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CHAPTER 3 From Little House on the Hill to Modern Institution  On Friday, May 30, 1924, the Jewish Chronicle, Newark’s weekly Jewish newspaper, printed a full-page advertisement that proclaimed a new era for the Newark Beth Israel Hospital. The advertisement was a drawing of a young woman wearing a nurse’s uniform whose short hemline revealed her legs, a nurse’s cap atop her flapper bobbed hair, her smile made more alluring by lipstick. The young woman held out a tray that supported an architectural model of a skyscraper with four symmetrical towers and a central arched entrance. Inscribed behind her in the heart was the statement: “My heart is with the hospital,” and the accompanying caption asked, “Will you help to build the new Beth Israel Hospital?” After almost a quarter century, Newark Jewry had an image that embodied their hospital: the lovely 1920s flapper would become known as “Miss Beth Israel.”1 Miss Beth was a potent image: a modern woman campaigning for a modern hospital. By the 1920s, embracing modernity included the pursuit of good health. Municipal governments appropriated enormous sums to ensure pure water and clean streets. On the front lines of the domestic war for health and hygiene, Americans were expected to consume nutritious meals and to scour their homes until they were germ free.2 Healthy, robust bodies were productive bodies, and membership in the middle class depended upon an affluence that only healthy individuals could attain.3 Nativist literature was crammed with comparisons of sickly immigrants who wilted under the stress of economic competition against the robust physiques of the “pioneering breed” celebrated by Wisconsin sociologist E. A. Ross and others.4 In communities with large numbers of poor immigrants, such as Newark, hospitals were especially critical outposts of health and hygiene. Repairing bodies efficiently and keeping them healthy so that they might resume productivity required state-of-the-art 61 facilities and well-trained physicians and nurses. But modernity cost money and required effort. A new generation of Newark Jews would resonate with Miss Beth’s image of good health and hygiene. In the span of four years, 1924–1928, they would pledge nearly $3 million to erect a third hospital structure, and the hospital would move from its aging, overcrowded 120-bed facility to a modern 350-bed skyscraper that towered above the highest point in the south Newark neighborhood of Weequahic. Miss Beth not only transformed the image of their hospital but would prove a potent magnet to draw a generation of Newark Jews from the Hill to the streets around their new hospital. The Need to Be a Class A Hospital The 1921 Beth Israel Hospital Annual Report suggests that at the beginning of the decade, the administration was engaged in improvements to the physical structure of the building. The laundry facility was finally removed from the main building and in its place stood a new $10,000 X-ray room with modern apparatus, purchased by the ladies’ auxiliary and dedicated in memory of Dr. Victor Parsonnet. Under chief of the medical staff Max Danzis’s leadership, Drs. Polevski and Wolfe created a clinic to treat heart diseases; Dr. Charles Rosewater was encouraged to create a clinic for nervous disorders. The report noted that the medical staff was finally using the International List of Causes of Death to collect the hospital morbidity and mortality data. The report also noted that its thirteen-year-old operating rooms had accommodated 1,252 cases, most surgeries related to the genitourinary , respiratory, and circulatory systems.5 The previous two decades had been a formative period for the American hospital sector. The Association of Hospital Superintendents, founded in 1899 by eight hospital administrators, had renamed itself as the American Hospital Association (AHA) and in 1918, opened its membership to hospital institutions: “to form a body which can speak for the hospitals with all the power the institutions can assemble.”6 The AHA application blank was printed in Modern Hospital.7 Church leaders formed sectarian hospital associations. In 1915, the Catholic Hospital Association of the United States and Canada was formed, promising to “bring about the endowment of beds, wards, and rooms to increase the efficiency for public service of Catholic Hospitals.”8 The Protestant Hospital Association was established in 1920 to “assist hospitals to become more efficient and to aid in the standardization and give such help as to possibly enlarge their facilities and equipment for the care...

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