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Irish
Contents
Irish Immigration to New York City >The
Irish at 97 Orchard Street > 19th
Century Dublin > Irish Immigrants
in the Workplace > Irish Immigrants
and the Catholic Church in America > Tammany
Hall and Irish Political Participation > Irish
Nationalism > Irish Fraternal and County Organizations >
19th Century Health Care and the Immigrant Irish > The Irish Wake
19th Century Health Care and the Immigrant
Irish
Health care, and the way we conceive of it in a contemporary manner,
was not available to the majority of Americans until well into the
twentieth century. Employers did not provide medical benefits to
their employees. When employers did offer support to the medical
community, it was in a circuitous way. Hospitals appealed to industrialists
to philanthropically support medical facilities so that they would
be supplied with a healthier and more productive workforce.1
If an Irish immigrant needed medical treatment, they would have
gone to one of the City's public hospitals. In the eyes of wealthier,
native-born New Yorkers, hospitals doubled as almshouses. This view
was perpetuated by a number of prevailing social beliefs of the
time, the two foremost being that any respectable native-born American
could hire a private physician, and illness, like poverty, was a
result of an immoral and intemperate life. Consequently, many affluent
New Yorkers believed that hospitals were where the poor went to
die and exercised their means to receive treatment in their own
homes. Because philanthropists sought to help the "worthy,"
not the "unworthy" poor, hospitals encountered extreme
difficulty in repudiating this perception to wealthy patrons, whose
support they required.2
Looking at admissions to Bellevue Hospital in 1866, of 7,111 new
patients, 3,705 (52%) were Irish. Since the native-born Protestants
who administered the hospitals viewed Catholicism and Irish moral
inferiority as the root of illnesses, doctors and nurses attempted
to impose native-born piety on patients. Some hospitals carried
this illogical perception to its seemingly logical extreme by attempting
to segregate mentally ill immigrant patients from native-born, since
the two groups required different forms of treatment. In public
hospitals, Protestants proselytized their religion to their captive
audience while simultaneously barring priests from visiting with
patients.3
As early as 1830 there were calls among New York's Irish community
for the creation of a Catholic hospital. In 1847, during the midst
of a cholera epidemic, Bishop John Hughes published a letter denouncing
the work of Protestant clergy in trying to convert Irish patients.
A year later, Ellen Duffy, a poor Irish immigrant living in the
Five Points' House of Industry, which was supposedly a nonsectarian
institutions, came forth claiming that the an assistant manager
had denied admittance to her priest George McCloskey while she was
ill. Responding to incidents such as this, St.Vincent's Hospital
opened in 1849.4
St. Vincent's was managed by the Sisters of Charity, an order with
a long history of medical care. In 1865, another Catholic hospital,
St. Francis's, opened on the Lower East Side to serve the German-speaking
population of Kleindeutschland. Although nuns administered both
institutions, they were open to patients from all religious backgrounds.
By 1885, there were 154 Catholic hospitals in the United States
- more than the number of total hospitals that were operating in
1865. To help combat the stigma many felt about hospitals, St. Vincent's
charged a nominal fee to patients, who preferred to pay a small
amount of money than to being perceived as charity cases. Nevertheless,
despite the availability of a hospital designed to cater to the
Irish-Catholic community, many immigrants still refused to seek
medical care outside their homes. In addition, to assuage the fears
of wealthy and poor residents alike, most hospitals were located
in remote, isolated areas of the city that made it difficult for
immigrants to access them conveniently. Finally, prior to their
arrival in the United States, the vast majority of Irish immigrants
would have never been to a physician, excepting perhaps the check-up
they received to determine whether they were healthy for passage
across the Atlantic. Living in Ireland, they would have relied on
folk remedies and the care of family members and neighbors, further
fueling their suspicion of hospitals and outsider care.5
1 Allen M. Kraut, "Illness and
Medical Care Among Immigrants in Antebellum New York," in Ronald
Bayor and Timothy Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Charles E. Rosenberg, The
Care of Strangers: The Rise of America's Hospital Station (New
York: Basic Books, 1987).
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
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