Nevertheless, Boston had no general hospital for two hundred years after the landing of the Pilgrims. During this time the city had been growing rapidly-from a population of 4,500 in 1680, to 11,000 in 1720, and finally to 32,896 in 1810. By now it was clear that an almshouse was inadequate for the population, a conclusion reached some years earlier in the larger cities of Philadelphia and New York.
Thus the Reverend John Bartlett, chaplain of the overcrowded almshouse, wrote a letter in 1811 to "fifteen or twenty-five of the wealthiest and most respected citizens of Boston," urging support of a general hospital. Shortly before, two professors of the newly formed Harvard Medical School had written a similar letter. Their emphasis was slightly different, for the medical school needed a hospital for clinical teaching, and every attempt to use the existing almshouse or to build a new hospital had been blocked by the local medical society, whose members feared the encroachment of the school on the conduct of medical practice.
Through these letters run a number of recurrent themes: that a hospital is indispensable for training young doctors; that existing facilities are inadequate; that the obligations of Christian charity demand support of a hospital; and that Boston has fallen behind Philadelphia and New York.
The appeal, on many levels, was certainly successful. When fund-raising began in 1816 (it was delayed by the War of 1812), $78,802 was collected in the first three days, and donations eventually exceeded $140,000.
The State was involved to the following extent: it granted a charter to incorporate the Massachusetts General Hospital; it contributed some real estate along the banks of the Charles River; it contributed granite for construction of the building; and it supplied convict labor to build it.
The designer of the building was Charles Bulfinch, Jr., a leading architect and son of a prominent physician. With its dome, the building was an architectural marvel of its time, and was considered the most beautiful structure in Boston for many years afterward. Organizationally, too, it was quite advanced; it was patterned upon the English urban teaching hospital as exemplified by Guy's Hospital in London.
The new institution was not, however, immediately popular with Boston citizenry. The first patient appeared on September 3, 1821, but no other applied until September 20, and the hospital never ran at full census until after 1850, when massive emigration from Ireland increased the city population fourfold.
This early reluctance to use the newly founded institution is frequently attributed to experiences with earlier hospitals, such as the military hospitals of the Revolution (which Benjamin Rush said "robbed the United States of more citizens than the sword"), the pesthouses, and the almshouses.
But in fact it is perfectly understandable if one considers the state of medical science when the hospital first opened its doors.
In 1821, the concept that cleanliness could prevent infection was unknown. There was little systematic attempt to keep the hospital clean; physicians went directly from the autopsy room to the bedside without washing their hands, and surgeons operated in whatever old street clothes were considered too shabby for other purposes.
In 1821, the stethoscope was a newfangled French gadget, invented four years before by Laennec. (It was a hollow tube, designed to break into two pieces so it could be carried inside a physician's top hat.) The syringe for injection was a novelty; the clinical thermometer would not be introduced for another forty years; and X-ray diagnosis was nearly a century off.
In 1821, the average physician's list of drugs contained many substances of doubtful value, including live worms, oil of ants, snakeskins, strychnine, bile, and human perspiration. Not so long previously, Governor John Winthrop had accepted powdered unicorn horn as a valuable addition to his pharmacopoeia. And if all this seems an exaggeration, it is worth remembering that as late as 1910 some doctors at the hospital still regarded strychnine as good treatment for pneumonia.
In 1821, there was no anesthesia, and consequently few operations. The post-operative infection rate was nearly 100 per cent. Surgical mortality was close to 80 per cent. In the first full year of service, the hospital treated 115 patients. Although records from that time are lost, the mortality for the hospital as a whole in its early years was a fairly constant 10 per cent.
Clearly, the hospital has undergone an astonishing growth in size and complexity since those days. That growth generally goes unquestioned; it is a peculiarity of the American mentality that the growth of almost anything is applauded. (Consider the mindless jubilation that accompanied the growth of our population to two hundred million.) One may ask whether there are any drawbacks to the size of today's MGH, and to its current emphasis on acute, curative medicine. The question is difficult to answer.
First there is size. For both patient and physician, the sheer size of the hospital can create problems. The patient may find it cold, enormous, impersonal; the doctor whose patients or consultations are widely scattered may find himself walking as much as a quarter of a mile from bed to bed. The intimate, supportive atmosphere that is possible in a smaller hospital cannot be achieved to the same extent here.
On the other hand, a large patient population permits active research on a range of less common diseases; and the hospital serves a genuine function as a place of expert management in such illnesses. Similarly, highly technical procedures, requiring trained personnel and expensive machinery, can be supported in a large hospital, and these procedures can be carried out with a high degree of expertise. Patients who require open-heart surgery or sophisticated radiotherapy find the expensive equipment for such procedures here-and, equally important, staff that carries out such procedures daily.
As for the emphasis on curative measures directed toward established organic illness, two points can be made. First, the hospital's ability to continue to care for the patient once he has left the hospital is not as good as anyone would like. The MGH founded the first social-service department in America, in 1905, to look after such follow-up care in areas not strictly medical. These departments are now standard in most large hospitals. Similarly, the out-patient clinics are designed to provide continuity of medical care to ambulatory patients. But many patients are "lost to follow-up," to use the hospital's expression; they don't answer the social worker's calls, or they don't keep their clinic appointment Nor can they be wholly faulted in this regard, for the hospital's out-patient services are, in general, quite time-consuming for the person who wants to use them. Not only does the patient spend hours in the clinic itself, but he must take the time to travel to and from the hospital on each visit.
Second, by definition the hospital has not done much in the area of preventive medicine. No hospital ever has. Since the aesculapia, hospitals have defined themselves as passive institutions, taking whoever comes to them but seeking no one out. There are some peculiar sidelights to this. For example, a high percentage of patients in the acute psychiatric service give a family history of severe psychiatric disturbance. In the case of the young girl who had tried to kill her child, her father was an alcoholic; her mother and younger brother had committed suicide; her twenty-year-old husband, a shoe salesman, had recently been admitted to a state hospital for an acute psychotic break.
It is possible to think of psychiatric illness as almost infectious, in the sense that these disorders are so frequently self-perpetuating. One is tempted to reflect that true infectious disease is best treated in the community, using direct preventive and therapeutic measures; indeed, the conquest of infectious disease-one of the triumphs of medicine in this century-is something for which the hospital, as an institution, can take no credit at all.
In the same way, it is in the hospital's approach to mental illness that its limitations as a curative institution, treating already established disease, are today most striking. If major inroads are to be made, they will not come from the hospital system as it is presently structured, any more than the old specialized hospitals for tuberculosis, leprosy, and smallpox had any real impact on the decline of those diseases.
Some of the ways the hospital is restructuring itself to meet these limitations will be discussed later. But the hospital is also revising its internal workings, and that is the subject of the next chapter.