From those humble beginnings sprang a whole new system of community-based health-care delivery in New Orleans. The brainchild of DeSalvo, who earned a medical degree and master’s degree in public health from Tulane in 1992, the Covenant House clinic treated 8,000 patients in its first year. By 2010, the network that DeSalvo created had grown to 68 clinics treating about 200,000 people a year.

“We were making our wings as we were falling off the cliff,” DeSalvo said of that turbulent time. “It’s not thinking out of the box because we got rid of the box.”

Charity Hospital and its successor, University Medical Center, will always be known as places “where the unusual occurs and miracles happen,” as the written motto inside Charity once proclaimed. And when so many of the city’s sick and suffering were crying out for help after Katrina, Tulane physician Karen DeSalvo answered their call and made real—and lasting—miracles happen.