INTRODUCTION
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.
Grateful though I am to them—deeply grateful—yet I know little of the personal history of the founder of this great hospital which now shelters me, or of that "Diamond Jim Brady" who built and endowed this noble wing. Still, I feel sure that in many ways these benefactors to their race made their gifts under much the same conditions as those barons and nobles of old who, led by some deep feeling, devoted their wealth to the saving, not only of their own souls, but of the souls and bodies of their fellow men.
Moreover, if the benefactors who founded and endowed this hospital resembled the men and women who made possible the powerful monasteries of the Middle Ages, there is also a resemblance to be found between the service that the monks rendered in their day to humanity and knowledge and that devotion which to-day inspires the staff of a great modern hospital. In this very building are housed and in constant attendance a large number of doctors, surgeons and orderlies. Their quarters, though in many ways like those in a modern club, are almost equally like the cells of a great monastery. There probably is not one of the staff who was not turned to his profession in some degree by the thought that it would make him of service to mankind. In another wing live several hundred nurses. The strength and health and happiness which appear in the faces of these young women attest to the good effect for women as well as for men of discipline and regular attention to duty. What a shining example is theirs of faithful and altruistic service to suffering humanity! Indeed a generous, helpful and encouraging spirit pervades all the men and women who form the staff of the hospital. Theirs is a single-minded and unwearying attention which no monks could have excelled, nor could the monasteries ever have offered a wider charity than that which makes white and colored, Hebrew and Gentile, poor and rich all objects of the kindly help of a skilful and devoted company.
I know that the kernel and very centre of the monastery was the lighted altar in the chapel where daily the sacred mysteries were enacted. That is what our friend will need to add to his perfected institution;—and yet—and yet—I doubt if the atmosphere will be very different when that is done. Although this place is world-famous as a centre of scientific research and of applied science,—though, in general, religion here is worked out in terms of service,—yet there are signs that the spirit has recognition as well as the physical body. To-day, in the great entrance rotunda stands a colossal and impressive statue of Christ, his hands outstretched welcoming the weary and the heavy-laden. The several hundred nurses have daily prayers together before they begin their unselfish work. At the dawn of Christmas morning, the doctors, nurses and orderlies make the halls resound with the carols suited to the day; and we hear how one convalescent who was praising his doctor's power over his ailments was surprised by the reply, "It was another power than mine that did it!" Perhaps he meant that miraculous servant Radium; perhaps he meant Nature herself; perhaps he meant something beyond these. He did not explain.
This devotion with which the staff is consecrated to altruistic labor is met by a spirit of buoyant gratitude from those on whom they minister. Our ward is vibrant with it. Perhaps this is not true at the very first. The patient arrives in misery. For a few days he is perhaps made even more miserable. But during this time he is in seclusion and not visible to his comrades. Soon he rallies. In bed or wheel chair he joins other convalescents on the roof terrace. They compare notes over their operations. They settle among themselves all those great pending questions which have been engrossing the active outside world and, looking forward to returning health and strength, a very joyous spirit pervades the group. These not too inviting surroundings abound, therefore, in a hearty thankfulness—a thankfulness abundant and sincere, and not unlike what it would be if it were offered amid solemn rites and with majestic music before the glowing altar of a monastery.
But in these early days of seclusion the lonely patient has opportunity for much thinking. Lying in bed in a room which, as a recent writer described it, is richly decorated with a white ceiling, four white walls, a door, a window and a floor, he has indeed time for thought and for thought without distraction.
Surrounded as he is by the sick and the maimed, perhaps one of the first subjects on which he is led to ponder is the mystery of Pain. What does it all mean that a God otherwise beneficent should impose on the creatures he has brought into the world illness and suffering? Even Prince Siddartha wondered at it:
"Since if, all powerful, he leaves it so,
He is not good; and if not powerful,
He is not God?"
In better mood the patient may wonder whether his personal share of pain is in any sense a penance or atonement for his own past sins. This is a thought which is natural and acceptable perhaps to most minds. But the Saints and Martyrs testifying to their faith went farther and not only submitted to but gladly sought pain and suffering. Now pain and agony well endured undoubtedly strengthen character. Have we not a vivid example of this before us in the catastrophe of the European war; a war which is saved from being wholly evil and dreadful because out of it has come the spiritual regeneration of the allied nations who are engulfed in it? Still it can hardly be expected that ordinary flesh and blood should in this world, so full of love and beauty, invite and seek out suffering and disaster even in order to bear them bravely. Enough for most of us that if doomed to walk with them we
"Turn the necessity to glorious gain."
But all the same it must be a happy thing for a sufferer if he can hope with the Martyrs that pain borne with fortitude may be offered as a sacrifice and atonement.
In these dull and lonely moments also one inevitably asks whether it is true that people exist who are stolid to pain? One may consecrate it before it comes and after it goes, but to most of us feeble folk pain when present occupies the whole limelight and leaves the rest of the stage in darkness! The only inmate of the hospital who stirred my temper was a patient who on making a rapid recovery from what he described as a very severe operation said he had refused ether and did not mind pain. I regained my equanimity when an orderly confided to me that the operation had been slight!
In health one is apt to think that Love is the great motive power of humanity. In illness and suffering Pain seems the great and pressing problem. They often go hand in hand and perhaps it is true that without them both life has not rendered its full wealth or its perfect discipline. "The ennobling depths of pain" need also "the purifying fire of love" to round out a perfect character.
"Incomprehensibly Love's will doth move
Through this blind world in ways we cannot see,
Death giving birth to life. So does deep sorrow
Give birth to rarer joy on some glad morrow."
These and many such questions can be as solemn, as perplexing and as engrossing as any that exercised the inmates of the Monastery to which we here find so much resemblance. As a contrast to such heart-searching thoughts the patient can wonder at the properties of that radium by which he may have been treated. How astonishing is it that this atom of matter should constantly emit rays which search out and destroy evil tissues and leave unharmed the good; and that they do this without any perceptible diminution of energy! How contrary this is to all we have hitherto known of the conservation of energy and of the impossibility of obtaining perpetual motion or continued power! What is so contrary to our preconceived ideas proves itself, however, by experience efficient in an almost supernatural or miraculous manner. Perhaps fatigued by these thoughts the patient can turn from them and closing his eyes begin to count "The flock of sheep that leisurely pass by one after one" and by happy chance submit himself to sleep.
The roof terrace has a wide view over the City of Baltimore, as well as of the heavens which encompass it. We sit there in our wheel chairs or lie tucked up in our rolling beds and talk flows freely. We watch the flocks of pigeons making endless circles in the upper air; the black and solemn buzzards hanging above us unmoved though the gale blow ever so fiercely; the cloud shadows moving over the panorama; the haze of mist and steam and smoke floating over the City; the ever-changing pageant of fleeting clouds and blue sky and blazing sunsets. At one time—
"And when the wind from place to place
Doth the unmoored cloud galleons chase"—
we follow the white fleets as they sail away towards the south, ever replaced by new armadas surging up and over the northern horizon. At another time in range beyond range of snowy clouds, we see rise before us the Delectable Mountains beyond which is the Land of Beulah where the shining ones go to and fro as messengers to the Celestial City.
It is said that an eye unused to the telescope cannot see the canals on the planet Mars, but that through the same instrument they are plainly visible to an eye trained to such observation. Sometimes, when the clouds have hung in white masses over the city, I have been eager to see what was hidden by those luminous walls, but my untrained eyes could not pierce them. Day after day, however, I became more familiar with them. Others before now, without journeying like Columbus to prove the truth of his visions, have, even by their own firesides, enjoyed Castles in the Air and Châteaux and great possessions in Spain. In like manner as the breeze moved the silver edges of the clouds, I had unexpectedly through the rifts views of strange lands and fair cities which I had never before seen or heard of. As they were indeed lovely, in all haste I tried to make rapid notes of them to prove the truth of my strange experience.
Far to the north over Homewood, a pile of mountainous clouds was rent for a short space by the breeze, and disclosed a Minster in a meadow land. Its name seemed to be Upthorpe-cum-Regis. Its tower rose before me over the busy life of the town and looked down on the mansion of the Squire and the house of the Dean. Close around the walls of the Minster, indeed within sound of its prayers and anthems, were clustered the graves of the dead,—the former generations who had made the life of the town and who built the church and worshipped at its altar. It was a town in which the characters described by Trollope or George Eliot or Jane Austen would have felt themselves at home.
Again when a sunset was filling the western sky with "the incomparable pomp of eve," a break in the clouds above the gilded towers of Cardinal Gibbons's Cathedral disclosed an Italian town on a lovely lake shore. Boats with colored sails lined the Riva of Ranconezzo. Two piazzas teeming with life surrounded the Duomo or Cathedral and from them there were wide views over lake and mountain scenery. It appears that in the long ago, the Cardinal Schalchi-Visconti was the benefactor of this town, and there on the hillside, tree embowered, was his villa with its little port for the lake boats. His tomb I also saw, not in the Duomo, but in the Bramantesque Church of Santa Prassede, a building resembling the many small churches in northern Italy due to the refined influence of Bramante. In my dreaming I entered the church, and found that the great Cardinal lies beneath a tomb carved by Mino da Fiesole on the north side of Santa Prassede.
Then on a cool and crisp day when clouds were scudding through the sky, between them there was revealed to me a French town that seemed to bear the name of Rocher-St.-Pol. There was the river Merle winding its way through meadow and woodland. A range of hills bounded the horizon and from the plain rose the Rock. Not far away the ruined castle of "La Dame Blanche" crowned a steep hill, and close to the town was the Château Beaumesnil, beetling over the wooded hillside and bristling with conical towers and burnished girouettes. The Grande Rue of Rocher-St.-Pol I saw winding between gabled and half-timbered houses towards the church on the summit, and finally a long flight of stairs called by the people Jacob's ladder brings the pilgrim to the terrace in front of the church door. The interior of Ste. Frédigonde showed me the same period of French Gothic which marks the cathedrals of Notre Dame at Paris and Rheims. Coming out from Jacob's ladder upon the Parvis, there was a wide view over the meadows and the river. At the moment when the cathedral door was disclosed to me, a procession of clergy bearing sacred relics emerged from the church. It passed between the ranks of prophets and martyrs whose effigies flank the portal, and vanished with its banners and vestments down the long incline of Jacob's ladder towards the old town.
And finally came a dismal day, at the end of which the west was lined with long streaks of red, and, just before sunset, through a lengthened break in the gray, I seemed to see an Island in the far Ægean. I think it must have been somewhere between the Ægina that looks across the waters to the Athenian Acropolis and the Assos which my friends in their youth dug from its grave. Let us call it Æginassos. Its buildings as I dimly saw them are in a remarkable condition of preservation. The white temple stood out on a promontory over the sea, and brought back to memory the temple-crowned headland at Sunium. Higher on the mountain-side was the Forum with its terraces and long colonnades. Steep and winding paths descended to the ancient port, and far across the water rose the heights of the Isles of Greece.
Here are the records of what I was privileged to see from the roof terrace of the Hospital. Made in bed or wheel chair and depending on the passing imagination of an invalid, the sketches are of necessity crude. Would that instead they were like the work of Claude or Turner, who were the great experts at seeing visions in the clouds and in transferring them to their paper! These drawings will, however, be a reminder that idle hours can be passed happily even during a long captivity! Opposite each drawing I have placed some quotations from various writers. Although these do not describe with exactness the places which no eye but mine has seen, yet they do picture others very like those which I saw from the hospital terrace.
A day at last arrived when the patient was suddenly released. After being the object of tender care for many weeks the outer world seemed very large and very hustling. It was with a certain timidity and almost with reluctance that facing it all he left the peaceful quiet of the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
