CHRISTIANITY and THE CREATION OF HOSPITALS  Christians, out of a desire to please God and obey His commands, saw the need for a special house that the sick and needy could use as a retreat while they recovered.
 

    Though the Greeks and Romans took care of the sick or wounded in various homes, there was no central place to which all those needing care could go.
     By the 4th century AD, newly Christianized Romans began running places specifically for the sick and needy.  By the 8th century, Christian hospitals became specialized in their functions.  Some served the sick, some the needy or orphans, lepers, or the insane.
    By the 12th century, the Christian Order of St. John of Jerusalem and also the St. Augustine nuns, had molded Medieval hospitals into fine institutions.
    Control of the institutions shifted away from the Church during the late 13th century.  Secular hospitals grew increasingly crowded and dirty. Those who could afford better did not go to those hospitals.

    In 1751 a Dr. Thomas Bond went to Ben Franklin and asked him for help in forming Philadelphia's first true hospital.  A small building went up with words from the story of the Good Samaritan, "Take care of him and I will repay thee.  That building is now the East Wing of Pennsylvania Hospital.

 

Benjamin Franklin:

    When Benjamin was eleven, his young fertile mind was influenced by Cotton Mather's book, Essays to do Good.  His older brother James was a printer and published the New England Courant, which he used to criticize Cotton Mather's ideas on different issues.  During the smallpox epidemic of 1721, Mather tried to have people "inoculated," a practice he learned from his African servant.*  James found such an idea outrageously irresponsible.

    Ben worked with James as an apprentice until he was seventeen and moved to Philadelphia to be a journeyman printer.  The next year, he came back to Boston, and the first thing he did was to visit Cotton Mather.  Mather was most gracious to Ben, making no mention of his brother's attacks on him.  When Franklin left, he bumped his head on Mather's doorjamb.  Mather reflected out loud to Franklin that he was a young man with the world ahead of him.  He must learn to stoop in order to miss the hard thumps of life.  Franklin learned a lesson of pride and observed throughout his life how many people met misfortune because they held their heads too high with pride.

    Franklin appreciated Mather in the realm of scientific knowledge and medicine.  For example, Mather had written about spontaneous hybridization in plants.  Mather himself admired and was guided in method by the work of Sir Isaac Newton.   

"I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that he made the world, and governed it by his Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded either here or hereafter."  from Franklin's autobiography

    In 1751, Franklin learned that Philadelphia needed a hospital, something new in the colonies.  Through great persuasive abilities, Ben Franklin was able to motivate his Christian friends and neighbors with help from the colonial legislature to work together and create the first hospital.

 

*Cotton Mather named the African-born man Onesimus, which comes from a Greek word meaning "useful."  Onesimus described the procedure common to Africa where pus from a smallpox sore is placed into a cut in the arm of a non-infected person. This should allow the non-infected person to develop a resistance to smallpox.  One doctor tried it first on his son and two slaves.  Eventually, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston and two other doctors inoculated about 300 Bostonians. The death rate dropped from 1-in-12 to 1-in-40.  

          "His reputation was more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and esteemed than any or all of them.  Newton had astonished perhaps forty or fifty men in Europe; for not more than that number, probably, at any one time had read him and understood him by his discoveries and demonstrations.  And these being held in admiration in their respective countries as at the head of the philosophers, had spread among scientific people a mysterious wonder at the genius of this perhaps the greatest man that ever lived.  But this fame was confined to men of letters.  The common people knew little and cared nothing about such a recluse philosopher.  Leibnitz's name was more confined still.  Frederick was hated by more than half of Europe as much as Louis XIV was, and as Napoleon is.  Voltaire, whose name was more universal than any of those before mentioned, was considered as a vain, profligate wit, and not much esteemed or beloved by anybody, though admired by all who knew his works.

            But Franklin's fame was universal.  His name was familiar to government and people, to kings, courtiers, nobility, clergy and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady's chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him as a friend to human kind.  ....To develop that complication of causes which conspired to produce so singular a phenomenon is far beyond my means or forces.....

            Franklin had a great genius, original, sagacious and inventive, capable of discoveries in science no less than of improvements in the fine arts and the mechanic arts.  He had a vast imagination, equal to the comprehension of the greatest objects, and capable of a steady and cool comprehension of them.  He had wit at will.  He had humor that, when he pleased, was delicate and delightful.  He had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure.  He had talents for irony, allegory and fable that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth.  ....Had he been blessed with the same advantages of scholastic education in his early youth, and pursued a course of studies as unembarrased with occupations of public and private life, as Sir Isaac Newton, he might have emulated the first philosopher."    from Works of John Adams, I, 659-661, 663-664.

        My Lords, I look upon North America as the only great nursery of freemen now left upon the face of the earth.  We have seen the liberties of Poland and Sweden swept away, in the course of one year, by treachery and usurpation.  The free towns of Germany are like so many dying sparks that go out one after another, and which must all be soon extinguished under the destructive greatness of their neighbours.  Holland is little more than a great trading company, with luxurious manners, and an exhausted revenue...Switzerland alone is free and happy within the narrow enclosure of its rocks and vallies.  As for the state of this country, my Lords, I can only refer myself to your own secret thoughts.  I am disposed to think and hope the best of Public Liberty.  Were I to describe her, according to my own ideas at present, I should say that she has a sickly countenance, but I trust she has a strong constitution.

        But whatever may be our future fate, the greatest glory that attends this country, a greater than any other nation ever acquired, is to have formed and nursed up to such a state of happiness those Colonies whom we are now so eager to butcher.  We ought to cherish them as the immortal monuments of our public justice and wisdom; as the heirs of our better days of our old arts and manners, and of our expiring national virtues.  What work of art, or power, or public utility, has ever equalled the glory of having peopled a continent without guilt or bloodshed with a multitude of free and happy commonwealths; to have given them the best arts of life and government, and to have suffered them under the shelter of our authority, to acquire in peace the skill to use them.  In comparison of this, the policy of governing by influence, and even the pride of war and victory, are dishonest tricks and poor contemptible pageantry.

       We seem not to be sensible of the high and important trust which Providence has committed to our charge.  The most precious remains of civil liberty that the world can now boast of are lodged in our hands; and God forbid that we should violate so sacred a deposit.  By enslaving your Colonies, you not only ruin the peace, the commerce and the fortunes of both countries, but you extinguish the fairest hopes, shut up the last asylum of mankind.  I think, my Lords, without being weakly superstitious, that a good man may hope that heaven will take part against the execution of a plan which seems big not only with mischief but impiety.