Double Bed Charity

In its 200-year-old, vast and grubby Charity Hospital New Orleans has a medical ulcer which long has pained the local medical profession. Last year Louisiana's Governor Richard Webster Leche secured $3,600,000 from the Public Works Administration and Charity's new director Dr. George Samuel Bel immediately started tearing down old buildings to make room for a 20-story hospital, the only State institution where Louisiana citizens may get all types of free medical care. While reconstruction progressed, patients had to be bedded in any available shelter. For Charity's Negroes, the old Negro Pythian Temple proved handiest.

That makeshift ward recently became a subject of scandal when Editor Morris Fishbein of the American Medical Association threatened to bring it to the attention of "the medical profession and the people of America." On a visit to it he had found 27 patients using ten three-quarter beds (two resting and one waiting his turn), and men and women suffering from tuberculosis and other contagious diseases placed near children of six and seven years.

Last week Director Bel decided he might as well publicize the conditions in his hospital as let others do so. In a statement, remarkable in Louisiana where doctors in public office have had to mind their tongues, Dr. Bel, a heart specialist who has been Charity's director since early in 1936, declared: "I have attempted in every way possible to at least ameliorate the frightful conditions surrounding the hospitalization of patients. My efforts, I believe, have been somewhat successful. The ratio of patients to beds used to be 1.7. It is now 1.2. But, in spite of this, much remains to be done in order to remedy a situation which undoubtedly has no parallel in the medical annals of America. . . .

"When completed the new [20-story, 2,500-bed] Hospital will only be able to provide adequate hospitalization for persons acutely ill from conditions other than infectious and contagious diseases. The new construction will not remedy the appalling and well-nigh unbelievable conditions existing insofar as tuberculosis, neuropsychiatric conditions, infectious and contagious diseases, incurable and convalescent patients are concerned. . .. Medical and social agencies estimate the num-ber of open tuberculosis patients in New Orleans alone as at 2,500. The Charity Hospital now houses 314. There are at least 2,000 chronic and incurable cases of cancer and heart disease who require proper hospitalization. No facilities are now available to these poor, unfortunate sufferers. . . ."

Charity Hospital's present trouble is a direct result of the late Huey Long's insistent attentions to this oldest (founded in 1737)charity hospital in the country. In 1928 Long "captured" the hospital, discharged an experienced director, and put in charge Dr. Arthur Vidrine, 31, a promising graduate of Tulane University who had done post-graduate work in surgery in London, Oxford and Paris hospitals, as well as in Charity Hospital where Tulane and University of Louisiana medi-cal students all get their preliminary practice. In Dr. Vidrine's particular favor for this important post was the fact that he had learned something of business management from his father, a wealthy Evangeline County planter and an early financial friend of Huey Long.

Long also wanted to make young Dr. Vidrine professor of surgery in Tulane, but Tulane's faculty laughed Long out of that University. In revenge Long enlarged the rival medical school of the Uni-versity of Louisiana and made Dr. Vidrine dean there.

To persuade Louisiana voters that orthodox doctors had neglected them and that he & Dr. Vidrine were their saviors, Long strutted all over the State, telling Cajun, Creole, hillbilly and villager to hurry over to New Orleans and get cured. Charity Hospital's admissions jumped from 1,800 to 3,800 patients a day, causing acute overcrowding. The fact that doctors on the staff intrigued against each other to curry Long's favor or to keep out of the range of his vindictiveness made matters worse.

Last year Governor Leche, 39, and a year younger than Dr. Vidrine, sent that able man packing--he is now in private practice in New Orleans. Pathologist Joseph Rigney D'Aunoy became dean of University of Louisiana's Medical School, Cardiologist George Samuel Bel became director of Charity Hospital. And with Dean Charles Cassedy Bass of Tulane's Medical School, these doctors set out to regain for Louisiana a good name in the medical profession.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.