During World War I, a man lay in the only oxygen tent at St. Joseph Hospital on East Carson Street as an infant gasped for air. Sister Anna Regina Luckett had to decide whether to take the man out of the tent or let the baby die.

Instead, she went to the kitchen and grabbed a cellophane ham wrapper, then hastened to the dime store for a wicker basket to hold the baby. She attached the cellophane over the basket "and jury-rigged the oxygen supply," said Sister Marguerite Coyne, a Sister of St. Joseph of Baden who documented the story for "Sisters in Healthcare 1847-1969," an exhibit being prepared at Slippery Rock University.

"When the other hospitals in Pittsburgh heard about it, they adopted it," she said of the first infant oxygen tent.

The exhibit will showcase 16 Catholic orders in Western Pennsylvania. So far only a small display is open at the Regional Learning Alliance in Cranberry. But John Bavaro, professor of health services administration at Slippery Rock, has amassed more than 100 artifacts, including the largest collection of pre-Vatican II sisters' habits in the U.S.

Dr. Bavaro spent much of his career at Catholic healthcare facilities before coming to Slippery Rock in 1993. He was sad to see many Catholic hospitals closing, with no acknowledgment of what the sisters had accomplished.

The sisters were reluctant to sing their own praises, but by 2004 he had persuaded many to trust him with their stories and artifacts. Sister Anna Regina's invention was one of many discoveries.

"The more I work on this, the more I find out about the challenges they faced, the roads they pioneered and the sacrifices they made," he said.

Most sisters worked 364 days a year for $1 a day paid to their communities.

"The Sisters of the Holy Family told me that on their time off they grew vegetables in the back of the hospital to feed the patients during the Great Depression," he said, as he painstakingly garbed a mannequin in layer upon layer worn by the Benedictine sisters.

"Despite what this looks like, they told me they could get dressed in 15 minutes," he said.

The sisters believed they were following Christ's call, but their story is about more than faith, he said. In eras when few women were educated, they became medical pioneers and ran multimillion-dollar nonprofit corporations. Even the managed-care prototype that became Blue Cross -- now Highmark -- was developed in 1933 by Sister of Charity Irenaeus Joyce at Providence Hospital in Beaver Falls, he said.

The collection now belongs to the Slippery Rock University Foundation. The state school has backed the project with office space and supplies because the sisters' story is vital to the history of Western Pennsylvania, Dr. Bavaro said.

Seven Sisters of Mercy were the first to arrive here, in 1843. In 1847, when typhus struck the city, they opened Pittsburgh's first hospital -- Mercy Hospital -- in a music hall. Four of the first seven sisters soon died of typhus caught from their patients.

Catholic sisters, with a centuries-old tradition of caring for the sick, were then the nation's only professional nurses and hospital administrators. President Abraham Lincoln issued a request for sisters to tend the wounded during the Civil War.

In 1862 at least 37 Sisters of Mercy of Pittsburgh responded, serving at Stanton Hospital in Washington, D.C., and on many battlefields. When Sister Otilia Duche, the Pittsburgh Mercy sister in charge of Stanton Hospital, ran short of food for her patients, she went to the White House to appeal for supplies. President Lincoln wrote her a note ordering the War Department to give her whatever she wanted, said Sister Patricia McCann, archivist for the Sisters of Mercy.

The sisters insisted on the right to treat all soldiers equally, no matter which side they fought for, she said."The Civil War changed the attitude of the America people toward the sisters," Dr. Bavaro said. "Prior to that it was common for sisters to be burned out of their convents by people who thought they were trying to help the pope take over the country."

Crises often turned sisters to nursing. Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill were teaching in Johnstown when their convent was destroyed by the great flood of 1889 that killed 2,209 people.

"When their superiors came from Greensburg and wanted to take them back to the motherhouse, they elected to stay in Johnstown and help out at the temporary hospital that had been set up," said Msgr. Timothy Stein, editor of the Catholic Register of the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, and writer for the Sisters in Healthcare project. In 1965, the Carmelite Sisters of the Aged and Infirm opened a home in Hollidaysburg, bringing with them from New York the cutting edge practices of physical therapy and other methods to keep ailing residents active and engaged.

Dr. Bavaro learned that the first certified nurse anesthetist in the nation was Sister Bernard Sheridan, a Sister of St. Joseph of Erie, in 1893. But he's been unable to learn anything about her beyond a brief mention in a history of the Pennsylvania Association of Nurse Anesthetists.

Few people realize how much sisters influenced the entire profession of nursing, Dr. Bavaro said. He has uniforms worn by secular graduates of nursing schools the sisters ran. The distinctive caps of each school are based on headgear the sisters wore. One classic style of nursing cap, with a turned up, pointed brim, was a tiny version of the huge paper-airplane-like cornettes worn by the Daughters of Charity.

The habits are stored in archival boxes. Student interns from Slippery Rock's history program designed and built mannequins from dress forms and heads. They closely resemble museum mannequins that would cost $2,000 each, but cost a tenth of that to make.

Dr. Bavaro is new to museum work and fundraising. He finds the latter a difficult struggle. The cost of a traveling display and storage is expected to total at least $250,000.

The artifacts include an array of antique equipment, from a Wedgewood china bedpan to a wicker wheelchair. While the sisters pushed advances in care, they weren't immune to bad practices of their day. Dr. Bavaro produced a bright green box of "therapeutic cigarettes" for athsmatics, containing stramonium and belladonna.

"The sister who gave them to me remembered giving them to patients," he said.

One 1960 photo on the storyboard shows Vincentian Sisters of Charity kneeling at the bed of a dying patient at the Vincentian Home in McCandless.

The home, which opened in 1924, was the vision of the Rev. Lawrence Carroll and Mother Emerentiana Handlovits.

Medical advances and insurance led to changes. The home is now primarily for the elderly. While most residents are of limited means, "We don't turn people away because they have money and we don't turn people away because they don't have money," Sister Rhoda Kay said.

They still pray with the dying.

"If it's at all possible, there would be sisters or staff or other residents to be with them and pray with them. That still goes on," she said.

Sisters have spoken to classes at Slippery Rock, including the School of Business, where they spoke about running healthcare corporations. They also spoke of other work that their communities do now, including efforts to stop modern-day slavery in brothels and sweatshops.

"The students were blown away. They didn't realize that sisters were still around, or that they were doing that kind of work," Dr. Bavaro said.

Many people believe Catholic hospitals have closed because there are few sisters to run them. While that's part of it, the sisters moved on to needs that no one else was addressing, he said. Today some sisters in health care drive vans to remote areas, bringing basic screenings and advice to the uninsured.

"They are still the pioneers. They realize the need to do things that are not being taken care of," he said.

For information, contact Dr. Bavaro at 724-738-2265 or see www.sistersinhealthcare.org.