Edgar Galloway, M.D. was appointed by the Board of Directors as the new Superintendent of the Shreveport Charity Hospital in August 1940. In 1939, the Hospital submitted credentials to the American College of Surgeons (ACS) to support the establishment of a surgery residency. The resulting ACS assessment was negative, criticizing the administration for housing its residents in a dark and dank cellar, for employing only twenty-three graduate nurses, and for their common practice of placing two or more patients in one bed.

The direct result of this evaluation was the appointment of Dr. Galloway, who immediately sought to address the Hospital’s most egregious faults. Galloway proved to be a successful administrator, serving the Hospital for four decades.

On May 5, 1941 a panel chaired by Dr. O.P. Daly, Superintendent of Charity Hospital of Louisiana, toured the Shreveport Charity Hospital. The panel cited numerous deficiencies and concluded that there was little to be gained by attempting to renovate the hospital. In Dr. Daly’s follow-up letter to Dr. Galloway, he stated “I was very much distressed upon observing the adverse conditions under which you are forced to do your work …” The panel’s report laid the foundation for plans to replace Shreveport Charity with a modern hospital. This vision took more than a decade to become a reality when the doors opened to the new hospital in 1953.

The United States’ involvement in World War II led to a decline in the number of physicians, interns and residents available to staff civilian hospitals. A revision of the 1940 Selective Service and Training Act required that all men between the ages of 18 and 65 register for the draft, with the 18 to 45 year-olds being immediately subject to induction. Increasing numbers of trained medical personnel were needed for the war effort, leaving hospitals to employ women physicians, physically disqualified physicians and those who had been discharged from military service. The War Manpower Commission required hospitals to submit lists of essential personnel with data about age, gender, commission status, and Selective Service classification.

When World War II ended in 1946, there was a nationwide call for expansion of medical training facilities to accommodate the many returning physicians who wanted to enroll in a residency program. Residencies were continued or established at Shreveport Charity Hospital in Surgery, Medicine, Pathology, Urology, Radiology, Pediatrics, Obstetrics-Gynecology, Psychiatry, Orthopedics, Dental Surgery, Otolaryngology, and Ophthalmology.

Prior to 1949, nurses in Shreveport received their training from hospital-based programs, an educational experience that did not include college level courses in the basic and health sciences.

This non-collegiate training resulted in a shortage of qualified nurses to staff Shreveport hospitals. To address this problem, an integrated collegiate nurses’ training program was established at the Northwestern State College in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The State Board of Education approved the collegiate program on April 11, 1949 and the first class was admitted in September. The Shreveport Charity Hospital along with Highland Sanitarium, North Louisiana Sanitarium and Tri-State Hospital provided the clinical experience for this new program. E.A. Conway Hospital in Monroe and Baptist Hospital in Alexandria also collaborated in this effort.

The long-awaited groundbreaking for the new hospital facility took place on September 5, 1949. Throughout the early 1940s, various bond issues and bills were proposed in the Louisiana Legislature. Finally in 1946 a constitutional amendment that authorized the issuance of bonds to be secured by surpluses from the Confederate Veterans’ pension fund tax was approved. A twenty-three acre plot of land was purchased at the southeast corner of Kings Highway and Linwood Avenue.

Associated Hospital Architects, composed of the Shreveport firms of Samuel G. Wiener, Neild and Somdal, and Van Os and Flaxman, was chosen to design the building. The $6,039,000 bid from the J.A. Jones Construction Company was accepted and led to the second largest building permit ever issued in Shreveport in July 1949.