Aerial Photo: “Riverside Methodist Hospitals” circa 1990

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

If you and I were partners in the 1980s and ’90s, you may remember that I quoted the above lines often. Hospitals are always building buildings. But what happens inside, the unseeable healing and the birthing of memories, is where the real magic exists.

We RMH Alum’s remember that sweep of highway being called “The Hospital Curve.” But we know those giant white buildings in the aerial photo as our work home. That is how I thought from 1983-1995 and how I remember it in 2026.

You alums know this picture is from the early 1990s by what is there and what is not. You can see the Ambulatory Care Center at top right is still under construction. You can even see the day care center, then brand new, behind the old family practice center top left.

Most strikingly, you recognize that the giant Neuro Science building, McConnell Heart Center, new Main entrance, and the currently-under-construction Women’s Center are invisible. At best, they were only dreams then. It is our successors that have made them today’s reality.

Measurement is a big deal in all hospitals. Still, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Your memory holds moments of driving into that giant parking lot in winter, every hour you spent on one of those floors, every minute you lived helping mothers deliver babies, caring for shattered bodies in the ER, or comforting a dying patient at our Hospice Center.

We share pictures of RMH sweatshirts and old hospital magazine covers along with snapshots of us from those years. Yet, words are too weak to describe the exquisite or excruciating hours we lived as partners. When we were among those that helped determine the culture and the work environment. When we lit the lamps of hope for others in ways no pictures can show or buildings can house.

Most of the buildings are still there. We are gone.

That is why our celebration of each other matters. I, perhaps like you, have many times when I wish we could go back to what was. We may think it was better then. There is, thank God, so much good happening in those buildings now.

One of my sweetest recollections is of winter evenings when I would happen to drive around that Hospital Curve on 315 and glance over at our campus. I would revel in how beautiful our place looked in the twilight; lights on in so many rooms, the blue neon sign* standing bright against the darkening sky, the lots full of cars, and I would think to myself, “I cannot believe how lucky I am to lead that place!”

I savor those days and each of you. Thank you how that magic stays alive in each of us.

-Erie Chapman

*A bit of trivia. I am the one who directed placement of the big blue neon sign and added the “S” in Riverside Methodist Hospitals. In my earliest days, I dreamed that we would spread our healing culture to other hospitals. Pluralizing our name was a harbinger of the birth of the OhioHealth I founded in 1984 as President and CEO of U.S. Health.