Saint Bartholomew's

...Scarcely a town of 5,000 inhabitants in Germany but had its hospital...

...The English were only doing what other countries were accomplishing with equal success...

...Their solution is the basis for hospital action in our time...

...Harvey lost half his consultant practice, as he tells us himself, for daring to declare that the blood went whirling around the body that way, for only progressive physicians would believe it...

...The total population [of the country] was much smaller than that of London of the present day [but] the facts prove that clergy and laity were battling bravely with social work...

...It might readily be thought that these mediaeval hospitals were utilitarian structures of little architectural significance...

...With the thirteenth century there was an immense step forward in this direction...

...To stimulate interest, the history of the hospital is being broadcast for the information of prospective donors...

...Rahere had come to see the hollowness of life as lived for mere selfish purposes, had joined a religious order and then devoted himself to the erection and endowment of a hospital in which all those who needed care in the city of London were to be provided for...

...He attributes their foundation to the incentive of the great Pope Innocent III...

...The bishop of London who wrote the preface to Miss Clay's work was astounded at the provision of care for the ailing which she had found to exist in the early middle-ages...

...In his essay, Public Medicine and the History of Epidemics, he said: The beginning of the history of all of these German hospitals is connected with the name of that Pope who made the boldest and the farthest-reaching attempt to gather the sum of human interests into the organization of the Catholic Church...

...We have just come to realize that in spite of our immense hospital development, our hospitals in this country, so generously contributed to by a great many people, have very little place in them for what has been called the white-collar class-that is for those who are able to make a decent living for themselves and their families but who are quite unable to meet the expenses of hospital treatment when they are ill, because of the ever-mounting costs of hospital accommodation...

...It must be recognized and admitted that it was reserved for the Roman Catholic Church and above all for Innocent III not only to open the bourse of Christian charity and mercy in all its fulness, but also to guide the life-giving stream into every branch of human life in an ordered manner...

...It carries eight centuries of traditions and those traditions are worthy of what is best in human nature...

...It was to be absolutely free to do its work for the poor without let or hindrance and without exactions or burdens of any kind...

...We are in the midst of a great hospital movement in this country by which in the past sixty years our hospitals have multiplied some fifty times-from less than one hundred and fifty to over seventy-five hundred...

...They were often surrounded by charming grounds, and this was true even for the leper hospitals, making these sad refuges very different from the sordid places of confinement they are usually considered to have been...

...To get the story of Saint Bartholomew's and its background is to understand more about the middle-ages and their wonderful social work for all classes...

...For this reason alone the interest in this man and in his time will never die out...

...Not long afterward from his own savings and from the contributions that he was able to obtain from friends, he was enabled to build the hospital and endow it...

...It would be hard for most of us to appreciate that there was a corresponding development of hospitals both in comparative number and in significance shortly after the time when Saint Bartholomew's Hospital was founded...

...We have places for the poor in our hospitals, and now are beginning to provide luxurious quarters for the rich when they are ill, but when the lower middle class of people, because of injury or illness, must be kept in the hospital for any length of time, they are unable to foot the bill...

...Virchow, the great German pathologist, to whom the Prussian government entrusted the rebuilding of the hospital system in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century, has told the story of the mediaeval hospitals in Germany...

...The recent Harvey celebration has broadened its fame, for Harvey was nearly thirty-five years the principal physician at Saint Bartholomew's...

...The three other London royal hospitals were Saint Mary's, Saint Thomas's (where the Nightingale nurses were trained) and Bethlehem Hospital, whose name was softened on the English tongue into Bedlam and afterward when it became a home exclusively for the insane contributed the word "bedlam" and its derivatives to our English speech...

...Hospital equipment has become very expensive and patients must be asked to share the expense of its installation and upkeep in order that hospitals may not have a deficit...

...English-speaking people all over the world have a common heritage of traditions in this subject of meeting social needs which all of us should know something about...

...If any hospital in the world deserves recognition for its work, it is Saint Bartholomew's...

...At least if they do so, they must cut into their reserve so seriously that there will be but little or nothing left for the rainy days that almost inevitably come when other members of the household, in the critical emergencies of life so sure to develop, must have the advantage of hospital treatment in their turn...

...They thought in terms of the human in the middle-ages, and their hospitals represented their thoughts in the highest degree...

...Undoubtedly many of his thoughts with regard to the circulation of the blood took form while he was engaged in his clinical work at Saint Bartholomew's and doubtless some of his experiments were planned there...

...When Henry I gave his great foundation charter to the royal hospital of Saint Bartholomew, he ordained that it should be "free from all earthly servitude and subjection...

...Of course these were not the first hospitals in England nor the only ones...

...As a matter of fact, many of them were very beautiful, for they were built in a day when it was looked upon as a civic duty to make public buildings beautiful because they were the common property of the people...

...He was a very practical man, this naive jester, as ever so many of our vaudeville artists in the modern time are, so he proceeded to obtain a grant of land for hospital purposes from King Henry I just about the end of the first quarter of the twelfth century...

...Who knows, by the way, but that Will Rogers may endow a hospital when he parts with his money for good...

...Our generation has devoted itself whole-heartedly to the work of the reconstruction of hospitals and this makes the original foundation of these humanitarian institutions many centuries ago extremely interesting...

...Saint Bartholomew's or Saint Bat's or Bart's, as it is called in London, is one of the world's great hospitals...

...The old hospital was founded by Rahere, the court jester...

...Thus came into existence Saint Bartholomew's Hospital, one of the four hospitals established in various parts of London by the middle of the thirteenth century and known as "royal hospitals" because they were under the special patronage of the king...

...Saint Bartholomew's Hospital is one of the mediaeval institutions that provided for those who needed special care for illness or accident, and represented an enduring response to an important social question...

...The campaign for Saint Bartholomew's brings with it a revelation of the traditions of the old-time hospitals and is supplying the historical background for these mediaeval institutions...

...It is rather hard for most people in our time to realize that our ancestors of the later middle-ages had to meet this problem and they proceeded to solve it very completely...

...Miss Clay, in The Mediaeval Hospitals in England, says: It will surprise many to learn that apart from monasteries and priories there existed upward of seven hundred and fifty such charitable institutions [hospitals and asylums] in mediaeval England...

...Henry vowed to maintain and defend it "even as my crown" and adjured "all my heirs and successors to confirm and defend its rights and privileges to perpetuity...