HOSPITALS Like many of its patients, Boston City Hospital is old, impoverished and badly in need of rehabilitation. Paint peels from sagging walls. Windows are smashed throughout the complex of 34 buildings, and the heating system is so antiquated that some wards must be shut down entirely in winter because the temperature cannot be pushed above 40°. The ill-ventilated, six-story maternity wing, where 3,500 babies are born each year, does not have a single bath or shower. Sighs Staff Physician William V. McDermott: "This is a hell of a way to run a hospital."
The hospital's patient services are as inadequate as its plant. Nurses and aides are in such short supply that the gravely ill sometimes die unnoticed and unattended; fragile premature babies have missed crucial feedings. Surgery patients must wait as long as two months until operating facilities become available. In some minor cases, doctors are known to have used instruments that were just dipped in rusty sinks. On a typical Saturday, the hospital treats 500 emergency patients—nearly twice as many as all of Boston's other hospitals combined—but its scandalous state is so well known to ghetto dwellers that they use almost any excuse to get sent to some other hospital.
Clinical Details. Complaints are beginning to be voiced by the hospital's own staff. Last year interns and resident physicians became so disgruntled with their working conditions and their pay ($3,600 a year for interns and $7,500 for top residents) that they went to the unusual extreme of staging a "heal-in"—admitting far more patients than the hospital could handle. More recently, the bacteriology labs became so overloaded that they had to suspend all diagnostic services to outpatient and emergency wards. Last month, after weeks of long hours and double shifts, the badly undermanned X-ray staff simply quit work on a busy weekend and went home. That was more than the hospital's 27 hardened chief physicians and surgeons could endure. Despite their professional aversion to notoriety, they gave Boston newspapers full, clinical details of the hospital's chronic condition —a move calculated to arouse the conscience of city hall and of the entire community.
The decline of few other institutions could have wounded Boston's civic pride more. In the 1930s, during Mayor James Curley's heyday, Boston City was considered one of the nation's finest municipal hospitals. Curley kept it well staffed, often with his supporters, and made sure Boston's Irish got medical care "second to none." It still ranks as a first-rate research center, as a result of its affiliations with the Harvard, Tufts and Boston University medical schools, but that hardly helps patients with ordinary ailments.