Introduction

Summary

“What do you mean ‘no room’? If you want to [admit me] badly enough you'll find a place.” This was the complaint of a Jewish immigrant to the superintendent of Mount Moriah Hospital in New York's lower East Side in 1909. Mount Moriah was a “penny hospital,” supported by the “pennies” of working people who were members of the Galicia-Bokovina League, a society of Eastern European Jewish workers who had emigrated to the United States in the preceding decades. In this particular hospital the superintendent himself felt “upset that … many applicants [were] rejected for lack of space,” because he understood that people who lived in cramped quarters would find it difficult to accept being turned away from a hospital for such a reason. “I have five children and three boarders in the same four rooms,” remarked one applicant for admission. If space is tight in the hospital, the patient argued, the superintendent should “push the beds together and squeeze in another.”

Mount Moriah was an extremely small hospital cramped between “two adjoining tenements” and supported by the local immigrant working-class community to care for its own members. Because the administration was informal and there was relatively little hierarchy in its social relationships, patients felt confident that the superintendent would take their complaints seriously. Whereas patient care in other institutions sometimes seemed harsh and cruel, Mount Moriah's administrators had a personal relationship with their patients.