HAVE
JEWISH
HOSPITALS
OUTLIVED
THEIR
PURPOSE?
Some say they are no longer
"ours." Others contend that
doesn't matter
moi• ■•■
ROBERT KANIGEL
Special to The Jewish News
22
Friday, February 27, 1987
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
S
he was the daughter of the
Great Man, the first president
of Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, the very personifi-
cation of that city's elite estab-
lishment. Her name was Elisabeth Gil-
man and, a few days before, she'd received
a letter from the distraught mother of a
Jewish undergraduate at Hopkins.
The boy had been advised, according
to his mother, that Jews "need not delude
themselves into thinking that they can be
admitted into the Hopkins Medical
School" — then, as now, among the most
distinguished in the country. Miss Gilman
wrote its dean: "I have of course known
that the Medical School only receives a
quota of Jewish boys." But as to just how
large it was, she had no idea. Would the
dean be so kind as to acquaint her with the
school's position on the matter?
Two days later came his reply, deny-
ing the existence of an "official" quota. Of
course, he added, "the choice of students to
be admitted is based not on scholastic re-
cord alone but on other qualifications, of
which the personal factor is an important
one . . ."
That was in December 1935. And offi-
cial or unofficial, voiced or not, quotas
were a fact of life for Jews growing up then;
decades later the word alone would be
enough to trigger anger in many of them.
In New York, around this time, Julius
Axelrod, the son of an immigrant basket-
maker and a City College graduate,
applied to several medical schools, was
turned down by each, and settled for a job
as a lowly lab technician. "You had to be
outstanding if you were a Jew," he says.
And to the medical school admissions
committees, apparently, the future Nobel
Prize winning researcher was not.
Even if you did manage to get into
medical school, it was hard for a young Jew
to land a residency, the next step in medi-
cal training. "If you were Jewish it was
almost impossible to get into Harper," re-
calls retired physician Max Beitman, one
of the few who did, and one of 248 doctors
on the staff of Sinai of Detroit when it
opened in 1953. "Jewish doctors were hav-
ing problems." As for staff appointments
at the best private hospitals, writes Paul
Starr in The Social Transformation of
American Medicine, most "went to physi-
cians from established families, while
Catholics and Jews were passed over."
Medical school, internships, residencies,
hospital appointments . . . New York, Bos-
ton, Detroit . . . Everywhere the story was
the same: For Jews, the great world of, _`
American medicine was closed. Not closed
shut — just closed enough to make Jews
seek the safe harbor of their own alterna-
tive medical institutions.
Since late in the 19th Century, most
cities with a sizeable Jewish population
had their own Jewish hospitals. The cir-
cumstances leading to their founding dif-
fered in detail, but invariably they were a
response to the plight of poor, sick Jews,
many of them recent immigrants, with no
place to go that would respect them as
Jews. In Boston, what spurred the found-
ing of the Jewish hospital was the dearth
of doctors familiar with the language and
customs of the new immigrants. In New
York, it was a physician's difficulty in
finding a hospital to take one of his Jewish
patients. In Baltimore, it was the lonely
death of a poor Jew far from his brethren.
D
etroit was late among major cities
in having its own Jewish hospi-
tal, but the origins of Sinai go
back decades before its founding and
spring from many of the same forces that
led to the establishment of Jewish hospi-
tals elsewhere. The idea of a Jewish hospi-
tal in Detroit was first broached in 1901,
when the city's Jewish population num-
bered barely 5,000. Two years later, the
first clinic was established. In March 1912,
Orthodox Jews marched down Hastings.
Street with signs bearing the slogan, "Buy
a brick to save the sick"; the march culmi-
nated in a mass meeting at which the He-
brew Hospital Association was organized.
But it would take expansion of the original
clinic, surveys, reports, community de-
bate, the Depression, World War II, and
numerous fund drives before ground on a
36-acre parcel in northwest Detroit was at
last broken on Jan. 14, 1951.
In their early days, Jewish hospitals,
like others, were aimed squarely at the
poor. Most private physcians avoided
them. It was a breach of family self-respect
to allow a relative to wind up in one. In-
deed, 19th Century Jewish hospitals were
not really for 'eus," meaning the Jewish
community as a whole; rather, they were
"ours," the philanthropic property of small
groups of wealthy men, intended for
"them" — the poor. Medical care offered at
one of Sinai of Detroit's predecessors, the
Hannah Schloss Building, was seen as
charity, pure and simple. "If a woman
needed a bucket of coal, or food for the
week, she might also need medical serv-
ices," writes Harry C. Saltzstein in his ac-
count of the hospital's origins.
As an institution, writes Paul Starr,
hospitals may be unique "in having first
been built primarily for the poor and only
later entered in significant numbers and
an entirely different state of mind by the
most respectable classes."
At first, most Jewish hospitals were
primitive affairs. At the time it was dedi-