BOOK REVIEWS

Some Account of the Pennsylvania Hos­ the managers had difficulty in raising the pital from Its First Rise to the Begin­ necessary funds, and many methods were ning of the Year 1938. By Francis R. employed for the purpose. During the Packard, m.d. Phila., Engle Press, 1938. stay in Philadelphia of the Hallam The­ Dr. Thomas Bond conceived the idea ater Company of London, a benefit per­ of establishing a hospital in Philadel­ formance was arranged for the hospital, phia,* which in the middle and latter parts despite the fact that the majority of the of the eighteenth century was the most managers belonging to the Society of important city in the Colonies. And just Friends were opposed to theatrical per­ as in Boston at a later day nothing could formances and had protested the erection be carried through without the support of a theater on Society Hill, where the of Lemuel Shaw, so in Philadelphia for plays were given. The benefit performance nearly seventy years no enterprise could was arranged by one of Managers, Evan succeed if it did not have the approval of Morgan, who was an Episcopalian. At any Benjamin Franklin. Franklin at once saw rate, the managers accepted the £47, 2s. the wisdom of Bond’s proposal and put fid. of tainted money produced by the his whole energy into the undertaking. benefit performance of Hamlet. Even after he had gone to England he The foregoing is a brief excerpt from kept the hospital in mind and interested the interesting history of the Pennsyl­ John Fothergill in it. Fothergill, a mem­ vania Hospital prepared by Dr. Francis ber of the Society of Friends, as were R. Packard. The book, which is beauti­ nearly all the managers of the hospital, fully printed, contains an account of the sent over a collection of paintings, which part played by the hospital throughout the hospital still possesses and cherishes. the nearly 200 years of its existence. It Their cost to Dr. Fothergill was about served the country in every one of the 200 guineas. wars in which the United States was en­ The Board of Managers in looking for gaged, including the Revolutionary War. a site requested Lieutenant-Governor The list of physicians and surgeons con­ Hamilton to intercede for them with the nected with the hospital in its long his­ Proprietaries, the Penn family, absentee tory is a roster of the great men in landlords. Hamilton, however, deceived medicine in this country. Beginning with the Board of Managers. To their faces Thomas Bond, the first clinical lecturer he promised to use his influence with the in this country, we have John Morgan, Penns, but behind their backs he wrote the founder of the University of Penn­ letters directly the opposite. Little did he sylvania, William Shippen, Jr., Benjamin think that these damning letters would Rush, Philip Syng Physick, the father of some day come back to this country. American surgery, John Syng Dorsey (of The hospital was founded in 1751. Its whom the witty Chapman said that his first building was erected in 1755 and still immortality was assured through the mus­ stands on the old site. In the beginning cle latissimus dorsi), John C. Otto, W. W. * The first hospital on this continent was Gerhard, George B. Wood, Benjamin founded in Mexico in 1524, the next in Can­ Dewees, three generations of Meigses, ada in 1639, the next on Manhattan Island Thomas G. Morton, D. Hays Agnew, in 1663, the last no longer existing. John H. Packard, Francis Stewart, R. G. LeConte, William Pepper, J. M. Da Costa, Thomas McCrae, and many more. Not only because the Pennsylvania Hospital is the first hospital in this coun­ try, but also because of the important part it has played in the history of Amer­ ican medicine Dr. Packard’s account will be of interest to physicians and educated laymen throughout the land.

David Riesman