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nation with all the power and the strength which they possess. There is nothing in the life of an individual that can take the place of religion and morality; there is nothing in the life of a nation that can take the place of a God-fearing citizenship. Take them out of the life of the individual and you have dissatisfaction and disappointment; take them out of the life of the nation and you have disorder and disaster.

Therefore we insist that we are serving our country best when we bestow upon our youth not only a thorough training in the branches usually taught in institutions of learning, but also a careful and complete training in the principles of religion and morality. Their teaching will not only insure the perpetuation of those principles, but will guarantee to the flag and the nation which we love and reverence a body of pure-minded, patriotic citizens who can be depended upon to support and defend this country and its institutions on all occasions and under all circumstances.

THE RELIGIOUS HOSPITAL AS THE NEED OF

OUR TIMES

ADDRESS BY JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., PH.D.

NOTHING that I know would give me greater pleasure than to hear that there was to be a great Catholic hospital in West Philadelphia. Westward the course of empire takes its way, and as the only period when I lived in Philadelphia I resided west of the Schuylkill, I know the needs of that district, and now I sincerely congratulate the West Philadelphians. North and South Philadelphia have been greatly benefited by Catholic hospitals, and now it is to be your turn. I am very glad that the movement for the erection of the hospital, however, is not confined to one district, but is made a diocesan project, for I am sure that the whole archdiocese will be deeply indebted to the success of your movement. I think, however, that you are doing much more than a local good work — you are about to exemplify in another institution how well the Catholic Church has within itself the means of solving social problems of all kinds.

I have, as some of you doubtless are aware, a penchant, fortunate or unfortunate as it may be, to think that there is nothing new under the sun. I have, of course, a rather good authority for that expression and am rather surprised to find how many people there are who are quite sure that there is nothing in the old biblical expression now, though there may have been until our time; but we have made so many new things and improved the world so much that it is hard to esti

mate our progress. When I still persist in saying that there is no progress in mankind, but that we are just going up and down in phases of interest, in various subjects, and that man's mind is no more penetrating, his vision, physical and mental, no more acute, and his power of expressing himself in letters or building or with the brush or chisel no better than it has been before, and that his interests merely vary, but do not improve, my friends sometimes suggest that at least in medicine there is a very great improvement and that our surgery is magnificently advanced, our hospitals ever so much better, our care of patients ever so much more humane, and the rest that may be said along that line.

Instead of feeling quite overcome by these suggestions I have merely to respond that none of these things are new. All our surgery is old and practically all the operations of importance have been done before our time, even as long as six or seven centuries ago. It would be impossible to do the operations without anaesthesia, but they actually had several modes of anesthesia in the later Middle Ages, and as without antisepsis the death rate would make them impossible, they had also anticipated our use of antiseptics, in practice at least, and boasted of getting union by first intention. This ideal surgical result of which our surgeons are so proud in the modern time is actually still called by an old mediaeval Latin expression, which indicates how old is the idea behind it.

Since the beginning of this war I may say that a good many friends have been a little more ready to accept the idea of there being little or any progress in mankind, for here is humanity, or at least the representative civilized nations, whose progress has been supposedly the greatest, engaged in quite as barbarous a contest as mankind has ever waged, and with ever so much more serious results because our mechanical im

provements have enabled us to kill and maim men faster and in larger numbers than ever before. The intellectual men to whom we look up in all these countries are all on record defending their own country, and the peoples of at least six nations in Europe are engaged in a bitter conflict, which each and every one of them thinks is in self-defence.

In the midst of all the barbarity of war there is one relief, the excellent care that is being taken of wounded soldiers in the hospitals. These have now become magnificent institutions, beautifully built, admirably adapted for their purpose, and no wonder the death rate among the wounded is probably not more than three per cent. These hospitals have developed in the last generation. Forty years ago our hospitals were nothing to brag of. Before that the less said about them the better. Here seems to be a great advance for humanitarian purposes, but let us not forget that in the history of hospitals there were beautiful hospital buildings in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries and that just before our time there was a negative phase of interest in hospital construction and organization which was very unfortunate, but represents one of those curious downs of interest in humanity so hard to account for in human history.

If you will take up any history of hospitals you will find that the dark period in the history of nursing and of hospitals comes at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Hospitals were then jail-like buildings with little ill-ventilated rooms and narrow doors and corridors and small windows and inadequate ventilation and everything that encouraged the accumulation of dirt. The old mediaeval hospitals had been beautiful buildings with tiled floors, large windows high in the walls, which permitted ventilation without draughts, a gallery around the ward for inspection pur

poses and the accommodation of patients who particularly needed air and sunlight, and arrangements for some privacy even for ward patients by low partitions. Mass was said at the end of the ward and all the patients heard it every morning, giving them that satisfaction, and there were pictures on the walls which kept patients from being thrown entirely back on themselves and having nothing to think about.

The surprise is that such a fine development should be followed by decadence. There were two reasons. The old hospitals were under the care of religious Orders, and a great many of these were suppressed at the time of the so-called Reformation and their property confiscated. It did not make any difference whether their property was being used for the poor or not. The kings transferred it to favored nobles. Hospitals then became state institutions, and above all the women who had had charge of them were put down from their places and the hospitals were run by men. What is not generally realized is that the Reformation movement particularly hurt the position of woman in the world, for in the mediaeval times abbesses sat in Parliament, many women had the right to vote, the universities had women professors, and they were granted licenses to practise both law and medicine on equal terms with the men.

When women were put down from their places as directors of hospitals, orphan asylums, and homes for the ailing of various kinds, then abuses crept in. When the only reason for caring for the ailing is the money that is paid for it, abuses are very liable to occur. Virchow, the great German pathologist, whose knowledge of the history of medicine was so thorough, and into whose hands was placed the organization of the hospitals of the great city of Berlin, insisted that some motive besides that of personal gain was almost inevitably necessary in

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