Hospital Sketches

1916
ROBERT SWAIN PEABODY
BOSTON & NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY ROBERT SWAIN PEABODY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published December 1916
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light; I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. W. B. Yeats.
Acknowledgments are made to Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons for permission to use a passage from Edith Wharton's Fighting France and to The Macmillan Company for the use of the poem Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, by W. B. Yeats.


Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, December, 1915.
ONE of my good friends, a stanch upholder of what to him is The Catholic Church, looks back to the thirteenth century as marking the highest tide of Christian civilization. He longs for a restoration (but under other rule) of that monastic life which then gave shelter to Art, Science, Learning, and Religion. It does not appear that this longing is coupled with any regret for the exceptionally happy domestic life with which he personally has been blessed. Probably his hopes are that even if he establishes, others will maintain, that monastic life and discipline which, duly purified from Ultramontane tendencies, he thinks would be so uplifting and beneficial to our times.
However that may be, if he is ever immured for many weeks in a great hospital, he will be surprised to find how many are the similarities between its life, its discipline and its atmosphere, and those of the great monasteries. I mean those mediæval houses which spread from the parent at Monte Cassino to Citeaux and Cluny and Vezelay and thence to far-away parts of Europe, and which were even more abundant in England where the ruins of the Yorkshire Abbeys still attest to their former power. When the time is ripe for the change longed for by our friend he will find that very slight additions to a modern hospital will give him what he wants in great perfection.