Woman's work in America

by Unknown

The Massachusetts Homœopathic Hospital was not established for the special benefit of women, but in connection with the medical school of Boston University, but it received the funds of the old Female Medical School, and it has women professors and students, and admits women to the hospital as internes.

The hospitals have dispensaries connected with them which are very important aids to the work, both of charity and education. These dispensaries afford the students a wider range of observation and experience than they could gain in the hospitals, since the patients are numbered by thousands, and they bring the poor sick women to the acquaintance of women physicians, to whom they can often confide their troubles more freely than to men. Cases which need the treatment of the hospital are secured admittance to it. In all this hospital work, and especially in that of the dispensary, as indeed in all charitable work, it has been found necessary to guard against the danger of pauperizing those who should be helped. For this reason a small charge is made to dispensary patients, except in cases of known destitution. The patients willingly pay it, feeling their own self-respect increased thereby, and the dispensary may be thus made nearly or quite self-supporting.

The surgical department of hospitals is of special importance to the poor, as it is almost impossible for them to have the conditions in their homes necessary to insure a fair chance of success and recovery in cases of operations. Remarkable success has been attained in this department in some of the hospitals I have named, where the greatest of abdominal operations are performed by surgeons connected with the hospital, with a percentage of recovery equal to that of other good hospitals here or in Europe. This branch of work is of absolute importance to the internes, and of the greatest value to the nurses.

Not less interesting or successful is the maternity work of these hospitals. A great deal of the chronic trouble from which working women suffer so severely comes from want of proper care while they are exercising the functions of childbearing. The poor applicant to the maternity department is seen by the woman physician, who gives her advice as to previous care of herself, and she has in the hospital that thorough rest and care which are indispensable to full restoration to health.

A great moral question forces itself on the consideration of the managers of these hospitals. The applicants to the maternity are very often unmarried girls. Does true humanity require us to refuse help to such women? It is evident that care must be exercised to give no encouragement to immorality, while we must not refuse the aid which is so often absolutely necessary to save life. The problem is a difficult one, but the managers have tried to meet it. They usually make a distinction between the first offense—which is often rather due to weakness and folly than to depravity—and confirmed habits of immorality, and do not receive unmarried women a second time. In one hospital, at least, the directors find the greatest assistance from a committee of ladies who look after the maternity patients, both before they enter and after they leave the hospital. They endeavor to procure work for the mother, and watch over her welfare and that of the child. But they make it their invariable rule to give aid only on condition that the mother makes every effort to fulfill her maternal duties; for they believe there is a regenerating power in motherhood, and that care for her child is the surest safeguard against a mother’s committing a second fault.

To many women of good position the maternity is a great blessing, if they have not comfortable homes and friends to care for them. The expense in the hospital is much less than the price for which good medical attendance and nursing can be secured at home.

I need only say of the medical care of women by their own sex in hospitals that its value has been fully proved. Women of all classes seek this aid eagerly, and show full confidence in their physicians and obey them quite as implicitly as they do those of the other sex. Women often say that they have suffered for years without medical or surgical assistance, that might have relieved them, from unwillingness to reveal their troubles to men. The greater freedom of the relation between patients and physicians of the same sex, enables the doctors to exercise much influence over their patients, who learn many good sanitary lessons in housekeeping. A physician was surprised to find the sick room of a poor patient carefully aired: “Why, you know they always do so at the hospital,” was the explanation given.

These hospitals have also done much to dispel among the poor the fear of going to hospitals.[^[199]] Finding their friends kindly ministered to by their own sex, they come to regard the hospital as a kindly refuge in sickness, not as the last resort of a homeless and deserted sufferer who will die unfriended and alone.

Besides these hospitals, especially adapted to assist in the medical education of women, are others established by women mainly in the interests of charity. I have, for instance, the twelfth annual report of “The Home of Mercy,” in Pittsfield, Mass. It contains about thirteen beds, and the number of patients in a year was one hundred. It was established by a small body of women who felt the need of a place for the victims of accident or disease. Sixty-eight per cent. of the patients are women, and all the officers but the physicians. This institution seems to present a good model for smaller cities and towns where, especially among a manufacturing population, hospital accommodations are often much needed. A training school for nurses is added to its work.

Another step has been taken in the medical education of women in the employment of women physicians, (made obligatory by the Legislature in some States) in State institutions, thus giving them management of the women’s infirmary. At the Reformatory prison at Sherburne, Mass., the resident physician has charge of the health of two hundred prisoners. The good care and treatment given them is apparent in the improvement of the health of prisoners during their stay, and in the small number of deaths.