|
|
|
Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Alan M. Kraut and Deborah A. Kraut. Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel Hospital and the Jewish Hospital in America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 2007. Pp. vii, 304. $37.95.
|
| This volume by Alan M. Kraut and Deborah A. Kraut is a finely crafted, comprehensive study of Newark Beth Israel Hospital, known as the Beth, from its 1902 immigrant beginnings, through its growth and expansion as a major component of an urban health care system, to, ultimately, its 1996 absorption within an expanding regional medical conglomerate. |
1
|
|
Commissioned as a tribute, the study takes an institutional focus, but places it within the larger context of the development of the Jewish hospital in the United States. The context, however, is even broader, since the dramas played out in the long history of the Beth continually provide illustration for such twentieth-century developments as the expansion and professionalization of health care, the rise and decline of the urban center, and the assimilation of Jewish immigrants. Concise, chronological chapters follow the saga of the Beth and its stages of growth from a charitable institution to a business enterprise, including the various crises and challenges, the pioneers and heroes, the internal power struggles, and the continuous expansion of facilities and services. |
2
|
|
By 1900, the foreign-born population of Newark numbered 70,000, or thirty percent of the city's total population. A wave of 45,000 recent arrivals from Eastern Europe had joined the prosperous German Jewish community that had settled in Newark beginning in 1850. Four charitable hospitals served the city: two Catholic, one Episcopalian, and one German. Another city hospital was designated for African Americans and indigent Jews. Poor diet; unsanitary and unsafe housing; dangerous work conditions; and infectious illness including polio, tuberculosis, and influenza were the reality for all urban immigrants. But the health needs of the Jewish community were magnified in an era of overt discrimination, when Jews and other southern and eastern Europeans were seen as members of in-between races, not quite black perhaps, but certainly not white. |
3
|
|
At the critical moments of illness or near death, people wanted to be in familiar surroundings, where caregivers spoke their language, and where dietary restrictions and religious customs were respected. Along with other philanthropic efforts, German Jewish elites were eager to assist newcomers, and the Beth grew out of the same tradition as the establishment of orphanages and burial societies. A coalition of existing Hebrew organizations, including a woman's service group, which purchased a large mansion as a hospital site, and a group of physicians, who had formed a dispensary, pooled their efforts, becoming the Beth Israel Hospital Society, and in 1902 they opened a twenty-eight-bed nonsectarian hospital, an astonishing accomplishment that attested to the community's influence and economic strength. |
4
|
|
From its inception, and as David Rosner has pointed out, hospitals like the Beth made internal class distinctions, with wards for the poor and working classes, and private and semiprivate pavilions for the middle and upper classes, mirroring the class distinctions already present in urban Jewish communities like Newark's. They were riding the wave of discoveries and techniques that for the first time were providing surgical solutions to medical problems, making hospitals places where cures were possible. |
. . . |
There are about 485 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
