first social worker was hired. A social service department was created under Goldwater's leadership, which would subsequently become known as the Department of Social Work Services. A decade later it had a staff of eighteen and a decade after that forty, growing to become one of the largest social service departments in any hospital in the nation – with a role that was especially important during traumatic periods such as the Great Depression.

The early 20th century saw the population of New York City explode. That, coupled with many new discoveries at Mount Sinai (including significant advances in blood transfusions and the first endotracheal anesthesia apparatus), meant that Mount Sinai's pool of doctors and specialists was in increasing demand.

World War I Mount Sinai responded to a request from the United States Army Medical Corps with the creation of Base Hospital No.3 of the American Expeditionary Forces, built around a group of doctors and nurses from Mount Sinai. This unit went to France in early 1918, and treated 9,127 patients with 172 deaths: 54 surgical and 118 medical, the latter due mainly to influenza and pneumonia.

The aftermath of the war saw the hospital dealing with not only the influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920 but also the 1919–1930 encephalitis lethargica epidemic that followed it as well as the problems of pleural empyema that could follow post-influenzal pneumonia.

A focus on research

From the early years of the 20th century on, doing medical research became an active priority at Mount Sinai. Over twenty diseases and other medical tests and techniques have been named after the doctors at Mount Sinai who discovered them, including Burrill Bernard Crohn for Crohn's disease, Bernard Sachs for Tay–Sachs disease, Gregory Shwartzman for the Shwartzman phenomenon, and Isidor Clinton Rubin for the Rubin test. At first, findings from research activities were published as part of the biennial Mount Sinai Hospital Reports series. In 1925, the hospital established a long-term research endowment fund and a medical journal in which to publish research results, as well as postgraduate teaching programs emphasizing both general care and various specialty areas. Subsequently, the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine was founded in 1934 and would publish as a general medical journal until 2007. The demographics of the East Harlem neighborhood around two sides of Mount Sinai started changing in the 1920s, with a large influx of Puerto Ricans coming in; the hospital provided ward medical service to them.