Boston
City Hospital-
In
my up-coming Victorian, holiday novella, Another Waltz, my hero ends up in a
hospital in Boston. While doing the
research I became engrossed in a fascinating book, A History OF The Boston City Hospital From Its Foundation Until 1904,
by David Williams Cheever, George Washington Gay, Amos Lawrence Mason, Johns
Bapst Blake, Boston City Hospital
Built
to provide comfort and care to the poor patients of the city, construction of Boston
City Hospital was begun in 1861, on Harrison Avenue in the South End of Boston,
north east of Roxbury.
In
the 1830’s a project was begun in which fill was brought in by trains to fill
in a large portion of Boston’s Back Bay and it was on the former Tidal Marsh
that the hospital was built.
The
four buildings of the original group were designed in the French Renaissance
style. The administration building was
an imposing structure of brick, with tall wooden columns, balustrades and
porches with a large dome at the very top, 148 ft. above the street. The first
floor was used for general administrative purposes, with a reception room for
visitors and offices and apartments for the superintendent and trustees. The
second floor contained private rooms for patients and the third floor, flooded
with light from the great dome, was used for operating rooms. Two stairways and
a hand elevator were used to move patients. The basement rooms were 13 ft. high
with another sub basement. These lower stories contained a kitchen, storerooms,
a dispensary, a laboratory, and a dining room for the employees, with rooms for
clerks and stewards.
To
the left and right of the administration building were Pavilion’s I and II. One hundred feet away, they were connected by
a cover colonnade. Each building was 180 ft. X 48 ft. and had three stories
with a basement 3 ½ ft. below the grade of the ground. Pavilion I, the surgical
side, contained Wards, A, B, C, & D, and Pavilion II, the medical side held
Wards, E, F, G, & H.
Because
of the surgical and antiseptic methods of the day, hospital gangrene and
general sepsis were common. In 1866, Pavilion III, known as the “Foul Ward,”
was built where the old Roxbury canal had channeled its sewage into the old
marsh. The main ward was for men and the second story for women.
The
original boiler room was located on Albany Street, parallel with the
Administration building. Steam was generated from three tubular boilers at
thirty pounds of pressure. Steam was carried to a large battery of steam coils,
and fresh air, drawn through a latticed window was forced by a large propulsion
fan 15 ft. in diameter, through a large sub basement conduit. From here the
heated air was distributed by smaller ducts, to the various wards. A secondary system of ducts admitted cold air
and by mixing the valves the correct portion of hot/cold air could be
maintained.
The
problem was that the conduits, which in some places were 10 ft. wide and 12 ft.
high, had too many leaks to properly achieve this. Then rats, which soon burrowed between the
sewers and the imperfectly constructed conduits, caused sewer gas to be mixed
with the heated air and pushed into to the wards. All patients in beds near the
air inlets invariably ended up with septic complications, many of whom died.
Then
because the hospital was built on such a low grade, the flow of tides caused seepage
of ooze into some areas of the buildings.
In
these early days sewage was removed by barrel sewers, but the sluggish flow
caused solids to settle and form deposits that gradually became obstructive.
The
original medical and surgical staff consisted of eighteen members. One third was
consulting physicians and surgeons. The rest were house officers, (interns) who
roomed in various parts of the hospital and were equally divided between the
buildings.
Patients
slept on beds with horse hair mattresses of blue and white striped
ticking. They were covered with a coarse
linen sheet and beige wool blankets. In the wards of the hospital, there were seven
windows on each side of the ward with two beds to each window. It had also been voted that except for
emergency cases, no one could be admitted to the hospital without a
satisfactory character reference.
ANOTHER
WALTZ
Excerpt:
Above
her loomed a wide porch with four Corinthian columns and balustrades. She blew
her runny nose and pushed her spectacles tight to the bridge of her nose. After
stuffing her handkerchief into her coat pocket, she grasped the fabric of her skirt
and carefully limped up each snowy step one at time, eighteen times.
Inside,
the ceiling soared above her head even higher than twelve foot ceilings in
Payton’s house. On either side two large staircases stretched toward the second
floor. A door snapped shut somewhere; the sound echoed through the building.
Across the width
of
the room she spotted a sign over a door of a room marked Visitors. Her heels
clicked loudly against the tile, their cadence out of time. After all these
years, she could still hear the sing-song chants of the girls from boarding
school ringing in her head. “Gimpygirl! Gimpy-girl!”
Even her brother had mimicked their taunts.
“Excuse
me?”
The
woman seated behind the desk raised her head. Her shrewd gaze silently
appraised Madeline from the bonnet which protected her head to the kid gloves
which covered her hands.
Madeline
continued. “I’m looking for a man—”
The
woman interrupted with a quick bark of laughter, flashing rows of crooked,
yellowed teeth. “Dearie, ain’t likely anyone of your quality would be here.”
Madeline
shuddered at the limp strands of salt and pepper hair, which had fallen from
the woman’s bun to frame her face and sagging throat. The fingernails of her
hands, as they dealt a game of solitaire, were rimmed with black.
Adjusting
her spectacles Madeline repeated her question. “Do you have a patient here by
the name of Sean MacAuley?”
“An
Irishman, eh? Well, we got lots a them here, but none by that name.”
Madeline
glanced beyond the desk, to the file cabinets, tables, and shelves, stacked
with ledgers and piles of papers. How could this person remember the name of
every patient?
“Could
you please check your records? He would have been admitted the night before
last.”
The
matron heaved a sigh, which strained the bosom of her too-tight blouse, as she
half-heartedly sifted through the piles of papers littering her desk. After a
couple of minutes, she looked up and shook her head.
Madeline’s
shoulder’s drooped. Where else could he be? This had to be the right hospital.
Unless he’d gone back to where he’d been staying. With all the hotels in the
city, it would be like hunting for a needle in a haystack. Maybe she should
just forget the whole idea and let him go.
“There
was a man—” the woman added, startling Madeline from her musing. “—the police
brought him in. Don’t know his name.” The wooden chair creaked under her cumbersome
weight as she flipped open the book beside her. “He was listed as an accident
patient. That would put him in North Pavilion,” she pointed toward a side door
on the right.
Madeline
murmured her thanks and once outside walked beneath the covered colonnade,
which spanned the curved distance between the administration building and the
entrance to the Pavilion.
Once
inside, the nurse in Ward A informed her that the beds were filled to capacity,
but some of the male patients were being tended to in the basement, and Sean
might be with them.
Stale
sweat, urine, and vomit blended together with an assortment of noxious odors,
forcing
Madeline
to swallow an urge to gag.
Though
less than half of the wall was actually below ground level, she still wondered
how these poor souls could survive in such damp conditions. The nurse on duty indicated
the bed at the end of the row as the one, which held the nameless patient.
As
she started down the wide aisle separating about twenty beds, for the first
time she prayed that Sean wouldn’t be here. She pictured him on a train, heading
back to Texas, his wide grin in place as he seemingly laughed at the world like
it was all some secret joke.
She
passed through a pocket of cold air, into a wave of heat blowing from a large
ventilation duct, then shivered as she moved back into the cold. A few more
steps and she was forced to detour around a pile of soiled linens and dirty
bandages which littered the aisle like flotsam in a stream, all while
maintaining her focus on that last bed. She glanced around, certain every eye was
on her as she limped through the ward, relieved to find most of the men were
either asleep or watching her with vacant eyes.
As
she came to a stop at the end of the iron bed, a gasp that was part relief and
part horror escaped her lips. For although she was relieved to have finally found
the man, who, until Thursday night had been known to her as James Sullivan, she
barely recognized the battered visage of the man sleeping restlessly before
her.
Another
Waltz is scheduled for release October 10th from The Wild Rose Press.
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