Michael Jackson was a patient himself when he started visiting the other patients.
Two days after an accident in January 1984, a local California paper called the Daily Breeze ran a story with the headline “Singer Michael Jackson visits patients in burn unit.” It quoted Michael saying, “it makes me feel good to cheer up sick and injured patients in the hospital.”
That’s a lovely thing to say on any day. It means even more coming from someone who had just been taken to the hospital himself.
Think about the timing. The accident happened on Jan 27, and that story ran on Jan 29. He was visiting other patients almost right away.
Here’s what happened, kept short. On Jan 27, 1984, Michael was filming a commercial for Pepsi when an accident on the set left him with burns to his scalp.
He was taken to Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, California, near Los Angeles. This 1984 news report covers his trip to the hospital, and it’s a real time capsule from the week fans first heard the news.
A 1984 news report on Michael’s trip to the hospital
His time in that burn unit stayed with him.
While he was there, he met other patients and spent time with them. He never forgot them.
Then came the money.
Pepsi paid Michael $1.5 million. For most people, that would have been a life-changing check to keep. Michael had other plans for it.
He gave every dollar of the $1.5 million to Brotman Medical Center, the same hospital that had treated him. His official website, MichaelJackson.com, says that in 1985 the money went to found a burn center at the very place he’d been a patient. The burn center was named the Michael Jackson Burn Center in his honor.
Years later, Michael explained why in his 1988 book “Moonwalk.” He wrote that he gave the money because he was so moved by the other burn patients he’d met at the hospital. Those patients were the reason. He wanted the money to go to people like them.
So the paycheck from the commercial that put him in the hospital went right back to that hospital.
Cheering up patients wasn’t a one-time thing for Michael, either. Years after Brotman, cameras followed him on another hospital visit, this time at Sophia Children’s Hospital in 1992. It’s a good look at the side of Michael the Daily Breeze wrote about back in 1984.
Michael visits Sophia Children’s Hospital in 1992
It would have been easy for Michael to treat that January as a bad memory and move on.
Instead, he thought about the people he’d met in that unit and gave the money away. The burn center it helped found carried his name. More than 40 years later, it’s still one of the kindest things he ever did with a check.