FOLEY, Ala. — The baby was in trouble. A double-breech birth (the feet and rear coming first instead of the head — as is normal), labor was long and difficult for the mother and life-threatening for the baby.

The infant was not breathing after delivery.

While Dr. W.C. Holmes tended to the mother, his wife and nurse, Philomena, tried to revive the baby.

According to Bonnie Donaldson, a board member of the Holmes Medical Museum in Foley, Philomena used warm and cold baths to get the child to breathe, to cry.

It worked. That baby, Donaldson, now helps to oversee the museum honoring Dr. Holmes and his father, Dr. Sibley Holmes. Sibley Holmes, according to Donaldson, came to the area in the mid-teens of the early 1900s.

The Sibley Holmes Memorial Hospital opened in 1936, not long after Sibley passed away. The museum occupies the original site, 111 W. Laurel Ave. (Highway 98).

“It was his (Sibley’s) dream to see a hospital come into being,” said Donaldson. “He died just before that happened.”

The hospital served the area until South Baldwin Hospital opened in 1958.

“W.C. Holmes was on the staff of that hospital,” said Donaldson.

Donaldson recalls being brought to the Holmes hospital over the years, once by her school’s assistant principal to receive stitches when she had an accident during school hours.

The opening of South Baldwin left idle a hospital that had served the area for 20-plus years. Eventually, Dr. Lynn Younge, who owned the property, approached the city council about the possibility of opening an art center and museum in the space.

Today, the hospital is set up pretty much as it was in its early years. There’s plenty of apparatus, and the staff of the tourist center located next door will get you started.

Tours are self-guided, but visitors will have to climb up a flight of stairs to get to the main part of the exhibit. Admission is free, and the museum is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. Donations are encouraged.

Tours for groups can be arranged by calling 251-943-1818 a few weeks in advance.

If you are wondering how sick or injured patients managed to get up those stairs, Donaldson has a possible solution.

“One of the nurses told me that if someone was too sick to get up the stairs, the nurse would get a couple of burly men from a nearby poolroom to help them up the stairs,” she said.

The museum is filled with devices that will be both strange and familiar to people today. There’s a device that a doctor could use to measure hemoglobin levels in blood (an important test for anemia) that used candlelight.

You might remember that homes did not always have electricity when the doctor would call.

Donaldson says she does not have a favorite exhibit, but smiles when revealing what she gets the most questions about when schoolchildren tour the museum.

“There is a skeleton in one of the wards,” she said. “The kids want to know three questions, and I know the answer to two of them. It is a real skeleton, it is male, but I have no idea how he died.”