^-" COLUMBIA LIBRARIES OFFSITE HEALTH SCIENCES STANDARD III III II HI HX641 67259 RA982.N48 So1 3 Historical address d RECAP &*.'■■■■. £ A.. . £jjj|jj ' ^^, ; #Vtf3 S -,. -ij; * :;v . '^M*t .. ~*f£t%-L Columbia Umbersittp in ttie Cttp of J&to Horfe College of $Jjpgtcians anb gmrgeons Reference Htbrarp THE SOCIETY OF THE NEW YORK HOSPITAL HISTORICAL ADDRESS DELIVERED IN TRINITY CHURCH. NEW YORK, ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 26. 1921, AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ROYAL CHARTER OF THE SOCIETY EDWARD W. SHELDON ITS PRESIDENT Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from Open Knowledge Commons http://www.archive.org/details/historicaladdresOOnewy ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS IN TRINITY CHURCH OCTOBER 26, 1921 BY EDWARD W. SHELDON The Governors of the Hospital are profoundly grateful for the permission that has so graciously been given to hold our anniversary exercises in this venerable shrine. Trinity Church, which is fortunate in still retaining the distinguished leader- ship of its Rector, notwithstanding his engrossing episcopal duties, has always upheld civic righteous- ness in whatever form presented. But there is special appropriateness in linking today these two ancient New York institutions, because on this very spot the younger of them came into being. There is, too, general his- toric as well as spiritual significance in the association of the church with the divinely appointed mission of a hospital. The wisdom of ancient Greece ranged over many human needs, and modern medicine finds there its first great exemplars. Hospitals, as we understand the term, did not exist, but the temples of the gods, both in Greece and Italy, were the refuge of the sick, and there the priests or family of Aesculapius minis- tered to the ill in body or mind "in a full conviction", as Walter Pater expresses it, "of the religiousness; the refined and sacred happiness, of a life spent in the relieving of pain". It was, we recall, the payment of a sacrificial debt to this god of health that inspired Socrates' last words. That fruitful worship of perfect sanity, so characteristic of the Greek and Roman civilization, may explain the inscription reputed to have been placed over the entrance to the great Library at Alexandria, suggesting that the books which it held were "the medicine of the mind." From even earlier times, indeed, the care of the sick proceeded under religious guidance. The temples of Saturn in Egypt and of Buddha in India seem to have sheltered medical schools as well as the sick, prior to the Christian era. Mohammedanism in its turn associated medical instruc- tion and the care of the sick with the mosque, and in the early and middle centuries of the Christian age an inti- mate relation between the church and the foundation and maintenance of hospitals flourished throughout Europe. Thus the hospital fittingly became the Hotel Dieu. In the same religious spirit, the privately sup- ported general hospital, beginning in 1123 with St. Bartholomew's of London, under the Prior Lahere, de- veloped in England. That model, though without the ecclesiastic connection, naturally commended itself to the British Colonies in North America. In Pennsylvania, their leader in population and in philanthropic spirit, a charter was obtained in 1751, largely through the efforts of that matchless American, Benjamin Frank- lin, for the Pennsylvania Hospital, in Philadelphia, the first incorporated hospital on this side of the Atlantic. The idea of this institution originated with Dr. Thomas Bond, who, like many of his profession in that day, had studied medicine in London and Edinburgh. Eighteen years later it fell to another physician of similar experience to suggest the establishment of such an institution in the City of New York. The occasion arose in this church. To understand the purport of that civic milestone, a word of preface may be help- ful. In the year 1769 the Colony of New York, with a population of about 300,000, of whom only about 20,000 lived in the City, had not a single hospital. A century earlier, indeed, a primitive institution under the direction of a Dutch matron had been maintained for a few years near Whitehall Street, but this was abandoned in 1674. Medical education in the Colonies was almost as backward. In 1767 a modest begin- ning had been made in New York by the estab- lishment of a medical department in King's Col- lege, now Columbia University. Two years later, on May 16, 1769, the graduating exercises of the first recipients of its medical degrees were, by a happy chance, held here within the walls of the original Trinity Church. A notable assemblage, including the Governor of the Colony, Sir Henry Moore, was present. Lasting distinction was given the occasion by Dr. Samuel Bard, a student of King's College and the London Hospital, a graduate in medicine of Edin- burgh University, and Professor of the Practice of Medicine in the College, whose name stands high on the roll of the profession, who, after addressing the two graduates on the high duties of their profession, elo- quently urged on the community the crying need for a general hospital, not only for the care and relief of the sick, but also as affording the best and only means of instructing students properly in the practice of medi- cine. This moving appeal met with an immediate response. Sir Henry Moore then and there headed a subscription, and many contributions were received. Sir Henry did not live to see his work crowned, but the Hospital was organized in 1770, and on June 13, 1771, in the term of his successor, the Earl of Dunmore, a Royal Charter was granted to "The Society of the Hos- pital in the city of New York in America," a seal with the legend of the Good Samaritan was adopted, — the original silver die of which is still used by the Society, — an annual appropriation of £800 for twenty years was voted by the Colonial Assembly, and steps were taken to procure an appropriate site. The city offered a tract of three-quarters of an acre near where the present Municipal Building stands, and Trinity Church, which in 1755 had given Kings College its grounds in Park Place, offered the hospital a 99 years lease of a two acre plot at Canal and Hudson Streets, but the Society determined to buy five acres of land on an elevated site on the west side of Broadway opposite Pearl Street, and imposing hospital buildings were painstakingly planned. Meanwhile Dr. John Jones was sent to England to make a public appeal there for funds, and to study Euro- pean hospital architecture. Dr. John Fothergill, the famous English physician, who was then confer- ring at London with Franklin in an endeavor to avert hostilities between the mother country and the Colonies, exerted himself in behalf of the project, and was so successful that he was chosen as one of its first Gov- ernors. Among the many British gifts were 20 shares in the Delaware Lottery from the Earl of Stirling. On September 3, 1773, the corner stone of the hospital was laid with due ceremony by Governor Tryon. Con- struction was pressed with all convenient speed, a staff of physicians, including Drs. Bard and Jones, was ap- pointed, preparations for the reception of patients were made, but on the 28th of February, 1775, when the building was practically completed, an accidental fire consumed the interior, "and", as the New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury described it, "this beautiful and useful structure, at once the pride and ornament of the City, became a ruin". Nothing daunted, the Governors made a fresh appeal for funds, £4,000 was granted by the Colonial Assembly, reconstruction was begun and within a year completed. But then a new obstacle to hospital operation arose. The War of the Revolution had exposed New York to attack, and on April 2, 1776, the New York Committee of Safety ordered the Governors to have the hospital put in a proper state for the reception of Continental troops. Breastworks had been thrown up around the 6 building, and the posting of troops there was deemed necessary for the defence of these works and of the City in general. By the irony of fate the first hospital patients received in the building were several American soldiers who had been wounded July 12, 1776 in an engagement between the shore batteries and two British warships forcing a passage up the Hudson. One of the cannon balls in that action landed in the Hospital grounds. In the fortune of war, the occupation of the Hospital passed with the cap- ture of the city in September, 1776, to British and Hessian troops. As their barracks, and occa- sionally as a military hospital, the building continued to be used for the next seven years. When the sol- diers were withdrawn and the war ended, a tedious period of readjustment ensued. Among other compli- cations, a reconstitution of the Board of Governors be- came necessary, since several of them had been named in the bill of attainder. Some use in the meanwhile was made of the buildings for medical instruction, and the State Legislature met there, but it was not until January, 1791, that this "Asylum for Pain and Dis- tress", as the Governors feelingly described it, was finally opened for the treatment of patients. A few years later the corporate title of the institution was changed by the Legislature to the present form, "The Society of the New York Hospital." That notable landmark of the City, with its stately gray- stone buildings and beautiful trees, lawn and flowers, may still be remembered by some of those present today. It was this prospect which is said to have ani- mated the genial Diedrich Knickerbocker while com- posing his inimitable History of New York. No one, probably, retains a more vivid recollection of the scene than our honored senior surgeon, Dr. Robert F. Weir, who began his brilliant professional career as a junior interne, in the shadow of those lofty elms, in 1859. The grounds extended from Broadway west to Church Street and from Duane Street north to Worth Street. The main building, with a handsome cupola, was in the centre, on the Worth Street side was the North Building, on the Duane Street side the newer South Building, and a laundry, extensive stables, and a building for lectures and autopsies occupied other sites. This structural group, which contained about 500 beds for patients, continued in active use until 1870, when the Governors of the Society found the financial burden of maintaining a hospital on that spacious and valu- able site too heavy to bear. They accordingly vacated the buildings and leased the ground on long terms, which have, from time to time, since been renewed. As soon as the necessary funds could be accumulated, a new hospital was built on the present site in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, west of Fifth Avenue, and there the work of the Society's general hospital has since been conducted. During the progress of the removal of the main hospital from lower Broadway the demand for an emergency hospital service in that district was em- phasized by the City's abandonment in 1875 of the so-called Park Hospital at the corner of Centre and Chambers Streets. This created an acute community need and the Governors responded to it by immediately establishing what was known as the Chambers Street Hospital. The building utilized for this purpose under informal license from the city was a disused Police Station House at 160 Chambers Street. Notwithstand- ing the insecurity of the tenure of this property, the Society expended a large sum in converting the build- ing into a hospital, and there 320,000 patients were treated. This service became so important that in 1894 the Society acquired a plot at the corner of Hudson and Jay Streets and there constructed the modern fire- proof hospital building known as the House of Relief. Under the brilliant direction first of Dr. William T. Bull and afterwards of Dr. Lewis A. Stimson, these two hospitals successively carried on an active and notable surgical service, in addition to constant med- ical work. When, after the recent war the Govern- ment wished to acquire the property for hospital use, the Governors of the Society decided to accept the offer. In doing so they were actuated not only by a desire to meet the Government's need, but also by the facts that two other hospitals recently established met the wants of the neighborhood, and that under such conditions it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain in that part of the city the quality of pro- fessional care and hospital service which the standard of the Society required. One duty fulfilled is apt to create another. Having thus taken up in 1875 emergency hospital work in the lower part of the city, the desirability of an ambulance service presented itself to the Society, as it had in 1869 to the Managers of Bellevue Hospital. In no other way could the injured or stricken obtain prompt medical relief. The work thus undertaken was con- tinuously pursued at the down town hospital until its sale in 1919, and at the main hospital has been unin- terrupted since 1877. It is neither an easy nor an agreeable service, but the public need for such emer- gency ministration has persuaded us not to abandon it. How great that need has been will appear from the record of the 245,000' ambulance calls responded to by the Hospital since our service was installed. Intrin- sically this service, which is already conducted under the supervision of the Police Department, is a munic- ipal function, and the City may before long see its way to taking the work over entirely. In the enormous growth of the City and the won- derful development of its many noble hospitals, general and special, it is easy to lose sight of the commanding position and wide influence which for a hundred years this pioneer of New York hospitals, and prior to 1850 its only general hospital, possessed in the City, the 10 State and the country. Laid on broad foundations, it has ministered to the relief of the sick and to the edu- cation of the medical profession in a conspicuous way, and has been the municipal centre of the art of medi- cine. It has done not only its own work but in a spirit of helpfulness has from time to time aided other in- stitutions in their corporate tasks. Thus the Gov- ernors co-operated in the establishment of the New York Dispensary in 1795. Later the Hospital opened its doors to and sheltered the entire operations of the Society of the Lying-in Hospital from 1801 to 1827; the New York Lying-in- Asylum from 1823 to 1825 ; the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary from 1824 to 1826, and the New York University Medical School from 1866 to 1869. There in 1792 the first care in the State of mental disease was undertaken and has been continuously maintained to this day. There, in 1799, a few months after Dr. Jenner had announced his great discovery in London, Dr. Valentine Seaman introduced vaccination for small-pox into America. There, from 1798 to 1870, a special hospital service for sailors was maintained. There in 1816 the phil- anthropic Quaker, Thomas Eddy, a Governor, the Treasurer and afterward the President of the Society, who had made a study of the reforms then in progress in France and England under the direction of Philippi Pinel and William and Samuel Tuke, presented a memorable report to the Governors in which he advo- cated a radical change in the medical treatment of 11 mental diseases. This resulted in the establishment, on a spacious country site on Morningside Heights, of a separate department of the Society known as Bloom- ingdale Hospital, open to the whole country, which has ever since cared for the mentally afflicted on a humane and scientific basis, and has gained a world-wide repu- tation. Only last May the centennial of Bloomingdale, which in 1894 had been removed to White Plains, was celebrated there in the presence of a distinguished gathering of psychiatrists from this country and Europe. In 1816, too, the New York Hospital issued an American pharmacopoeia which had been prepared by Drs. Samuel L. Mitchill and Valentine Seaman primarily for the use of the staff, but which became and remained the recognized standard for the medical and pharmaceutical professions throughout most of the country until the first United States Pharmacopoeia was prepared under the supervision of a convention of State Medical Associations in Philadelphia in January, 1821, presided over by Dr. Mitchill. Even earlier than this Dr. Seaman, who was described on the title page as "Lecturer on Clinical Surgery in the New York Hospital", had issued in 1811 for the convenience of his students a surgical pharmacopoeia. There, were performed for the first time various successful and brilliant surgical operations; such as the ligature by Dr. Wright Post of the common carotid artery in 1813, of the external iliac artery in 1814, and of the sub-clavian artery in 1817, and the ligature by Dr. 12 Valentine Mott in 1818 of the innominate artery. There Dr. Francis U. Johnson as early as 1832 aban- doned the old method of treating fevers by depletion. There in 1835, thirty years before Lister had taken up the subject, the Governors instituted a searching inquiry into the cause of erisipelas in the surgical wards of the Hospital; this produced a* de- tailed report, with various recommendations, based upon personal investigation by a committee of the Governors and the professional advice of the Medical Staff and of sanitary experts. These recommendations were adopted by the Board, and included a general rearrangement of the wards, many devices for secu- ring greater cleanliness, the employment of a larger and more competent force of nurses, and the construc- tion, at a cost of $50,000, of the North Building, which represented the most advanced ideas of hospital con- struction then entertained. The results of these radical changes were immediately beneficial, but fourteen years later hospital gangrene, the disease so prevalent in Europe, and the horrors of which led Lister to his discovery of antiseptic surgery, broke out in the New York Hospital. Again a careful inquiry was made, new methods of ventilation and heating were devised and installed at a cost of $50,000, and a description of the work published for the benefit of the medical pro- fession, the managers of other hospitals and the people at large. Similarly satisfactory results followed these reforms, but the complete protection of the patient from 13 sepsis in the actual surgical contact still awaited the adoption of Lister's world aiding discovery. Mean- while a succession of novel and important surgical operations has been recorded which naturally increased in daring and lasting value as the antiseptic method established itself. In medicine, also, a galaxy of ftHrtbus physicians ministered to the sick and steadily developed the science of therapeutics. So this temple of healing has been open day and night during all these long years to fulfill the pro- fessed object of its founders to extend relief to the sick and distressed poor of the community "with the most indiscriminating impartiality". That, as those pious men described it, was "the Godlike design of our patent". But there was another corporate object inti- mately and necessarily related to the care of the sick, which was vividly portrayed by Dr. Bard in his address here in 1769, namely, the education of doctors. That purpose was again avowed in the petition for a charter presented in March, 1770, in an appeal in September, 1771, for the aid and sympathy of Lord Dunmore's successor, Governor General Tryon, and in an appli- cation to the Legislature of the State in February, 1792, for an annual money grant. Immediately on the opening of the Hospital for patients in 1791 the medical staff became a medical faculty, and organized for clinical lectures and general instruction of students. Those students in large numbers attended the clinics and used the library and other facilities of the Hos- 14 pital. The medical students of King's College had these privileges from the beginning. In 1807 they were extended to the newly incorporated College of Physicians and Surgeons and were shared by both col- leges until the medical faculty of Columbia was ab- sorbed in 1813 by the College of Physicians and Sur- geons. In 1860 the latter College became in its fernm the Medical Department of Columbia. Nor were students from other medical schools, nor unattached students from the city and from the country at large, debarred from the privileges. Some idea of the extent of this educational work may be gained when we recall that at the old Broad- way hospital 300 students regularly attended the clinics in the main hospital building and 300 more those held in the newer South building. In volume certainly this will bear comparison with the performance of any medical school in the country. One of New York's historians, writing in 1868, said that the Hos- pital was then "recognized as a centre from which is derived a large share of that practical knowl- edge for which the American physician has be- come so famous." To aid the staff and medical pupils further, a medical library was established in 1796 which grew steadily until it was the largest and best in the country. Being open to the public it was consulted by thousands of students and practitioners. The financial burden of its maintenance, however, finally became so heavy that in 1898 the Governors 15 determined to give the collection of 23,000 volumes to the Academy of Medicine, where they are still available for the use of the profession. With a like object, beginning in 1840, a pathological cabinet of rare value was accumulated by the Hospital, but in 1901, because of lack of room for their exhibition, the larger number of the specimens was distributed among the labora- tories of several medical colleges. Perhaps a better idea of the scientific significance of this national uni- versity of medicine may be gained by consulting some informed professional opinion. Thus in the course of "A Lecture on Practical Education in Medicine and on the course of instruction at the New York Hospital", Dr. John Watson, one of the brilliant surgeons of that institution, said in 1846: "You may in other countries find larger hospitals; but none presenting a greater variety of acute and important diseases. You may find in other hospitals abler teachers ; but none so willing as we have been to give you our time and services for nothing; you may find, in some few other institutions, greater oppor- tunities for autopsic examinations; you may find, in the cabinets of foreign societies, more valuable patho- logical collections; you may, in other cities, even find larger libraries than ours. But look for all of these together in any other hospital, either at home or abroad — and you will look for them in vain. I say it without fear of contradiction, you will not find a single hos- pital to compare with this, — not one that contains 16 within itself so many advantages for both theoretical and practical study as this N. Y. Hospital". So convinced was he of the truth of Dr. Watson's conclusion that Dr. Jacob Harsen in 1859 and 1860, by agreement with the College of Physicians and Surgeons, created two trust funds the income from which was to be awarded annually as prizes to the students of the Col- lege for dissertations on the advantages of the clinical instruction afforded in the New York Hospital. Thirty years later Dr. William H. Van Buren, a consulting surgeon, confirming Dr. Watson's estimate, added: "As a consequence of this liberal policy, the New York Hospital while accomplishing its purpose of affording relief to the sick poor of the city had become a great centre of instruction in the art and science of medicine. It had become known abroad as the seat of original operations and solid advances in medicine and surgery. * * * It was the most extensive school of practice in the country". And in 1 899 Dr. D. B. St. John Roosa, a former interne, and then President of the New York Post-Graduate Medical School, paid this generous tribute to his hospital Alma Mater: "The New York Hospital has always been pre- eminently a medical school. It was one of the first, — if not the first institution in our country, to place itself open for clinical instructions. * * * It was one of the first in the world to demonstrate thoroughly the fact that no instruction in the practice of medicine and 17 surgery is worth the name that is not clinical. It was the great school of surgery of the whole country * * * A halo will always encircle its brow". In more recent times, with the greatly enlarged educational facilities at other institutions and with the changes in methods of instruction, the number of stu- dents at the New York Hospital has diminished, but in all of its medical and surgical services the work still continues, and one half of those services is regularly availed of by the students of Cornell University Medi- cal College under the guidance of its distinguished medical faculty. Second in importance only to the education of the doctors has been the training of nurses. In all departments of its activity the Hospital has from the beginning felt the insistence of the problem of supplying the patients with adequate nursing service. As early as 1799 Dr. Valentine Seaman, one of the surgeons of the Hospital, undertook a course of lec- tures and practical instruction in the nursing care of maternity cases. This was probably the first attempt in America to educate nurses. In the old days the facilities for obtaining nurses of any kind were limited. There were no training schools, the stand- ards of nursing were not high, and the work did not, as a rule, appeal to the intelligent and high-minded of either sex. The Protestant sisters in Germany and the Roman Catholic nuns in France were the pioneer nurses 18 of the world, and were the only systematic followers of that calling until Florence Nightingale, in 1860, devised and launched the modern training school for nurses. In the meantime special studies of the subject had been made by the Governors in 1821, in 1840 and in 1849. It was natural, therefore, that when in 1873, largely through the efforts of several philanthropic women of the city, the Health Department undertook the estab- lishment of The Bellevue Hospital Training School for Nurses, the New York Hospital should have encour- aged and aided that enterprise. In 1877, when the Hospital took possession of its new buildings in 15th and 16th Streets, it determined to found its own Training School, and this, the second oldest institution of the kind in the country, has since been in successful operation. To date the number of its graduates is more than 1,000, and many of them occupy important administrative and teaching positions throughout the country. They have an incorporated alumnae associa- tion, and a large club house and home in New York City. At Bloomingdale Hospital a separate training school for registered nurses of mental cases is main- tained. This earnest normal life of the institution in the care of the sick and in the education of doctors and nurses, has from time to time been intensified by two great human emergencies, war and pestilence. As we have seen, circumstances did not permit of any great hospital activity in the Revolutionary War. During 19 the War of 1812, however, the Hospital had some soldiers to care for, and through the seamen's service which had been established by arrangement with the Federal Government in 1798, and which for many years was maintained in a separate department and building, a larger number of sick and wounded sailors was treated. Two good deeds of our then enemy shine out from the Hospital's relation to that deplorable, and, as so many of our ancestors thought, tragically un- necessary conflict. These acts reveal a chivalrous spirit of warfare in refreshing contrast to some belligerent methods adopted in the World War. The first has come newly to light through the recent discovery in the archives of the Hospital of the medical journal of Dr. James Inderwick, one of its House Surgeons in 1812-13. In May, 1813, he entered the Navy as surgeon of the brig of war Argus which sailed from New York the following month to land the American Minister in France, and then to destroy British merchantmen on the coast of England. She had startling success in that cruise, but after capturing 19 merchant vessels laden with valuable cargoes, was in her turn captured August 14th after a hot fight with the larger British brig, the Pelican. Barly in the engagement the American commander, Captain Allen, after whom Allen Street in this city is named, had been seriously wounded. When the battle was over, he was carried ashore at Plymouth in charge of Dr. Inder- 20 wick. There four days later the gallant Captain died and after a stately funeral procession was buried in St. Andrew's churchyard with all the honors of war. Eight Captains of the British Navy were his pall bearers ; over the coffin was draped the American ensign, and on it were laid his hat and sword. The other bright deed had a more peaceful setting. In September of that same year, 1813, when the port of New York was blockaded by the British fleet, the Treasurer of the Society, Thomas Eddy, foreseeing that the Hospital could not be operated during the approaching winter unless an adequate supply of fuel was procured, obtained through the British Commissary General of Prisoners, a license signed by Admiral Cockburn, for the entrance into the harbor of a ship from Virginia laden with coal for the use of the Hospital. A suitable acknowledgment of the British Admiral's humane per- mission was made by the Governors and communicated to him. In the Mexican War a few returning soldiers were treated in the Hospital, but with the outbreak of the Civil War the activities of the institution increased greatly. The North Building was set apart for the exclusive use of soldiers, and when the capacity of that building was exceeded in 1862, the overflow was cared for in the general wards of the main building. Several patriotic women of the city served devotedly as volunteer nurses during that crowded hospital year. In all about three thousand soldiers were treated be- 21 tween 1861 and 1865. The last soldier patient was discharged on January 15, 1870. In the spring of 1898, when it became apparent that hospital aid would be needed for soldiers, the Governors offered the War Department to receive at our several institutions, to the full extent of their capacity and free of cost, soldiers requiring medical and surgical care. In pursuance of this, several hun- dred patients were treated between July 26th and De- cember 31st, 1898. Out of 113 cases of typhoid fever, 99 recovered and 14 died, which, under the circum- stances, was deemed an unusually large percentage of recoveries. Our Directress of Nurses took charge of, organized and maintained the Red Cross Hospital nursing service at Camp Black, Long Island, and 41 graduates of our Training School served in the various posts and camp hospitals, including Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippines. Our connection with the World War began early in 1916, when with timely foresight, and with the sanction of the Governors, our medical staff organized on paper the composition of a Red Cross Base Hospital Unit. This substantially divided the Hospital per- sonnel into two equal sections, one for the Base Hos- pital when needed, and one for the maintenance of our hospitals in New York. In making this division and in carrying it out when war came, the finest spirit of un- selfish and patriotic endeavor was exhibited. The entire medical staff wished to go abroad, and it was 22 only by generous adjustment that the efficient main- tenance of the institutions here was made possible. This hospital unit consisted of 23 medical officers, 60 gradu- ate nurses and 156 enlisted men. When the time for service came in July, 1917, it was successfully mobilized as planned, and sent to France. There it maintained at Ghateauroux, United States Base Hospital No. 9. The original number of patients was estimated at 500. This was subsequently increased successively to 1,000, 1,500 and 2,000, and then to 2,100. In all, 15,000 patients, about equally divided between medical and surgical cases, were cared for. Several of the medical officers were detached from the Base Hospital and ren- dered notable special service elsewhere in France and in Belgium. Several other members of our Medical Board were assigned by the War Department to import- ant positions in the United States. At all our home institutions the Governors offered the War and Navy Departments the same aid as in the Spanish War, and this resulted in a varied service. At the 15th and 16th Streets Hospital many young Polish women were trained as nursing attendants for Polish soldiers in France, Red Cross candidates re- ceived short nursing courses, enlisted men of the United States Medical Corps were trained as orderlies, assistant surgeons of the Navy were students in the wards and laboratories, and members of the Medical Reserve Corps were instructed in the operation of the X-ray machine and the interpretation of X-ray 23 plates. The Navy being in need of hospital accommo- dation, the Governors set apart the House of Relief in Hudson Street exclusively for the use of the sailors. During the period from March, 1918, to May, 1919, 824 sailors were treated there. At Blooming- dale Hospital 53 members of the staff, including five physicians, the Directress of Nurses and fifteen gradu- ate nurses entered the military service and most of them went overseas. The physicians and the Direct- ress of Nurses rendered notable service in France and two of the enlisted men were killed in action. Fifty beds in Bloomingdale Hospital were offered to the Sur- geon General of the Army for the use of officers suf- fering from shell shock and other mental disorders. Pursuant to this, 91 officers were treated and a large percentage of them were discharged as recovered or greatly improved. With the concurrence of the Sur- geon General various instruction was given at the Hos- pital to war workers in the neuro-psychiatric division of the Army medical service. When pestilence, too, has overtaken the City, the Hospital has tried to meet its share of the burden. From 1791 to 1807 New York was visited thirteen times by yellow fever and lost nearly a tenth of its population. The Governors agreed to receive in the Hospital as many sufferers from this disease as could be cared for without danger to the other patients. From 1794 until 1856 hardly a year elapsed when the Hospital was free from typhus fever patients. From 24 1818 to 1828, the disease was epidemic. When it ap- peared in that form the Governors adopted a resolu- tion that on this and every similar occasion they would gladly cooperate with the Board of Health by receiving fever .patients to the limit that the accommodations of the Hospital would permit. Following this policy they. treated in the Hospital an average of about 300 typhus patients in each of those ten years. When the malignant cholera broke out in 1832, the Governors decided that the safety of their other patients forbade the use of the wards by cholera patients, but the Hos- pital cooperated with the Board of Health in providing temporary cholera hospitals in other parts of the City. With the flood of immigration in 1847, many typhus cases reached the country and the disease again became epidemic in New York. The Hospital treated that year 1,034 of these patients in its newest building, North House, which had been set aside for the purpose, and thanks to the excellent arrangements there made for ventilation, cleanliness and skilful nursing, the mor- tality from the disease in that building was smaller than recorded in any other similar establishment in the country. New York on the whole has been fortunate in escaping epidemics, but there is another serious one to record, that of infantile paralysis in the summer and autumn of 1916. When the Department of Health inquired of each of the local hospitals what number of stricken children it could house and treat, the Gover- nors of the New York Hospital decided, as they had 25 in 1832 when cholera was epidemic, that they could not assume the risk of imperiling the occupants of our children's wards by receiving victims of this dread affliction. But we deemed it to be our duty to care for as many children as possible in some appropriate sepa- rate building. Trinity Church generously offered us rent free a vacant school house for the purpose, but we found a more readily adaptable structure in the recently vacated home of the Orthopedic Hospital in 59th Street, and that by the kindness of the Trustees of the institu- tion having been placed at our disposal, we fitted it up in a few days with 120 beds, which were kept filled during several sad weeks. No one who saw those appealing little faces can forget the pathos of it all and the longing it excited to prevent a recurrence of such a tragedy. Through the devoted efforts of the phy- sicians and bacteriologists and nurses who volunteered their services, much was done to alleviate suffering and ward off death, and we still hope that through the valuable research work there conducted under the direction of Dr. Edward C. Rosenow of the Mayo Foundation, some knowledge of the incidence and course of the disease was gained that will lessen its ravages in the future. In common with all the hospitals we were called upon in the last four months of 1918 to care for the many cases of influenza in a specially insidious form. For this treatment two of our surgical wards were temporarily converted into medical wards, and 560 26 influenza patients were treated there, of whom 152 died. Several of the doctors and forty of the nurses treating these cases took the disease themselves, and one of the nurses died. Although relatively to other institutions our hos- pital performance does not now show that preeminence which prevailed in the 18th and 19th centuries, the actual quantity and -variety of our work were never so great as they are at the present time, nor, we are glad to believe, was its quality ever higher. As we have seen, one department of the Society, the House of Relief, at Hudson and Jay Streets, has been discontinued and the building has become a public health hospital. But in all other directions the Society has been expanding. In addition to the general medical and surgical divi- sions, and the department of mental diseases, at White Plains, the Division of Laboratories, the Department of Urology on the recently established Brady Founda- tion, the Department of Radiology, the Social Service Department, under the guidance of the devoted Ladies Auxiliary, the various Out-Patient clinics, and the inspiring hospital for convalescent children at White Plains, are developing with admirable zeal and effi- ciency, and have all outgrown their physical accommo- dations. From the opening of the Broadway Hospital in January, 1791, until the 1st of January, 1921, the Society treated in all its departments a total of 2,015,000 patients. From 1792 to 1856 it received 27 an annual grant from the State, ranging from about $5,000 to $22,500, but since the latter date it has depended for its endowment principally upon the fortunate acquisition of its Broadway hospital site, which it now leases, and of its Bloomingdale hospital site on Morningside Heights which it has sold and where Columbia University, Barnard College, the National Academy of Design, St. Luke's Hospital, the Woman's Hospital, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine now stand. Apart from the generosity of its Governors it has not received pecuniary aid from many individuals. But after 150 years it begins to feel the need of wider support if it is to continue to expand its service to the people and to the cause of medical education. As one of its chroniclers has said, the history of the New York Hospital is, in a sense, the history of the City since the Revolution. The origin of the insti- tution had so lofty a purpose, its affairs were admin- istered with such devotion, the personnel of its Board of Governors, its membership and its medical staff, was so representative of the best the City contained, that the Society touched the community closely. Its Attending Physician was President Washington's medical adviser during his official residence in New York; another Attending Physician and one of its Attending Surgeons ministered in 1804 to Alexander Hamilton's fatal wound; in 1824, while visiting New York, General Lafayette became our guest and honor- 28 ary member; in 1862 the surgeons of the visiting French Fleet were entertained at the Hospital, and at all times that building was the Mecca of the medical profession throughout the country. The Governors have really governed. Faithful service has become a tradition of the Society. Since the opening of the Hospital in 1791, twelve regular monthly meetings of the Board have been held each year, and on only three occasions has a quorum been lacking. The list of the Governors contains many noted names. Among them have been John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States and a Governor of the State, Robert R. Living- ston, the first Chancellor of the State, and James Kent, its greatest Chancellor, Richard Varick, Cadwallader D. Colden, Philip Hone and Abram S. Hewitt, Mayors of the City, Aaron Burr, afterwards Vice-President of the United States, Lindley Murray, John Jacob Astor, and Joseph H. Choate. But no account of the achievements of the Hospital in the century and a half of its corporate life could be complete which did not award the fullest recognition to the devoted band of physicians and surgeons, the first of whom by their commanding vision and influence brought the institution into being, and who, with their successors during the intervening genera- tions down to the present time, have made its great accomplishments possible. An adequate appraisal of the work of those brilliant practitioners and teachers must be entrusted to a competent hand, and will, 29 some day, we may hope, be duly executed. But the admiration and gratitude we all feel for the noble ser- vice which they have gratuitously rendered for the relief of the sick and for the advancement of medical education, must not remain unexpressed today. They have included the flower of the American medical pro- fession, and they have left an ineffaceable imprint on the development of the art of medicine. Their hall of fame should be secure. While we are celebrating today a special anniver- sary, the occasion may also by its implication have a wider significance. In his address here in 1769, Dr. Bard seems to have had for his text that famous sen- tence of Cicero in his oration in defence of Ligarius, which the Doctor in substance rendered, that in no act does man approach so near to the Gods as when he is restoring the sick to the blessings of health. This ideal of service to the weak and distressed in body or mind, which underlies all our hospitals, must still, after twenty centuries, be ranked among the highest of human aspirations. In its exercise it is thrice blessed, by relieving the recipient, by refining the ministrant and by enriching the community. At no time in his- tory has there seemed to be more acute need than now for the application of that same habit of tender benefi- cence in the affairs of each community and of the world at large, to diminish suffering, to allay strife and to perpetuate peace. Animated by that conception of 30 the service of man we may all march toward one goal. Surely such a consummation, to adopt another phrase of the wise founders of our institution, is "recommended at once by the maxims of human policy and the precepts of divjne truth". SUUTH PROPE; " COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES This book is due on the date indicated below, or at the expiration of a definite period after the date of borrowing as Provided by the library rules or by special arrangement with ui uiiarge. DATE BORROWED DATE DUE I DATE BORROWED — DATE DUE I MAR 3189 )3 J153 ' | "J J C28(3-52)IOOM 1 ] *vo* ^^5^- a*****^ a£fcr — ij: 1- " j ,. V * /9 I : -. sr- ^ ■ L <. ; TP* ' & ! . ■ £7 " ^ £ .*'•%' _„