Carney Hospital, long a fixture in Dorchester, was founded in 1863 by Andrew Carney, an Irish immigrant who built his fortune in textiles. With a $75,000 donation (about $2 million today), he created a hospital where Boston’s working class and Civil War veterans could receive treatment. Its founding charter stated plainly that it was to provide “care of the sick, without distinction of creed, color, or nationality,” according to the chronology preserved by the Daughters of Charity.

For more than a century, Carney lived up to that mission, and when the hospital shut its doors on September 30, 2024, it wasn’t because doctors or nurses failed. It was because the same financial engineering and waves of privatization that have stripped hospitals across the country finally caught up here, leaving a 161-year-old institution powerless against forces far larger than itself.

The institution may have closed, but its spirit was first defined by people, not profits. When Carney Hospital needed its first administrator, Sister Ann Alexis Shorb stepped forward. A Daughter of Charity, she brought the resolve that shaped the hospital’s Catholic ethos of service. Her obituaries, published by the community in Boston and by her order in Emmitsburg, Maryland, described her as “an indefatigable worker” with a “sweet, winning personality.”

Carney quickly became a hospital of firsts. Records recall that its outpatient clinic, opened in 1877, charged just ten cents per visit, making care accessible to laborers who could not afford private doctors. In 1882, Dr. John Homans performed the first abdominal surgery in America at Carney, an operation that won the hospital international renown. It opened Boston’s first skin clinic in 1891, established the region’s first Catholic nursing school the following year. During the influenza epidemic of 1918, the hospital treated four hundred victims at once, with several Sisters and nurses themselves falling ill in the process.

Carney’s sense of mission did not stop at Dorchester’s borders. In the 1960s and 70s, the Daughters of Charity organized medical missions from Carney to Haiti, where Sisters and physicians treated children suffering from malnutrition and tropical disease. Writing about the mission, Sister Mary Walter Boyle situated it within a longer institutional relationship, explaining that “where Carney now has many Haitian patients and staff, a better understanding of the Haitian culture and medical needs is important in providing care at the Hospital,” and later reflecting, “the highlight of my trip was to help a mother deliver her baby! Sister Josephine, a Daughter from Puerto Rico, was with us for the event - - one fraught with privations and difficulties - - but one with a happy ending - - a little baby girl!”

As Carney entered the 2000s, money and ownership changes started to shape what it would become. For years, it had been part of Caritas Christi, a group of Catholic hospitals run by the Archdiocese of Boston. That affiliation came after a key shift in 1997, when control moved from the Daughters of Charity to Caritas, something one longtime staff member I spoke to felt marked the end of its identity as a charity-focused Catholic hospital. Then, in 2010, Caritas was sold to Steward Health Care, a for-profit company backed by private equity.

The sale was presented as a way to modernize and improve the hospital, with promises to run it more efficiently and keep it afloat when nonprofit models had struggled. Fourteen years later, in 2024, that promise collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

Long before UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot in Midtown Manhattan and his assailant echoed public outrage over healthcare denial and profiteering with shell casings inscribed with the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose,” Massachusetts had already begun to feel the fractures caused by healthcare privatization.

When Steward took over in 2010, it implemented a sale-leaseback scheme, selling the land beneath Carney to a real estate trust and leasing it back under a triple net lease. Carney no longer owned its land, yet still bore the full cost of it. The deal brought in immediate capital, but locked the hospital into long-term financial strain.

By 2024, that strain had become untenable. The triple net lease had turned Carney’s land from a stable asset into a constant drain, requiring fixed payments for rent, taxes, insurance, and maintenance that did not adjust when revenue fell. Across Steward’s system, similar arrangements compounded these pressures, placing multiple hospitals under the same strain and weakening the company as a whole. In May 2024, Steward Health Care filed for bankruptcy, leaving Carney’s future uncertain. On August 1, a mere few weeks after the filing and well short of the 120-day notice Massachusetts state law requires to suspend essential services, a bankruptcy judge approved its closure.

For Dorchester, where nearly 60 percent of residents are Black or Latino and rates of chronic illness are high, losing Carney has been devastating. Carney handled about 30,000 emergency visits a year before it closed, and since then Boston EMS has reported a 20% increase in transport times as patients are taken to other hospitals. Many now travel farther to Beth-Israel Deaconess Hospital Milton, where the emergency department, built for 26,000 visits a year, is already handling more than 40,000 and struggling to keep up. In January 2025, about 24.5% of all ambulance-to-ED trips arriving at Milton Hospital came from Boston, mostly Dorchester and Mattapan, more than double the 11.1% recorded a year earlier, according to a report by the Dorchester Health Planning Working Group.

What began as a hospital built on charity and innovation ended in bankruptcy court, forced to rent its own foundation back.