BY: JOHN J. FIALKA
Mr. Fialka is a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
John J. Fialka's book, Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the
Making of America, recounts the contributions made by women religious in
America from the 1800s to the present day. The stories illustrate what Fialka
describes as "the spiritual wealth these women invested in America."
This "spiritual wealth" serves as the foundation for community benefit
programs today. Below is an excerpt from Fialka's Chapter 12.
Community Benefit, Not Profit, Was the Motive behind the Preservation in
1887 of the City's Downtown Hospital
The bleakest moment in the history of the hospital that has served downtown
Baltimore for almost 150 years came on the frosty evening of November 1, 1887.
A group of doctors who used the hospital to perform surgery and to teach medicine
came to the conclusion that it was doomed.
On the west side of the city the University of Maryland was developing a hospital
with a medical school. On the east side, a medical colossus bankrolled by a
local merchant, Johns Hopkins, was beginning to rise. Parts of the center of
the city, which included the waterfront, were becoming seedy slums populated
by wharf rats and bums.
While the inner city had its romantic places, the doctors' diagnosis was
that few people were interested in keeping their hospital going. The one exception
was this strange order of Catholic nuns, the Sisters of Mercy. For some reason
they had agreed to take over nursing chores at the hospital.
To the modern mind, City Hospital, as it was called then, was hardly a hospital
at all. It was more like a charnel house or a kind of medical warehouse reserved
for very sick people. It featured stark contrasts between life and death. Some
students observed autopsies. Others could watch delicate surgery. And sometimes
they could switch back and forth because the procedures were performed in the
same room, often at the same time.
City Hospital was poorly heated, poorly lit, chronically short of potable water.
Its patients, often street people, enjoyed what they might have considered luxury
accommodations: dingy twelve-by-fifteen-foot boxes.
"Disorder in the highest degree and uncleanliness of the most repulsive
type made the City Hospital a place to be avoided by respectable visitors,"
says one early account of its status. What mystified the doctors that night
was that the nuns had come in at all. Since then they had cleaned it up and
now they were pledging to help the doctors buy adjacent land owned by the city.
They proposed to build a new hospital there.
These doctors were hard businessmen. Some were fine surgeons when they weren't
drinking. It had seemed like good business to bring in the nuns. Since the
Civil War the Mercies' nursing skills had become legendary. Plus, they
worked for almost nothing.
But now they were offering to buy what amounted to equity in the place! It
was bad enough that the nuns' interest in the land had provoked the city's
Protestant ministers to gather two thousand signatures on a petition to get
the mayor to queer the deal. But now the doctors had to grapple with the frankness
of the priest who had recommended the Mercies in the first place, Rev. William
E. Star. A gentle soul who was chaplain at the state penitentiary, he had just
let them in on a little secret: To back up their dreams, the nuns had no money,
not a dime, zippo.
That night the doctors had a very noisy meeting, but Dr. Aaron Friedenwald,
one of the elders among them, enjoyed a moment of quiet satisfaction. After
all, it was he who had warned them that they should have never gotten into business
dealings with the nuns in the first place. They had no contracts, nothing to
assure that the sisters would do anything at all as part of the bargain. Now
the doctors appeared stuck. "I am sick of the whole affair," he confided
in his diary.
Dr. A. B. Arnold, the dreamer of the group, presented this prognosis: The nuns
wouldn't be involved with City Hospital if it didn't pay them. Sisters
of Mercy, he reasoned, were no different from the doctors. They both had faith
in the almighty five-dollar bill. There had to be money someplace, he concluded.
But there wasn't. The priest, a respected man in Baltimore, had said as
much. Some of the doctors were religious, some—like many of Baltimore's
city fathers—put what little faith they had in the goals of the old Confederacy,
and some were outright atheists.
What galled them all was that they had believed the leader of the Mercies,
Mother Mary Benedicta, when she blithely told them if they committed to get
the land, she would build the hospital and make it "one of the finest in
the Union." By the end of the evening they resigned themselves to the fact
that they had all invested in a dubious undertaking that would probably take
them all down.
Within a month, Mother Benedicta turned this completely around. She convinced
the city council to issue a long-term lease for the vacant lot near the hospital
for a thousand dollars. As for the petition from the Protestant ministers, it
never made it to the mayor.
One account of the Mercies' explains this. The petition "fell into
the hands" of Mr. John M. Travelers, a city council clerk, "and he
being a gentleman of the highest integrity, and of uncommonly good sense, quietly
dropped all the papers filled with signatures into his very capacious desk,
turned the key and left them to mature."
After that, Mother Benedicta ventured off to New York and Philadelphia to inspect
models for her hospital. She commissioned three architects to flesh out what
her vision should look like. In short, the new hospital was happening. The following
September, at the laying of the cornerstone, the political muscle that she used
quietly to make it happen came on public display.
There was Baltimore's cardinal, James Gibbons, resplendent in white silk
vestments. The new hospital, he told the crowd, would rival Johns Hopkins. Marching
in solemn procession before him came the Knights of St. Vincent, Knights of
St. Ignatius, Knights of St. Patrick, Knights of Holy Cross, Knights of St.
Augustine and all of the other fraternal orders that bound together in a common
cause the Irish, German, Polish and Bohemian Catholic parishes of Baltimore.
. . .
The confusion over who really ran City Hospital was ended in 1909. Under the
leadership of a formidable new administrator, Sister M. Carmelita Hartman, its
name was changed to Mercy Hospital. She forged an even stronger alliance with
the business community, and in 1911 her hospital sprouted a new wing. . . .
At Mercy Hospital, she transformed the business side, reinforcing the financial
footings of the hospital and using part of the income to broaden its medical
research and enlarge its medical team. She set about applying the Mercy formula
with a vengeance: The poor came first, but the hospital had to generate money
to care for them. . . .
There was no facet of Mercy Hospital that Sister Carmelita Hartman didn't
see through to the end. Under her hand "Mercy," as the locals call
it, became a fixture of downtown Baltimore. Police and fire units made Mercy's
emergency room their hospital of choice. After Sister Carmelita left in 1917,
to become the treasurer and later mother superior of the Baltimore Mercies,
Mercy became the hospital-for-all-seasons for downtown Baltimore.
Contrary to the doubting doctors . . . it was . . . the force of the prayers,
the sacrifices, the determination and the skill of these women in drawing help
from the community that kept the whole enterprise going.
From the book Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America by
John J. Fialka. Copyright 2003 by the author. Reprinted with permission from
St. Martin's Press.
Mercy Today: Commitment and Caring
Mercy Medical Center, Baltimore, provides health care for persons of every
creed, color, and economic and social condition. Since its founding, Mercy continues
to develop programs that fulfill critical elements of its mission and follow
the tradition established by the first Sisters of Mercy of caring for the most
vulnerable in their community.
In fiscal 2004, Mercy Medical Center and Stella Maris (Mercy's continuum
of care service) provided more than $28 million in uncompensated care. In addition,
Mercy Medical Center—often in partnership with community organizations—offered
a number of programs to meet the needs of the poor and underserved in the Baltimore
community including:
- A charity pharmacy program that helps patients cover the costs of prescription
drugs.
- Sexual Assault Forensic Examiner (SAFE) helps sexual assault victims through
the aftermath of the crime and facilitates prosecution of attackers. SAFE
collaborates with TurnAround, Inc., a not-for-profit organization for victims
of sexual assault and domestic violence, and the Baltimore City Police Department's
Sex Offense Unit.
- The Family Violence Response Program (which also partners with TurnAround)
provides direct crisis intervention, danger assessment, safety planning, and
resource linkage to victims of family violence. The program, which has helped
more than 900 victims since March 2000, collaborates with 11 homeless service
providers, the Charles Crane Family Foundation, and the Governor's Office
of Crime Control and Prevention.
- The Mercy Supportive Housing Program, in partnership, with the city's
Homeless Service Unit, assists in the overall well-being of Mercy's neighbors
and provides housing placement and case management to more than 100 homeless
families annually.
—Aimee DeVoll
Copyright © 2005 by the Catholic Health Association of the United States
For reprint permission, contact Betty Crosby or call (314) 253-3477.