purpose for betterment of those who gave their impress to our
national life. Hamilton Mabie says: "Among Americans education is
not only a discipline, a training; it is also a symbol. It means
living an ampler life in a larger world."
The church-Home Missions--from the beginning has been the largest
factor in the spread of schools and colleges--the greatest single
educative force of this country.
The record of the Home Mission activities of the various denominations
tells the story of the founding of academies and colleges, throughout
the length and breadth of the land. In Kansas the State Normal School,
State Agricultural College and the State University were founded by
Home Missionaries.
Of the great Eastern universities and colleges it will be recalled
that many were established by the Christian church. Among these
are Harvard, Williams, Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, Vassar and
many others.
Home Missions is still an active and deeply needed educative
force. It brings the most powerful influence to the great groups
of the neglected in our land, giving them visions of bettered
physical conditions, yearnings after higher spiritual purposes,
and determinations for a fuller realization of life in all its
meaning, with the power of attaining these ideals.
IV
A HEALING FORCE
"During the spring months an epidemic of diphtheria and other
infectious diseases visited a district of nine or ten villages in
New Mexico. Many children succumbed to these diseases, the number
of those who died being about one-tenth of the entire population
of the district.
"No people in the world are kinder-hearted than the Mexican
people. Everybody, even the children, visits the sick, and attends
the _velorios_ (wakes) and funeral rites of the dead, without
regard to the contagious character of the disease.
"This fatal custom is re-enforced by a fatalistic philosophy.
Whatever befalls one, he receives it with an '_Asi me toco_' (It
was my fate). Whatever comes, he says:
"'_Es par Dios_' (It is of God). Each man has his appointed time
to die. Until that time he is safe, and when that time comes
nothing can save him. There is no such thing as contagion; disease
strikes when and where God will. Medicine will cure, if it is the
will of God. What the medicine may be is of little importance; a
glass of water will cure as well as anything else, is a frequent
saying, if it is the will of God.
"She, the missionary nurse, thereupon took up her station in the
sick room, kept out the numerous callers, administered antitoxin,
and nursed the child back to life. She had saved the child. She
gave the antitoxin treatment in other cases where the parents were
willing. She thus treated fifteen cases, losing only one."
* * * * *
"The healing of the seamless dress,
Is by our beds of pain.
We touch Him in life's throng and press,
And we are whole again."
* * * * *
Of all the compelling qualities that drew humanity irresistibly
to Him, the compassion of the Christ was the most winning. This
constraining love was the very heart of His Gospel.
The masses of the suffering in His day knew only the ostracism of
society because of their affliction.
The blind must sit idly through the glory of the day by the dusty
road-side, begging bread from the passing throng; the crippled lay
in their misery and impotence at the gateways of the temples,
sustained by the occasional coins tossed by the more fortunate as
they hurried by. Nervous and mental sufferers must range through
the wilds of deserts and waste places, or share the tombs where
the lepers took refuge, being judged possessed of devils and fit
only to be outcasts.
The pity of Christ, as well as His power to heal, disclosed a new
force in the world-a love that could tenderly share the darkened
outlook as well as minister to all the needs of such as these.
The compassion of the Christ reached and lifted the hopeless heart
of suffering humanity as His touch soothed the torturing agony of
disease and brought hope and healing into a world hardened to pain.
It released a power the beneficence and helpfulness of which
increase year by year as science adds to its ability, and a growing
sense of responsibility widens its use.
The Christian era ushered in the day of hope for the sick-poor--a
day that has progressed steadily, to an ever-enlarging vision of
what was in the heart of Christ for the healing of the nations.
Ancient writers tell us of some efforts in pre-Christian days
toward the institutional care of the sick. The earliest records
mention the treatment of the sick in the Greek temples of Aesculapius
in 1134 B.C.; these were probably not for the poor. Seneca very
much later refers to the infirmaries established by the Romans for
the well-to-do classes.
In 226 B.C., the Buddhists in India are credited with some small
efforts to provide for the sick poor, as are also later the fire
worshipers of Persia.
"When the example and teachings of Christ began to bear fruit, and
when Jerusalem and the roads approaching it began to be crowded
with pilgrims, special accommodations for the use of the sick were
established. When monasteries and convents followed, they too,
provided for the sick."
From the Roman word "hospitalia" (apartment set apart for guests),
our word hospital is derived.
In the writings of St. Jerome, who established several, the word
"hospital" is first used for a curative institution.
It is of interest to know that the oldest hospital now in use in
Europe, the Hotel Dieu, was founded in Paris, in 600 A. D. by the
Bishop of Paris.
All the early hospitals were church institutions, and the wards
were clustered about the chapel, as may be seen to-day in the
arrangement of beautiful St. Luke's hospital in New York City.
Thus we find that religion, not medicine, gave birth to hospitals.
An accelerating influence in their growth came through the
necessities of war, which threw large numbers of the injured and
suffering upon communities quite unprepared to receive and
minister to them.
It was to meet such a need that the first hospital was established
in the United States on Manhattan Island in 1658.
The "New Netherland Register" says "This hospital was established
at the request of Surgeon Hendricksen Varrevauger for the reception
of sick soldiers--who had been previously billeted on private
families."
In 1679 the hospital consisted of five houses.
Early in the eighteenth century pest-houses were established at
Salem, Massachusetts, at New York, and Charleston, and in 1717,
a hospital for contagious diseases was built in Boston.
The teachings and writings of Benjamin Franklin were of marked
importance in promoting sanitary science and in securing the
building of the first chartered hospital in the United States,
which was erected in Philadelphia in 1755. The record shows four
hundred and thirty-five patients treated in this hospital in the
year 1775.
That year was also marked by the building of the New York
Hospital, which was destroyed by fire almost as soon as completed,
and rebuilt in 1791. It owed its origin to two professors of
King's College (now Columbia), which at that time was a church
institution.
The necessities of war have from early times had a marked effect
upon the development of hospitals. Dr. James Tilton, in presenting
recommendations to Congress in 1781, says of his experience in the
Revolution: "It would be shocking to humanity to relate the history
of our general hospitals in the years 1777 and 1779, when they
swallowed up at least one-half of our army, owing to the system of
placing nearly all the sick of the army in the general hospitals,
where crowds and infection wrought a fearful mortality, and where
more surgeons died in the American service in proportion to their
number than officers of the line--a strong evidence that infection
is more dangerous than weapons of war."
The death rate of the English and French soldiers was so fearful,
and the neglect and condition of the wounded men so appalling in
the Crimean war (1854), that the entire English nation was aroused.
It was a woman, Florence Nightingale, who was sent out by the nation
and given full authority to act in the emergency upon which hung
the fate of the armies.
Not only did this noble woman, with her band of thirty-seven
nurses, bring healing instead of death in those army hospitals,
but she instituted reform in sanitation which was adopted by
hospitals throughout the world.
To her also humanity owes the inestimable boon of the trained
nurse of education, refinement and ability. Before Florence
Nightingale gave herself and initiated the movement for the
training of young women of standing as nurses, such work had been
left to the rough, uncouth, and often low-lived men and women, of
whom the unspeakable Sairey Gamp, immortalized by Charles Dickens,
is a fitting type.
As the Christian church was the first to give healing to the
needy, so it has carried this ministry wherever in the world its
banners have been set up.
Throughout this land, from Alaska to the Gulf, may be found
hospitals established by the Christian church--the greater number
the product of Home Missions.
The Home Mission nurse, or deaconess-nurse, is an important factor
in connection with nearly every mission station.
In lumber sections, in mining camps, on Alaskan river boats, in
far back mountain settlements, in the patios of Porto Rico and our
island possessions, with the Negroes of the South, the Orientals
of the Pacific coast, the backward peoples, the Mexicans and
Indians, the depressed of our great cities, at the gates of the
nation--wherever the cry of human need in our land has been met by
Home Missions, there these ministers of healing have carried their
blessed service.
If the nurse, or deaconess, is to fulfill her mission to the
sick, she must have training. There must be deaconess homes and
hospital's for this, where also the sick poor who can rarely be
properly cared for in their dark, crowded, unsanitary homes may
find help. In answer to this double need, deaconess hospitals
have been established.
"The deaconess nurse goes into the homes of the poor, bringing
the skilled touch of the nurse and the loving heart of Christian
womanhood to the service of the neediest. Contagion has no terrors
for her; Filth, vermin, and dangerously unsanitary conditions are
matters of every-day occurrence. No service so quickly opens the
heart to good influences as that which comes in hours of deepest
need and helplessness, to lead the heart through human tenderness
to the Source of all goodness and love. Whole families have been
won to Christ through the services of a Christian nurse.
* * * * *
"Babies first! The wee folk, doomed to the ill's to which tenement
life is heir, must have safe food; a luxury unattainable, or it
would be if the House did not have a dispensary from which over a
thousand bottles of milk, modified by the doctor's prescription for
each individual case, are given out each month.
"It is worth while to visit the Medical Mission at 36 Hull Street,
Boston. There will be found a dental clinic, opened in the spring of
1912, and the school nurses send the children there to get acquainted
with the pleasures of the dental chair, and, most important of all,
to learn how to care for their teeth. Then there are the orthopedic,
and the regular surgical and medical clinics.
"Soon after lunch I went with a nurse to make call's on a few of the
out-patients. We read of dark stairways, but I had no conception of
such dark and crooked ways. Why the children do not have broken
limbs all the time I cannot imagine.
"We entered three places--I suppose the people who live in them
call them homes; each has two or three rooms, with one or more
beds in every room, even the kitchen. If there were three rooms,
one was window-less. A mother, with a three weeks' old baby, was
scrubbing the stone steps. The babies were bound up like papooses,
and the nurse had to unwind the little living mummies to care for
them.
"Later, returning to the Mission, we attended the 'Italian
Mothers' Club.' How they luxuriate in their weekly treat! They
sing, sew on garments which are theirs when completed, listen to
talks from visitors and workers, and always close the hour with
the Lord's prayer. Children cling to their skirts or lie in their
laps as they discuss their personal problems, and all look up when
spoken to with the never-failing Italian courtesy.
"Some of the year's statistics are a revelation as to the work
done: Dispensary treatments, indoor, 12,522; outdoor, 1536; new
patients, 4649; operations, 329; obstetrical cases, 151; calls
made by nurses, 3075.
"In one week at the morning and evening clinics, ninety-seven
patients were treated at the dispensary besides the vaccination
cases." [Footnote: Woman's Home Missionary Society, Methodist
Episcopal Church.]
* * * * *
"She was an epileptic. The sadness that is bound up in the word
only those who have experienced it can know. She worked with her
needle as long as she could. At the warning cry of one of the
terrible attacks, her mother tenderly cared for her.
"'There is only one thing that rests on my heart,' said the mother,
as she lay on her death-bed. 'I am satisfied about everything else
and ready to go, if only there was some friend to care for my poor
epileptic girl.'
"A friend promised to place the daughter in the Lutheran Home
for Epileptics, and the mother died praising God for those who,
in following His Son, had provided for those who were afflicted."
[Footnote: The Women's Missionary Society, Lutheran General
Council.]
* * * * *
Nowhere is the twofold service of the Mission hospital more
needed than among the Negroes of the South, where the unsanitary
conditions in and about the homes, and the widespread ignorance
of the simplest laws of health are so pronounced. A number of the
Boards maintain hospitals providing care for the sick Negroes and
the training of colored girls as nurses for their own people.
Among these MacVicar Hospital is outstanding in the character and
efficiency of its service.
This hospital is a department of Spelman Seminary, maintained by
the Woman's American Baptist Home Missionary Society at Atlanta,
Georgia. Its workers are members of the school faculty and they
are paid from the school fund. A small charge, to outside
patients, is made.
The trustees have set aside one-half of the annual income of a
small endowment in order to provide free operations and treatment
for those to whom even a small payment is impossible.
Negro women and children from the city have the privileges of the
hospital, and patients also come from various parts of the state
for medical and surgical treatment.
The hospital is able to take adequate care of the health of Spelman's
large family of six hundred people. When smallpox is in the city,
vaccination day is held and every boarder, day pupil, teacher, and
workman must report to the hospital.
The doctors from the city co-operate in the work at MacVicar,
giving their services freely.
One of the most valuable features of the institution is the
training course for nurses, to which those in training must give
their entire time for three years. They must have completed the
eighth grade in school before beginning.
* * * * *
Of those in dire need of physical as well as spiritual regeneration
in our land are the Mexicans, of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico,
California, and the large colonies in some of the cities of Texas.
The prevailing ignorance, untidiness, and superstition of the
homes call insistently for more missionary nurses to teach
cleanliness, sanitation, and economy, and the training of mothers
in the care of their little ones and in the preparation of
wholesome food.
* * * * *
The latest report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs states that
the Government maintains fifty-one hospitals (six additional are
under construction), with a combined capacity of 1432 patients, to
care for a population of 331,250 persons. In view of these figures,
it is not difficult to realize the urgent need of the field workers
and nurses in connection with Christian Missions among Indians.
The report shows also the estimated number of 21,980 Indians
suffering from tuberculosis, and 35,769 afflicted with the highly
contagious eye disease, trachoma. The death rate per thousand
among the Indians last year was 30.76. The percentage of deaths
due to tuberculosis was 31.83, while the birthrate was 38.79 per
thousand.
The Commissioner of Indian Affairs says:
"I am fully aware of the fact that to perpetuate the Indian race,
the inroads of tuberculosis must be stayed. To do this it is
essential that better sanitary conditions be instituted in the
Indian homes, and cleanliness, better ventilation, and sufficient
and nourishing food be secured."
Realizing the importance of these matters, a study has been made
of the physical conditions of the government Indian schools. An
effort has been made to detect incipient tuberculosis and trachoma
and segregate and treat those infected, so that healthy families
may not be infected through the return of a child who has been
infected at school. Regular talks are given to the children on
sanitary matters.
There is vital necessity for more hospitals to care for the
children and other members of the family in the early stages of
disease.
Fully sixty per cent of the Indians under the supervision of the
Indian service are still entirely dependent upon the government for
medical assistance. The medical staff employed by the government
comprises one hundred and twenty-eight regular physicians, devoting
their entire time, and fifty-nine contract physicians giving part
time service.
A unique and most helpful feature of the Indian Missions
maintained by the Women's Board of Domestic Missions of the
Reformed Church in America are the separate buildings known as
lodges, set apart for the use of the Indians.
Here the specially needy sick find care and shelter until other
provision can be made for them.
Here when the journey has been long, or necessity compels, mothers
bring their little ones for rest, or to spend the night.
Young girls pressed by temptation or needing shelter can find
security and safety at the lodge.
The lodge sewing machines and laundry facilities are greatly
appreciated by the women who seek the help of such conveniences
from time to time.
Here mothers are taught many helpful lessons in sanitation,
the care of babies, and the preparation of food for the sick.
Occasionally Indian feasts and celebrations connected with
the Mission are held or prepared in the lodge by the Indians
themselves under the supervision of a worker.
The lodge matron knows the Indians and how to help them, and is
loved and trusted by them because they realize her sympathy and
appreciate what her kind hands do for them in the care of the
sick, and often, also, in the preparation of their dead for burial.
Many a sick and needy one at the lodge has turned from the old
Indian road of darkness, pain, and dread, and found rest, and
help, and light in the Jesus Way.
* * * * *
"Here in Alaska the hospital boat was launched this summer, and
will be of great use.
"One of the important results of my visit, I trust, will be a
report of a medical survey made of the natives in Haines and Kluckwan.
A number of estimates of the amount of tubercular and other infectious
diseases among these people have been made, but, so far as my knowledge
goes, no careful, exhaustive, complete medical survey of any one village
has ever been made, or put into suitable form for presentation. I fear
that this will disclose a most appalling condition (unless it should
prove that the estimates hitherto available have been very carelessly
made). Whatever it may show, I feel sure that it will help us in
presenting to the United States Government the medical needs of these
people in such a way as to compel the serious attention of Congress,
and result in an appropriation annually for the introduction of such
sanitary measures throughout Alaska as will eventually eradicate the
dreadful source of contagion now existing.
"It seems almost inconceivable that while so much has been done for
the Indians of the plains, for the people of the Philippine Islands
and for Porto Rico, in the way of sanitation, these natives who have
been wards of the nation for forty-seven years should have been almost
entirely neglected in this respect. According to the information
which I have, there is not a single government hospital in all Alaska,
and only one hospital of any kind--our own at Haines--that is being
maintained for the benefit of the natives; nor are there any homes
for the aged, the incurables, or orphans, though these are sadly
needed. While the church has been ministering to their spiritual
needs, and the government and church together have been supplying
educational facilities, all agencies have failed to meet the
fundamental problem of physical regeneration.
"The question may be asked, as, indeed, it has been, 'What is the
use of attempting to save a dying race?' and secondly, 'Can the
race be saved?' I have little patience with Christian men and women
who ask the first question, but shall reply most emphatically that
on commercial grounds alone we should save these people. They ought
to become a very valuable asset in the new economic development of
the entire territory of Alaska. When properly trained and disciplined
they make excellent workmen. Their natural adaptation to the climatic
conditions should prove a valuable commercial asset. In the name of a
common humanity; in the name of the gospel of the brotherhood of man,
as well as for commercial reasons, I do not hesitate to say that they
should be saved.
"Can they be regenerated physically? Possibly not as a race; but
as individuals without hesitation I answer in the affirmative. The
introduction of proper sanitary measures by the government; the
development of educational systems by both church and state; and
the ministry of spiritual advisers working hand in hand, would
form a combination of agencies that in ten years would completely
transform, rebuild and place on the sure road to health and
prosperity, this people." [Footnote: Rev. M. C. Allaben, Woman's
Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.]
* * * * *
The mountain made a steep descent to the road except for one shelving
bit of level ground upon which rested, as if it had alighted there,
a one-room cabin, for which an end of a tree trunk served as a
doorstep. A loosely-hung wooden door provided the only light by day,
except that given by the flickering of the flames from the burning
logs on the old open fireplace.
On a big bed in the corner, the only one the home afforded, lay a
little baby girl, burning with fever. Over her bent her young
mother, widowed, though still in her early twenties.
Pretty fair-haired children of two and four years of age crouched
in sleepy misery on the foot of the bed, sharing in their childish
way their mother's anxiety.
An older girl of six, pretty, but already womanly in her busy
household ways, heaped another log on the fire and hovered over it
for warmth. She was barefoot and, like the others of the household,
including the sick baby, wore the scanty day-time clothing, having
no other, for they were of the very poor of the mountains.
It was the lonely, desolate hour between midnight and morning. The
watchers in the cabin listened intently for the sound of hoof-beats
which would mean that the Mission nurse had been home when the
summons came, and would soon be with them.
Hark! Yes!--through the night came the beat, beat of the hoofs of
old "Bess" as she struck the road in a swift steady trot.
Emma, the oldest girl, is down in the darkness at the road to meet
the beloved nurse and help her dismount. She holds the lantern while
the saddle-bags are swung off and old "Bess" is blanketed and tethered.
As she enters the cabin Miss M---- goes immediately to the bed,
and holding the lantern for light, examines her little patient and
finds a bad case of pneumonia. The Mission hospital is not yet
completed, and there is no doctor within many miles. She must fight
alone for the little life.