Woman's work in America

by Unknown

When the Devil was sick, the Devil a monk would be;

When the Devil was well, the devil a monk was he.

The earliest known hospital for the sick was founded in the latter part of the fourth century at Cæsarea; St. Chrysostom built one at his own expense at Constantinople, and Fabiola, the friend of St. Jerome, founded one at Rome.

Many of the present great European hospitals, as the “Hôtel Dieu” of Paris, “St. Bartholomew” of London, etc., owe their existence to religious foundations, and the sisters of various orders made it their especial work to labor in them.

Women assisted in these good works. In the old hospital of the Savoy in London, thirteen sisters are on the pay roll. “Queen Mary tried to restore this hospital, and the ladies of the court and maidens of honor stored the same with two beds, bedding, and furniture in very ample manner.” The work of the sisters of charity is familiar to all, and Protestants have imitated it by establishing orders of women who devote themselves to the care of the sick.

In addition to the ordinary needs of human life, war brought its large increase of wounds and sickness, which made military hospitals a necessity, and women did not hesitate to follow men to the camp and field to minister to their fellow-beings in distress. In these scenes of war Florence Nightingale began her great work, which has raised nursing to the rank of a skillful profession. Private charity also extended help to the sick, and King James’s favorite goldsmith, George Heriot, secured an honorable remembrance in Edinburgh by founding the large hospital which bears his name. Neither has the State forgotten its duty to the sick, not only in providing infirmaries, almshouses, and other institutions, but certainly, in later times, in furnishing hospitals for the poor at the public expense.

In time of war, or when great epidemics devastated cities, the hospitals often became excessively crowded, and offered scenes of misery and horror which justified the dread and disgust felt for them in the popular mind, so that to “die in a hospital” was an expression for the extreme of human misery.

Through all these years women took an active part in hospital work as nurses, and, in the case of infirmaries connected with female convents, must have had charge of the administration; but it is not until our own day that hospitals have been established especially for the benefit of women, and mainly under their own control. As the science of medicine advanced, and physicians were not solitary students but became a body of educated men united in their work and deeply interested in the advancement of their science, the hospital came to be regarded not exclusively as a charity, but also as a school in which the student of medicine could gain experience and knowledge by intimate acquaintance with various forms of disease and the means employed to remove it. This created a vulgar prejudice that the sick were considered only subjects of experiment, without regard to their own good. But, in fact, the constant presence of bodies of intelligent students in hospitals has done much to raise their character and to reform abuses. As Dr. Finlay says, “Clinical teaching benefits the patient, secures careful investigation of his case, and has a bracing effect on the work done in the hospital.”

It is in this relation that hospitals have become especially important to women during the last thirty years.

The woman physician was not wholly unknown in America before this time. Anne Hutchinson, of Boston, was doctor as well as preacher. Ruth Barnaby practiced the profession of midwifery forty years, and this branch of practice was fully recognized as belonging to women.[^[197]] But while the standard of education for women was very low, these were only individuals carrying out the impulses of their genius or their hearts, having no relation to each other and no thorough systematic education.