Hospitals In The 19th Century

In the world today, people go to hospitals when they are in times of physical or mental need. People consider hospitals to be places of asylum because they are safe and have a reputation of giving both medically and technologically advanced care. Unfortunately though, hospitals were not always like this. Before we had the accessibility to state of the art medical products like vaccines and antibiotics, hospitals were not always safe. They used to be places where all the sick would get forcibly put together so they couldn’t continue to infect the healthy population. It wasn’t until the turn of the twentieth century that hospitals began to make a large difference in helping people in need. Once considered places of death and disease, as time

In the beginning, hospitals were not what people today would consider hospitals. Instead, they would be considered to be more of a healing shrine where priests would use religious healing to help the sick and wounded (Porter, 135). The first real hospitals were erected in the medieval age (between the fifth and sixteenth centuries). They were generally very small, on average only about 10-12 beds. During this time period, there was still very little medicine to provide assistance to the old and sick, so the hospital's main purpose was to allow people to confess their sins to a priest and then die in a state of grace (Porter 136). People were scared of these early hospitals because going to them meant almost certain death. In addition, “Leper Asylums” were created to quarantine the sick people so they couldn’t

Surgery, which often led to death, became much more intricate, prevalent, and reliable in saving people's lives. Inventions like the Iron Lung (created in 1930) and the dialysis machine (1940) saved people who suffered from diseases like polio (Porter, 148). In addition, arguably the most important invention, the electron microscope, was created in 1926. Its existence allowed humans to view bacteria and other small organisms with great detail and learn a lot about them (Porter, 149). It was also in this time that the first ambulances, blood transfusions, and instances of life support became available to the public. With all these new inventions, and the increased rate of survival in hospitals, many people began to see hospitals in a new light. Many who had initially been scared of them were now hopeful of them and their existence. Robert Morris, one of the founding fathers of the United States said, “One of the very greatest changes that I have observed… has been in the attitude of the public towards hospitals. Dread of them was general and well founded before the days of antiseptic surgery. But with its widespread adoption, fear faded rapidly from the lay mind…” (Porter, 148). A lot of this success could be attributed to the increase of cost in medicine. In one year, almost sixty five percent of the United States budget went to the