Hospital Sketches

Hospital Sketches

However that may be, if he is ever immured for many weeks in a great hospital, he will be surprised to find how many are the similarities between[x] its life, its discipline and its atmosphere, and those of the great monasteries. I mean those medival houses which spread from the parent at Monte Cassino to Citeaux and Cluny and Vezelay and thence to far-away parts of Europe, and which were even more abundant in England where the ruins of the Yorkshire Abbeys still attest to their former power. When the time is ripe for the change longed for by our friend he will find that very slight additions to a modern hospital will give him what he wants in great perfection. Grateful though I am to themdeeply gratefulyet I know little of the personal history of the founder of this great hospital which now shelters me, or of that "Diamond Jim Brady" who built and endowed this noble wing. Still, I feel sure that in many ways these benefactors to their race made their gifts under much the same conditions as those barons and nobles of old who, led by some deep feeling, devoted their wealth to the saving, not only of their own souls, but of the souls and bodies of their fellow men. Moreover, if the benefactors who founded and endowed this hospital resembled the men and women who made possible the powerful monasteries of the Middle Ages, there is also a resemblance to be found between the service that the monks rendered in their day to humanity and knowledge and that devotion which to-day inspires the staff of a great modern hospital. In this very building[xi] are housed and in constant attendance a large number of doctors, surgeons and orderlies. Their quarters, though in many ways like those in a modern club, are almost equally like the cells of a great monastery. There probably is not one of the staff who was not turned to his profession in some degree by the thought that it would make him of service to mankind. In another wing live several hundred nurses. The strength and health and happiness which appear in the faces of these young women attest to the good effect for women as well as for men of discipline and regular attention to duty. What a shining example is theirs of faithful and altruistic service to suffering humanity! Indeed a generous, helpful and encouraging spirit pervades all the men and women who form the staff of the hospital. Theirs is a single-minded and unwearying attention which no monks could have excelled, nor could the monasteries ever have offered a wider charity than that which makes white and colored, Hebrew and Gentile, poor and rich all objects of the kindly help of a skilful and devoted company. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 35289
Author: Peabody, Robert Swain
Release Date: Feb 15, 2011
Format: eBook
Language: English