Medical America in the Nineteenth Century: Readings from the Literature

Hospital Life in New York

W. H. RIDEING HOSPITAL LIFE IN NEW YORK Editor's Note W. H. Rideing (1853-1918), an American journalist and author, looked at some of the large hospitals of New York through the eyes of a nonphysician. Although his descriptions strike us today as somewhat overly sentimental, he probably reflected the views of the middle class readers of Harper's quite well. The picture we get of the ambulance surgeon, the hospital wards, and their staff and patients is more vivid than one usually finds in strictly medical writings. Several points bear special notice. Rideing praised the nurses training school at Bellevue, established in 1873 with the aid of some of the surgical staff, especially James R. Wood and Stephen Smith. Despite the deplorable nursing that patients received prior to the presence of well-trained nurses, many medical men strongly opposed the innovation. Their main argument was that nursing was no occupation for genteel women, the other kind being too often pressed into service on public wards already, often to the detriment of patients. A second argument warned that a trained nurse would be prone to act as if she were a physician, a point Florence Nightingale specifically disclaimed. Rideing, like Sir John Erichsen (see Section V) praised the Roosevelt Hospital . It was designed principally by the Bellevue surgeon Stephen Smith, who was one of New York's foremost authorities on hospital contraction and hospital infections. Rideing correctly pointed out Robert Weir's (whose name he misspelled ) important work on antiseptic surgery. But he mistakenly credited Weir and the Roosevelt Hospital for being first in the country to adopt Listerism. Stephen Smith and William Van Buren used the system at Bellevue just as early, and there were individual surgeons elsewhere who introduced the methods of Lister when Weir did.* Most of the hospitals of New York have two beginnings. The first is in the charitable forethought of the rich men who have endowed them. Inclosed by the privacy of his chamber or study, the millionaire has pondered over the disposiHarper 's New Monthly Magazine 57 (1878): 171-89. 1 1 have discussed the problems associated with assigning the priority of introduction of antiseptic surgery in the United States in "American surgery and the germ theory of disease ," Bull Hist. Med 40 (1966): 135-45. 242 W. H. RIDEING 243 tion to be made of his accumulated wealth and, feeling the hand of sickness upon him, has remembered the thousands of others whose pain could not know the alleviation that money can procure. The heavy damask curtains drawn in ample folds over the windows, the glowing fire, the mild light of the study lamp, the soft resoundless carpets, the ministrations of the most skillful physicians, and the attentions of trained servants—all these blessings might not take the sting away from death nor wholly disarm suffering, but they surely assuage both. Love can do more than money in smoothing the distressed pillow; the dying laborer in his attic, with his wife's hand in his, may cross the gloomy boundary with greater resignation than the millionaire, says the sentimentalist; but were the love that waits upon the laborer with tireless devotion supplemented with the means to do all that it craves, the fever might be allayed now and then, and life itself prolonged. In such meditations as these some of our hospitals have begun, and the total outcome of the endowments made through private munificence is a variety of establishments for the treatment of every imaginable ailment . A stranger is struck with the number and magnificence of the New York hospitals. Some are of the size and have the appearance of palaces. They are ornaments to the city and are among the largestbuildings. The newer ones are built of warm red brick and, with their sunny windows, spacious pavilions, and galleries , are memorable objects to the city's visitors. There is no kind of physical suffering that may not find treatment in one or the other, as we have said. The penniless outcast who is overtaken by sickness, the haggard victim of hip-disease, the incurable consumptive, and the raving creatures stricken with fever are provided for with care and liberality; the patient with means may command all the luxuries a home could give, and those who are poor enjoy comforts impossible to them in their own narrow dwellings. All hospitals began with Christ and belong to Christianity. The Greeks looked with contempt upon physical weakness, and other nations of antiquity...