Colorado's Healthcare Heritage: A Chronology of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume One — 1800-1899

Colorado’s Healthcare Heritage

A Chronology of the

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Volume One — 1800-1899

Tom Sherlock

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Colorado’s Healthcare Heritage

A Chronology of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Volume One — 1800-1899

Copyright © 2013 by Thomas J. Sherlock.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-8025-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8026-4 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 04/09/2013

Cover photo: Sisters of Mercy from St. Nicholas Hospital walking along Bennett Avenue in Cripple Creek during the late 1890s. St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church and St. Nicholas Hospital are at top left—above and behind the dark building with the Van Camp’s Pork and Beans sign. Cripple Creek received service from the Colorado Telephone Company beginning in 1894.

Photo courtesy of the Cripple Creek District Museum, Cripple Creek, Colorado, and the Sisters of Mercy Archives, Omaha, Nebraska

Contents

Dedication

Preface

About This Chronology

Acknowledgements

This Book’s Website

1799—The End of an Era

1800-1853—The Louisiana Purchase

1800

1801

1802

1803

1804

1805

1806

1807

1808

1809

1810

1811

1812

1813

1814

1815

1816

1817

1818

1819

1820

1821

1822

1823

1824

1825

1826

1827

1828

1829

1830

1831

1832

1833

1834

1835

1836

1837

1838

1839

1840

1841

1842

1843

1844

1845

1846

1847

1848

1849

1850

1851

1852

1853

1854-1860—The Kansas Territory and Pike’s Peak or Bust!

1854

1855

1856

1857

1858

1859

1860

1861-1875—The Colorado Territory

1861

1862

1863

1864

1865

1866

1867

1868

1869

1870

1871

1872

1873

1874

1875

1876-1889—Creating the State of Colorado

1876

1877

1878

1879

1880

1881

1882

1883

1884

1885

1886

1887

1888

1889

1890-1899—Populists, Progressives, and the Silver Crisis

1890

1891

1892

1893

1894

1895

1896

1897

1898

1899

Roman Catholic Sisters’ Healthcare Legacy in Colorado

Colorado’s Hospitals—1860-1899

Colorado’s Medical Schools—1881-1899

Colorado’s Medical Societies—1860-1899

Nineteenth-Century Presidents of the Colorado Medical Society

Nineteenth-Century Presidents of the Denver Medical Society

Colorado and Tuberculosis

Panics, Recessions, and Depressions in the Nineteenth Century

Bibliography—Colorado

History of Healthcare and Medicine in Colorado

History of Colorado’s Healthcare Institutions

Catholic Sisters’ Contributions to Healthcare

Colorado’s Jewish Healthcare Leaders and Institutions

History of Colorado’s Women Physicians

History of Nursing in Colorado

Colorado’s Medical Periodicals

Colorado’s Medical Schools

History of Colorado’s Hospital Conversion Foundations

History of Colorado

History of Colorado’s Railroads

Bibliography—General

History of Healthcare and Medicine

History of Women in Medicine

History of Nursing

History of Hospitals

History of Medical Education

History of Health Insurance

History of Healthcare Reform

History of HMOs and Kaiser Permanente

Issues and Themes

Dedication

For My Family

Francis Sherlock and Mary Kinney Sherlock

—and—

Henry Carter Brown

Cleo Ezell Seamans and Charles Seamans

My Grandparents

Frank J. Sherlock and Cleo Brown Sherlock

My Parents

James C. Sherlock and Georgia Sherlock

My Brother and Sister-in-Law

Joanne Gallagher Sherlock

My Late Sister-in-Law

Brendan F. Sherlock

Aidan Sherlock

Riley Sherlock

My Nephew and His Sons

Kieran S. Poulos and Christopher Poulos

Cullen Poulos

Carson Poulos

My Niece and Her Family

—and—

Shane

My Cocker Spaniel

Preface

. . . my conception of the first duty of history [is] to ensure that merit shall not lack its record…

Tacitus (56-117), Annals, Book III

In the early days on the Colorado frontier, neighbors took care of neighbors because accepting that we’re all in this together was the only realistic survival strategy—on the high plains, along the Front Range, in the mountain towns, and on the Western Slope.

As dangerous occupations including mining and railroad construction became fundamental to Colorado’s nineteenth-century economy, families and neighbors could no longer meet the need for healthcare. For that reason—and because people with tuberculosis began moving to Colorado later in the century—physicians, surgeons, nurses, Roman Catholic Sisters, Reform and Orthodox Jews, Swedish Protestants, German Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Reformed, Adventists, Mennonites, and others began establishing hospitals and sanatoriums in Colorado. Those pioneers and the communities they served created our humanitarian healthcare tradition.

Sisters came to us from their hospitals in Cincinnati, Leavenworth, St. Louis, and other points east. Many physicians and surgeons who came to Colorado after the Civil War had served in the Union or the Confederate army. Nevertheless, those Yankees and Rebels quickly began to collaborate to build the healthcare system the Colorado Territory and then the State of Colorado needed.

Many of those Colorado healthcare pioneers considered it their duty to serve everyone who came to them, without regard for social status, place of employment, or ability to pay. Their focus was on initiatives by and for their local communities. It wouldn’t have occurred to them to ask for state or federal government funding, and there were, of course, no insurance companies, foundations, or hospital corporations.

Fully aware that they were on their own, and as the need for and acceptance of hospital care gradually grew, they and their local communities were free to create the healthcare infrastructure they needed in each town and region.

Our healthcare pioneers—a significant number of whom were first-generation immigrants from Europe—accomplished what they did because grateful local Colorado communities strongly supported their unselfish private-sector initiatives. They embraced Colorado’s frontier tradition of neighborliness, determined where their professional skills were most needed, and then did whatever it took to provide healthcare to everyone who came to them. They never let obstacles, skeptics, bigots, or the powerful hold them back, and the word impossible wasn’t in their vocabulary.

Because they were smart, optimistic, compassionate, imaginative, and determined, Colorado’s healthcare pioneers were able to create the humanitarian ethos and the patient-centered healthcare delivery system that we’ve inherited. For nearly three-quarters of a century after Colorado became a state, healthcare providers didn’t have to concern themselves with much else beyond providing healthcare as best they could with the resources they had at their disposal. They expanded their facilities as needed, to whatever extent community resources permitted.

Before World War II, communities that wanted well-staffed and well-equipped hospitals found their own ways to pay for them. The transformation of nineteenth-century community hospitals into modern medical facilities was a gradual process that took place during nearly all of the twentieth century, but only became fully evident to most of the general public during and after the 1950s.

Beginning in 1860, Colorado’s healthcare pioneers, working in their local communities across the state, created the infrastructure we’ve inherited. Nineteenth—and twentieth-century physicians, surgeons, nurses, Roman Catholic Sisters, hospital administrators, community organizers, bishops, pastors, rabbis, missionaries, and concerned citizens collaborated for the common good with less concern about ethnic, religious, political, and philosophical differences than might have been expected. That didn’t begin to change significantly until the years leading up to the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan took over in Colorado for a few years. Already in 1866, an Episcopal bishop was able to write that, in Colorado,

The people here have come hither from almost every state in the Union. They have severed old ties, and in many instances, former religious associations. Most of them have left behind not a little of prejudices, which bound them to certain systems, and made them hostile to others which they knew nothing about.¹

A majority of our early healthcare leaders arrived in Colorado with a mission and a sense of duty—and some of them from a tradition of noblesse oblige—all of which included a fundamental commitment to the common good. Particularly after the Civil War, Colorado became home to physicians and other men and women from New England, the Middle Atlantic States, and the Midwest who had been raised with traditional Yankee community values.

In June 2012, Sara Robinson wrote about how those traditional values worked out in practice.

In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).

Individuals were expected to balance their personal needs and desires against the greater good of the collective—and, occasionally, to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. (This is why the Puritan wealthy tended to dutifully pay their taxes, tithe in their churches and donate generously to create hospitals, parks and universities.)

In return, the community had a solemn and inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy—the kind of support that maximizes each person’s liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself.²

Sara Robinson demonstrates how Southern plantation values have once again reasserted themselves in American politics, and she shows that we’ll be much better off when we re-embrace traditional Yankee community values.

The Yankee Puritan ethic flourished in Colorado because it was fully consistent with the religious beliefs of Colorado’s Roman Catholic Sisters, Reformed and Orthodox Jews, and Protestants of all traditions. That noble moral imperative that led so many to believe that wealth brings with it power that must be used for the good of the community survives in the hearts and minds of more than a few Coloradans.

Colorado’s healthcare heritage is to a great extent a story about women. During Colorado’s early pioneer days, domestic medicine provided by women was about all that was available. As hospitals began to become available, two issues remained—illness and injuries had long been considered private matters, and for a long time hospitals were thought to be sources of infection and other complicating factors. As we’ll see, there were many young working men in Colorado during the early days who had no family here, so the matter of keeping the need for healthcare a private matter was not an option.

Catholic Sisters and other women may have increased the confidence in hospitals by continuing the familiar role of women in healthcare. By the end of the nineteenth century in Colorado, Sisters, nurses and women physicians had shown conclusively, by the way, that sympathy and science aren’t alternatives—they’re the twin components of patient-centered professional care.

Women founded many of Colorado’s hospitals, or largely took them over after men did the groundwork. Women directed and staffed many of Colorado’s healthcare institutions. Prominent Colorado women led fundraising campaigns, served on boards, and supported male healthcare leaders in essential ways. Nearly every hospital was supported by women who volunteered to do the things that made it possible for that institution to exist. They cooked, cleaned, assisted with patient care, volunteered in a dozen or more administrative and support roles, and took to the streets and rails to raise funds to make up for budget deficiencies.

Women are still prominent in twenty-first-century healthcare, of course, but during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were numerous differences in what women did and in the obstacles they faced. Getting to know these women—sometimes by name, more often only in terms of the services they happily provided—is a gift, and it’s a privilege to help preserve their legacy.

We can introduce the history of healthcare in Colorado by mentioning six of many inspiring women who deserve to be on the list of those who founded our state’s original humanitarian healthcare tradition—in chronological order, Mrs. Frances Jacobs, Sister Joanna Bruner, Mother Baptist Meyers, Sister Huberta Duennebacke, Dr. Justina Ford, and Dr. Florence Sabin.

These six women brought healthcare to Coloradans during the period from the 1870s to the 1950s. They saw things that needed to be done, and they did them without worrying all that much about the formidable obstacles. Not one of them had to think about insurance companies or hospital or pharmaceutical corporations, and only Dr. Sabin had to deal with government officials to any great extent. Mrs. Jacobs, Sister Joanna, Mother Baptist, Sister Huberta, Dr. Ford, and Dr. Sabin were by no means the only women who created our humanitarian tradition, and there’s a long list of male physicians, surgeons, and healthcare administrators from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who will be celebrated both in this volume and in the volumes on the twentieth century.

Mrs. Jacobs and the Sisters focused on the needs of people who couldn’t pay, and the communities they served found financing strategies that worked in their time and their place. When the financing of all or part of a local healthcare-service delivery system by government and corporations isn’t an option, communities are free to do what’s best for themselves—without government control or corporate expectations.

These women demonstrated that when there is a need and the will to meet that need, intelligent creative people who are not constrained by assumptions can always find a way. Their example can inspire twenty-first-century healthcare decision-makers to find answers to the pressing questions about who will provide healthcare to people who are poor or struggling, and how those healthcare facilities and services can be financed.

These women remind us what a dedicated leader can accomplish when she enlists the support of her colleagues and her local community—even when that community is in the Wild West, traditionally considered to have been populated by rugged individuals.³

The Example of Frances Wisebart Jacobs (1843-1892)

Beginning in the early 1870s, Frances Jacobs cared not only for tuberculosis patients in Denver’s tenement houses, but also for homeless people with tuberculosis down by the Platte River and out on West Colfax. She sometimes brought physicians to treat them, and she gave them soup, clothing, soap, and coal. She didn’t hesitate to take care of people who collapsed in the streets, hemorrhaging from tuberculosis.

Frances Jacobs took traditional Colorado neighborliness to a completely new level by seeking out Denver’s most neglected residents in the roughest parts of town. She was a community organizer and the Mother of Denver charities, but she was also very much a hands-on caregiver.

In 1890, Frances Wisebart Jacobs—by then a longtime caregiver and advocate for people with tuberculosis and promoter of the idea of a free hospital for poor people with the disease—collaborated with Rabbi William Sterne Friedman of Denver’s Temple Emanuel to found the Jewish Hospital Association of Colorado.

After Frances Jacobs’ premature death in 1892, Rabbi Friedman and his colleagues opened National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives in 1899. Then Charles Spivak, MD, opened the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society sanatorium on West Colfax in 1904.

Both institutions followed the philosophy preached incessantly by Mrs. Jacobs—they didn’t charge anyone, because there were still so many people in Denver who were in critical need of healthcare that they couldn’t possibly afford. They therefore created funding strategies that weren’t dependent on how much money their patients had. The importance of creative thinking about financing healthcare is one of the most important legacies we’ve received from Colorado’s healthcare pioneers.

Like Frances Jacobs, Rabbi Friedman and Dr. Spivak focused on the needs of the individual patient. Mrs. Jacobs had shown them that the poor was not a demographic classification. The poor were individual men and women whose options were so limited that they had to depend on the community. Traditional Jewish values reinforced the traditional Yankee community values—and the teachings of Jesus—that were already strong in the hearts and minds of many of Colorado’s healthcare pioneers.

After her death, the Denver Medical Times (November 1892), under the heading Mrs. Frances Jacobs, published this:

Mrs. Jacobs, though not a physician, has for the past twenty-five years been closely identified with the physician in the noblest part of his work—charity, benevolence, philanthropy. The true physician is always a philanthropist, and nearly all of the older physicians of Denver have accompanied Mrs. Jacobs not once but many times to the poorest haunts of poverty for sweet charity’s sake.

In her long and busy and checkered career her milk of human kindness never turned sour or dry within her bosom, and in her death the submerged public lose a faithful friend and benefactor. We speak for the medical profession of Denver when we offer condolence and sympathy to the family and friends of the departed.

The Example of the Roman Catholic Sisters

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 17 different communities of Catholic Sisters built and/or staffed more than 25 hospitals and other major healthcare institutions in Colorado.

In 1873, Sister Joanna Bruner and the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth took the first step by building what became Denver’s St. Joseph’s Hospital, Colorado’s first private-sector hospital. Then more Sisters came from Leavenworth to build hospitals in Leadville (1879) and Grand Junction (1896) for all the sick, wounded and destitute. Back east, the Sisters’ hospitals may have focused on caring for immigrants who didn’t feel welcome elsewhere, but in Colorado, the Sisters made it clear that they had come here to serve everyone.

In 1882, Sister Maria Teresa O’Donnell and the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati built St. Mary’s Hospital in Pueblo. Then more Sisters came from Cincinnati to build Mount San Rafael Hospital in Trinidad (1889) and take over the Glockner Sanatorium in Colorado Springs (1893)—because Coloradans needed their professional skills and their nonjudgmental compassion, which Billy the Kid himself experienced firsthand both in Trinidad and in Santa Fé.

Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, opened by the Sisters of Charity in 1866, was a valuable training center for generations of Sisters who contributed to the development of Colorado’s healthcare-services delivery system—as was St. John’s Hospital in St. Louis, opened by the Sisters of Mercy in 1871.

Mother Mary John Baptist Meyers and the Sisters of Mercy came from St. Louis and built hospitals in Durango (1882), Ouray (1887), Cripple Creek (1894), and Denver (1900). Their mission was to serve sick and injured people in those Wild West towns who needed experienced, compassionate nurses to take care of them. Local physicians welcomed the respect and the experienced professional support they received from the Sisters.

Sister Huberta Duennebacke and the Sisters of Saint Francis of Perpetual Adoration built St. Francis Hospital in Colorado Springs (1887) and St. Anthony Hospital in Denver (1893) because they needed to be free to offer professional healthcare and other services to the poor, which was their whole reason for existence (they initially staffed corporate hospitals for the railroads in both cities).

The Sisters who came to Colorado to provide healthcare never considered limiting their services to Roman Catholics. The Sisters’ healthcare mission was much broader than that: they came to nurse and heal sick and injured people who needed them—particularly the poor and those who had no one else to take care of them.

It’s worth repeating that in the early days, Colorado families and neighbors took care of the sick and injured. But many of the miners, steel workers, cowboys, and railroad construction workers were single men who were concentrated in remote towns where there were so many of them doing such dangerous work that they could easily overwhelm local resources when they got sick or injured.

Medical markets also increased in response to the need for services by people congregating in urban, mining, and railroad centers who were detached from traditional family-based medical care. These problems intensified… as railway and mining centers increasingly attracted single, primarily immigrant, men who had nowhere to turn when they became ill except to a hospital. (Barbara Mann Wall, Unlikely Entrepreneurs, pg. 15)

Governor Gilpin’s 1861 census found that there were 20,758 men but only 4,484 women in the Colorado Territory. The actual proportion of men to women—if the men prospecting up in the mountains had been systematically counted—may well have been considerably more lopsided than that.

The figures for white males and females in Colorado remained disproportionate throughout the nineteenth century, but the statewide figures grew closer by the turn of the century. The figures for mining towns would still be lopsided during the 1890s.

• 1870—24,820 Males and 15,044 Females—100 : 62.5

• 1880—129,131 Males and 65,196 Females—100 : 50.4

• 1890—245,247 Males and 166,951 Females—100 : 67.7

• 1900—294,706 Males and 244,314 Females—100 : 82.9

Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Mercy, and Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet therefore built hospitals to take care of the predominantly male populations in mining, railroad, and ranching towns like Cripple Creek, Durango, Georgetown, Grand Junction, Leadville, Manitou, Ouray, and Trinidad.

The Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration originally came to Colorado Springs and Denver from Germany by way of Lafayette, Indiana, to run railroad company hospitals for that same reason—many railroad construction workers, train crews, and passengers had no one to take care of them if they got sick or injured, so the railroads asked the Sisters to care for them.

The Sisters of Saint Francis of Perpetual Adoration subsequently opened St. Francis Hospital in 1887 and St. Anthony Hospital in 1893 so that they could continue to nurse railroad workers and passengers, but take care of the poor as well. Colorado’s railroad physicians and surgeons were some of the Sisters’ strongest supporters.

Looking back at the record from 1873 to 1999, it’s fair to generalize. Doctors all over Colorado appreciated the Sisters’ intelligence, training, work ethic, dedication to the well-being of each of their patients, and the clean and orderly hospitals they ran. Right up until the end of the twentieth century, physicians and surgeons said that the Sisters’ hospitals were good places to practice medicine. Doctors knew that they and their patients were respected.

All these Sisters’ dedication to serving Colorado’s poor—people who were sometimes referred to as submerged because they might as well have been invisible to most people—continued right down to the late twentieth century, when because of declining numbers of Sisters, they had to begin turning over their hospitals to others. The Sisters’ legacy, described in detail in an overview on this chronology’s website, still has the power to challenge the Coloradans they served for so long.

When two communities of Sisters who had founded hospitals in Colorado in the nineteenth century agreed to consolidate their healthcare systems in 1987, for example, their leaders—Sister Helen Flaherty of the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati and Sister Stephanie McReynolds of the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration of Colorado Springs—wrote this:

. . . both systems, loyal to the traditions of their sponsoring congregations, have undertaken the pressing ministerial task of the decade ahead—not just to provide health services directly to the poor, but to be their advocates—to be, in the revolutionary environment of health care, a powerful voice for those who have neither voice nor power.

If we listen carefully, Frances Jacobs can still remind us to seek out Colorado’s most neglected residents, even and maybe especially those in the roughest parts of town and in our most remote communities. The Sisters’ legacy will always remind caregivers to treat each patient as family or friend, and it will challenge healthcare executives to be powerful voices for those who have neither voice nor power.

The values that Frances Jacobs and the Sisters lived every day are essential components of our nineteenth-century Colorado heritage—a heritage that was strengthened during the twentieth century by Drs. Justina Ford and Florence Sabin, each in her own distinctive way. Dr. Ford used her skills as an obstetrician to help marginalized women deliver their babies, and after a long career as a research scientist, Dr. Sabin became the best public health activist Colorado has ever had.

The Example of Justina Ford, MD (1871-1952)

In 1902, Dr. Justina Laurena Ford—a 31-year-old African-American who had received her MD in 1899 from Hering Medical College in Chicago—arrived in Denver, where she practiced as an obstetrician, gynecologist, and pediatrician for fifty years. She delivered at least 5,000 and probably about 7,000 babies, and she gained a working knowledge of the languages she needed to care for her patients.

When Dr. Ford arrived in Denver, there were five male African-American physicians, but they were not permitted to join the Medical Society of the City and County of Denver or the Colorado State Medical Society. Membership in those segregated organizations was required for physicians who wanted to practice at Denver hospitals, which weren’t desegregated until after 1950.

Eileen Welsome did find that Dr. Ford was listed as visiting staff during the late 1920s and early 1930s at Denver General Hospital, which seems to have made it clear to her that she was welcome to return at any time. For whatever reasons, she chose not to accept that offer.

When Dr. Ford applied for her license to practice medicine, the clerk said, I feel dishonest taking a fee from you. You’ve got two strikes against you to begin with. First of all, you’re a lady, and second, you’re colored. She later said, I fought like a tiger against those things.

Dr. Ford worked from her home office and made house calls to Hispanic, Native American, Chinese, Japanese, and Greek women—and, as she put it, plain whites and plain colored. About 15% of the babies she delivered were African-American; her philosophy was whatever color they show up, that’s the way I take them.

Dr. Justina Ford—widely known as Denver’s Lady Doctor—was a proponent of natural childbirth, and most babies were still born at home in those days anyway, so her exclusion from the hospitals may have been annoying but it wasn’t a major obstacle for an ob/gyn. She was often given produce and other goods and services by women who couldn’t pay, and when needed, she helped families by providing food, bedding, and coal. Grocers, taxi drivers, and coal companies helped too. The community supported her practice.

Despite prejudice, segregation, and almost 50 years of exclusion from the medical societies, Dr. Ford became one of Denver’s best-known and most beloved physicians. After her yearly applications were refused for nearly half a century, she was finally admitted to the Colorado Medical Society and the Medical Society of the City and County of Denver in 1950, two years before she died at age 81 on October 14, 1952.

In 1985, Dr. Justina Ford was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame, and in 1989, the Colorado Medical Society declared her to be one of Colorado’s medical pioneers.

The Example of Florence Sabin, MD (1871-1953)

Late in 1944, Governor John Vivian appointed Dr. Florence R. Sabin—a native of Central City who had received her MD in 1900 from Johns Hopkins—to chair the Subcommittee on Health of the Colorado Post-War Planning Committee.

She was the first woman to be appointed to the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, where she had graduated first in her class, and she was the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Sabin brought intelligence, compassion, and determination to the extraordinarily challenging job Governor John Vivian had given her, never imagining that she would take it so seriously.

Florence Sabin, MD—an eminent 73-year-old research scientist who had returned home to Colorado after she retired from the Rockefeller Institute in New York City—persuaded Governor Vivian to get the Commonwealth Fund to pay for the American Public Health Association (APHA) to survey Coloradans’ health. The APHA sent Dr. Carl E. Buck to do the study, which was published in 1946. It was shocking—Colorado’s public health was considerably worse than that of other states.

Dr. Sabin began traveling around the state, paying her own way, asking the women of Colorado to pressure the legislature to reform the state’s corrupt public health system despite powerful special interest groups that profited from the status quo.

In the end, the legislature was left with no choice but to pass the laws that Dr. Sabin had drafted herself—because she had personally explained the problems and her proposed solutions to women all over Colorado, and because she had so effectively challenged them to demand action from their legislators.

After listening to Dr. Sabin and reading the Basic Health Needs of Colorado pamphlet she gave them, women understood that the well-being of their children and grandchildren was at stake. She asked women to think about their families and their neighbors and to get their legislators to commit to doing what’s best for the people of Colorado.

Five of the Sabin Health Laws established and funded health services, and three dealt with the control of specific diseases. All but one of her bills was passed by the Colorado legislature in 1947, and as we’ll see in Volume Two, the improvements to the state’s public health were monumental. In 1949, the Colorado legislature added to the Sabin Health Laws that had been enacted in 1947.

Then Mayor Quigg Newton asked Dr. Florence Sabin to help him reform Denver’s public health system. During her tenure as chair of an Interim Board of Health and Hospitals (1948-1951), Denver’s tuberculosis rate dropped by 50% and the incidence of syphilis by more than 85%.

Her concerns included the building of a new sewage treatment plant for Denver, increased frequency of garbage collection, an aggressive rat-elimination campaign, and improvement in the quality of milk and other dairy products. She worked with Denver General Hospital and the Denver Police Department to establish an emergency telephone number that residents could use to call for help.

Florence Sabin may have been the finest scientist ever born in Colorado, and she was unquestionably the most effective healthcare reformer we’ve had so far. She hadn’t lived in her native Colorado since she was a girl except for a couple of years when she taught high school in Denver after graduating from Smith College in 1893.

When she was in her 70s, however, she went to great lengths to give Colorado and Denver the public health systems that were needed. Her maturity brought with it the wisdom to know how to get things done by sidestepping people who might put obstacles in her path or caution her to go slowly. She was fully aware of having no time to waste.

In 1959, the State of Colorado placed a statue of Dr. Florence Sabin in National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol.

Generous Colorado Families

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, dozens of Colorado families helped build our state’s hospitals and other healthcare facilities. When new or expanded healthcare facilities were needed, Coloradans responded generously with their time, talent, property, and financial resources.

Some of these family names are instantly recognizable, others maybe not:

• Anschutz

• Bacon

• Beaumont

• Boettcher

• Bonfils

• Brown

• Campion

• Cooper

• Coors

• Daniels

• Davis

• Dower

• Evans

• Fahrenbrink

• Gary

• Gilpin

• Goodstein

• Guggenheim

• Kiesler

• Leprino

• May

• Mullen

• Palmer

• Penrose

• Phipps

• Porter

• Reed

• Robinson

• Russell

• Schoenberg

• Shore

• Shwayder

• Tabor

• Tammen

• Thatcher

• Vestal

• Walsh

• Weckbaugh

• Whitted

• Wolf

These families and many more like them have also earned the right to be remembered as creators of Colorado’s humanitarian healthcare heritage. Please send the names of families who deserve to be added to his list to book@coloradohealthcarehistory.com

About This Chronology

For man is so constituted that he can judge rationally of the future only by the experience of the past; and that man, or that class of men, will possess the highest degree of practical wisdom, who treasure up this experience with most care and correctness. Why is it that one generation after another, not of individuals only, but of whole communities and nations, are found pursuing the same general course, committing the same errors, suffering the same evils, and finally perishing from essentially the same causes? Simply because they learn nothing from the history of those who have preceded them.

Nathan Smith Davis, MD

Dr. Nathan Davis of Chicago—founder of the American Medical Association and founding editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association—published that thought in his 1850 volume called History of Medical Education and Institutions in the United States from the First Settlement of the British Colonies to the Year 1850 (pp. vii-viii). I wrote this chronology of Colorado’s healthcare heritage for two reasons—first, to honor our healthcare pioneers, and second, to provide background and inspiration to twenty-first-century Coloradans who want to learn from those who have preceded them.

It became clear not long after I began my research and writing that a chronology would serve these purposes best. Writing a narrative history of healthcare and medicine in Colorado during two centuries could have resulted in something almost impossibly complex. The additional advantages of being able to read about the events of a specific year or decade—or to read a little bit here or there at random—will become obvious.

Colorado’s twenty-first-century healthcare leaders—if they reflect on the legacy of the men and women who came before us—will, as the old saying goes, be able to steer by the wake. Back in 1952, Adlai Stevenson put it this way: We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led us to the present.

If our current course sometimes seems to waver from side to side, by keeping an eye on the legacy of those who created what we inherited, we’ll find it easier to focus on what will best meet the needs of the people of Colorado. Meeting those needs, as the record shows, was the guiding principle of a majority of Colorado’s healthcare pioneers, to whom everything else was secondary, partly because they didn’t have to take market share and profitability into account, as today’s healthcare executives feel they must because of the expectations of their corporations.

In this chronology, I’m often simplifying complicated developments—the complex politics of early Denver, the development of public health safeguards in Denver, the evolution of the mining business in Colorado, and the control and development of railroads in, into, and through Colorado, and even the financing of local community hospitals, for example—and I have had to omit many interesting details. That’s the nature of a chronology.

By structuring this book as a chronology, it turned out to be easier for me to focus on our actual tradition. I had always wanted to avoid finding things that I was consciously or unconsciously looking for. I wanted to discover our heritage, not create one for us.

Lewis Lapham cited a line from Goethe—He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living hand to mouth.—and then told an interviewer I figure that if we’re going to find our way into answers to, at least hypotheses to, the circumstances presented by the 21st century, that our best chance is to find them floating around somewhere in the historical record.⁴

People who are concerned about the present and future of healthcare in Colorado don’t have to live hand to mouth, and should avoid adopting a faux-Buddhist position of there is no yesterday, there is no tomorrow, there’s only today’s market share. This chronology’s three volumes will enable us to draw on a good bit of our 150-year healthcare heritage, and we have plenty to learn. Readers outside of Colorado will find it helpful too: the history of healthcare in nineteenth-century Colorado is intimately tied to the history of healthcare in the states back east as well as in Europe.

Because our Colorado healthcare heritage can only inspire us if we understand the facts—and because facts are more likely to be understood when presented in context—this chronology includes national and international developments that establish an indispensable frame of reference for understanding what was happening in Colorado.

This is a book to reflect upon while you gradually let it all soak in. Be sure to notice connections between what was going on in Colorado and the events in the broader world.⁵ Politics and the economy affected healthcare, and eventually developments back east found their way to Colorado.

If readers understand my purpose, I won’t worry about . . . specialists, whose pleasure it is to lie in the long grass waiting for amateurs to blunder along… .⁶ As Wilfrid Sheed understood, sometimes—as long as you’re careful, honest, and respectful of your sources—it’s acceptable to risk making mistakes or offending the sensibilities of specialists.

Historians may not actually have a problem with what I’m doing because—as I hope my bibliography suggests—I couldn’t have done this without their work. Excellent historians have published whole books and articles about a great many of the things I’m chronicling in the concise way demanded by a chronology.

More than a few of the professional historians who have written about Colorado are fine storytellers—Jeanne Abrams, Phil Goodstein, Tom Noel, Patty Limerick, Susan Schulten, Eileen Welsome, and Elliott West come immediately to mind—and it’s not my intention to try to compete with them. Although I find historiography to be one of the most fascinating disciplines in all of academia, here I’m a chronicler, not an historian.

Crowdsourcing—that important tool familiar to social media users—may make an updated edition possible. Like so many of Colorado’s early hospitals, this chronology will be a community project. This chronology’s website, which has an Updates section, makes it easy to make corrections and remedy omissions—but only to the extent that readers, like Colorado’s pioneers, understand that we’re all in this together. When you see something that’s not right or is misleading—and when you think of something that has been left out—please email me: book@coloradohealthcarehistory.com

Some things to note about this chronology:

• Because people tend to browse and scan chronologies rather than read every entry, some descriptive facts are repeated. I may have identified a physician when I recorded that she arrived in Colorado, but I will likely identify her again at important points in her career.

• Before Colorado became a state in 1876, Coloradans said back in the states when referring to anything east of our border with Kansas; after 1876, it became back east.

• For Coloradans, the University of Colorado is CU and the University of Denver is DU.

• Because footnotes would overwhelm a chronology, quotations ordinarily just include the name of the person or resource being quoted and the page numbers. The specific references will be easy enough to find in the bibliography.

For each year, entries that are not directly related to healthcare are listed first and are followed by this:

There’s a flexible geographic order to entries for each year that I ordinarily follow:

1. International developments

2. National developments

3. The Denver metro area

4. The northern Front Range—Boulder, Loveland, Fort Collins, Greeley, etc., and northeastern Colorado

5. The southern Front Range—Colorado Springs, Pueblo, etc.—as well as southeastern Colorado and the San Luis Valley

6. The central mountain communities including Gilpin, Clear Creek, and other counties along I-70 and North Park, Middle Park, and South Park

7. The Western Slope including northwestern and southwestern Colorado

When referring to medical periodicals published in Colorado, I sometimes use these abbreviations:

• Colorado Medical Journal (1882-1905)—CMJ

• Colorado Medicine (1903-Present)—CM

• Denver Medical Times (July 1882-March 1906)—DMT

• Proceedings of the Rocky Mountain Medical Association (1871-1877)—PRMMA

• Transactions of the Colorado Territorial Medical Society (1871-1875)—TCTMS

• Transactions of the Colorado State Medical Society (1876-1902)—TCSMS

Acknowledgements

The following are among the many archivists, historians, librarians, healthcare professionals, and others who in a wide variety of ways facilitated my research and the copyright permissions process:

• Kari Abarca, Office of the Board of Regents, University of Colorado

• Jeanne Lichtman Abrams, Center for Judaic Studies, Penrose Library, University of Denver

• Richard Anderson, Denver

• Margaret Bandy, Saint Joseph Hospital Library, Denver

• Sister Jane Behlmann, CSJ, St. Louis, Missouri

• Dolores Bennett, Mesa County Medical Society, Grand Junction

• Gayle Berry, Denver

• Christopher Blue, Union Pacific Railroad Museum, Council Bluffs, Iowa

• Anne Bond, the Presbytery of Denver

• Mary Bonner, Craig Hospital, Englewood

• Sudip Bose, The American Scholar, Washington, DC

• Garry Brewer, Grand Junction

• Regina Brooks, Swedish Medical Center

• Dale Budde, formerly of Mercy Hospital, Denver

• Sheila Bugdanowitz, Rose Community Foundation, Denver

• Dan Burns, Diocese of Sioux City Archives, Sioux City, Iowa

• Ned Calonge, MD, The Colorado Trust, Denver

• Sister Melissa Camardo, SCL, Saint Joseph Hospital, Denver

• Sue Carroll, Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, Silver Spring, Maryland

• Gary Clark, Department of Veterans Affairs, Denver

• Carol Coburn, Avila College, Kansas City, Missouri

• Elizabeth Cook, Regis University, Denver

• Roxanne Cooper, alternet, San Francisco, California

• Darcy Copeland, RN, St. Anthony Central Hospital, Lakewood

• Sandra Costich, The American Scholar, Washington, DC

• Sister Patricia Crowley, OSB, Chicago, Illinois

• Sally Crum, Grand Junction

• Matt Dacy, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota

• Rochelle Kelly DeVargas, St. Mary-Corwin Medical Center, Pueblo

• Jay Dew, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma

• Adam Dormuth, National Jewish Health, Denver

• Joel Edelman, formerly of Rose Medical Center, Denver

• Ben Eiseman, MD, Denver VA Medical Center

• Jessica Evans-Tameron, Penrose-St. Francis, Colorado Springs

• Debra Faulkner, Brown Palace Hotel, Denver

• Jody Feely, RN, Swedish Medical Center, Englewood

• Steve Fisher, Penrose Library, University of Denver

• David Forsyth, Gilpin Historical Society, Central City

• Sister Elaine Frank, OSF, Rochester, Minnesota

• Elizabeth Garner, Colorado State Demography Office, Denver

• Sarah Gilmor, History Colorado, Denver

• Richard Glasser, MD, Littleton

• Phil Goodstein, Denver

• Deborah Gosling, Swedish Medical Center

• Samantha Hager, Colorado State Publications Library, Denver

• Sister Maureen Hall, SCL, Leavenworth, Kansas

• Bruce Hanson, Western History and Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library

• Sister Deborah Harmeling, OSB, Covington, Kentucky

• Katherine Hill Harris

• Laura Harris, Ira J. Taylor Library, Iliff School of Theology, Denver

• Brenda Hawley, Colorado Springs

• Sister Judith Patricia Healy, RSM, College of St. Mary, Omaha, Nebraska

• Jim Henderson, formerly of Presbyterian Hospital, Denver

• Sister Nancy Hoffman, SC, Denver

• Sarah Hogan, Rangely District Hospital, Rangely

• Dean Holzkamp, Colorado Medical Society, Denver

• K. Mason Howard, MD, Denver

• David Hutchison, MD, Denver

• Sister Vivian Ivantic, OSB, Chicago, Illinois

• Colton Johnson, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

• Noel Kalenian, Western History and Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library

• Sister Mary Ann Klein, OP, Great Bend, Kansas

• Monte Kniffen, CA, Sisters of Mercy Archives, Omaha, Nebraska

• Corinne Koehler, RN, Arvada

• Mike Landon, LDS Church History Library Reference Services, Salt Lake City, Utah

• Diane Lenfest, University of Colorado College of Nursing, Aurora

• Polly Letofsky, Colorado Business Women, Denver

• Kathy Lindquist-Kleissler, Denver Medical Society

• Nancy Lonergan, Memorial Hospital, Colorado Springs

• Debbi MacLeod, Colorado State Publications Library, Denver

• Heather Maes, Woodruff Memorial Library, La Junta

• Sister Benedicta Mahoney, SC, Cincinnati, Ohio

• Sister Peggy Maloney, RSM, Denver

• Joe Martell, Central Presbyterian Heritage Center, Denver

• Sister Peggy Ann Martin, OP, Catholic Health Initiatives, Englewood

• Sharon Martin, HealthONE Dorsey Medical Library, Denver

• Karen Martsolf, Community Hospital, Grand Junction

• Sister Pat McDermott, RSM, Silver Spring, Maryland

• Mike McDonald, Franklin Ferguson Memorial Library, Cripple Creek

• Sister Stephanie McReynolds, OSF, Colorado Springs

• Sandy Merrill, Colorado Hospital Association, Greenwood Village

• Sister Judith Metz, SC, Cincinnati, Ohio

• Susan Miller, Colorado Medical Board, Denver

• Terry Minger, Piton Foundation, Denver

• Nell Mitchell, Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo

• Samantha Moe, St. Mary’s Hospital, Grand Junction

• Gloria Morkert, St. Anthony Church, Sterling

• Sister Lillian Murphy, RSM, Denver

• Bailey Murray, Albany County Public Library, Laramie, Wyoming

• Brian Newsome, Memorial Hospital, Colorado Springs

• Sister Regis Nuva, OP, Denver

• Sister Kathleen O’Brien, RSM, Omaha, Nebraska

• Sister Julie Peak, OSB, Mount Marty College, Yankton, South Dakota

• Gretchen Perryman, Rose Community Foundation, Denver

• Greg Porter, Rio Grande Hospital, Del Norte

• Sister Joyce Prasalowicz, SSJ-TOSF, Stevens Point, Wisconsin

• Robert Pulcifer, Denver

• Sister Mary Lonan Reilly, OSF, Rochester, Minnesota

• Mary Jo Reitsema, Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, Boulder

• Kathy Reynolds, Cripple Creek District Museum, Cripple Creek

• Karen Rinehart, St. Vincent Hospital, Leadville

• Richard Robinson, Denver

• Gerry Romero, RN, formerly of Mercy Hospital, Denver

• Michelle Salmieri, Condé Nast, New York City

• Nancy Sandleback, Benedictine Women of Madison, Wisconsin

• Tom Sangster, formerly of the Colorado Hospital Association, Denver

• Susan Schulten, Department of History, University of Denver

• Anna Scott, Aspen History Archives

• Patti Sedano, Boulder Community Hospital

• Sister Romona Seidl, CSJ, Wichita, Kansas

• Sister Barbara Sellers, SCL, Leavenworth, Kansas

• Sandy Shimko, White River Museum, Meeker

• Martin Shore, Denver

• D.K. Spencer, Rocky Ford, Colorado

• Rozolen Stanford, Central Presbyterian Church, Denver

• Beckett Stokes, Episcopal Diocese of Colorado, Denver

• Jamie Thornton, Colorado State Board of Health, Denver

• Diane Tobin, HealthONE Dorsey Medical Library, Denver

• Carl Unrein, Mullen High School, formerly of St. Joseph Hospital Foundation, Denver

• Mary Catherine Unrein, St. Anthony Church, Sterling

• Gary VanderArk, MD, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora

• Jeff Gregg Wahl, Denver

• Jane Wald, Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts

• Sister Mary David Walgenbach, OSB, Benedictine Women of Madison

• Sherry Nanninga Walker

• Barbara White, RN, Colorado Christian University, Northglenn

• Ben Wiederholt, St. Anthony Hospital, Denver

• Kalena Wilkinson, Denver Health Medical Center

• Sister Cyrilla Wolfe, RSM, formerly of Mercy Hospital, Denver

• Lavinia Ycas, Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, Boulder

Years ago when I was doing some of the research that has now become part of this chronology, Jim and Lucy Guercio and their family provided hospitality and moral support. Along with Dave Lund and Mark and Paula Guercio, they made a time of transition much easier than it would otherwise have been.

Arn Current has been a trusted friend whose hard work and talent as singer, guitarist, and songwriter still inspire me after all these years—he’s a constant reminder that practice makes perfect. Chris and Dave Current and Diane and Vince Suich and their families have been there for me without fail for more than thirty years. Martha and Gary Mosley and their family have been an integral part of my life for even longer than that, as have Alice, John, and Tom Maloney.

Tom Archer and Marti Murphy Archer, John and Pat Bronikowski, Karen Current, Melanie Cushion, Jim Duffy, Steve Fagaly, John and Denise de la Hoz, Larry Hemmelgarn, Justin Kolenc, Bill Rafferty, Don Ranly, Don Sarley, Kenny Seipel, Wally Showman, Vince Suich, Jr., Evan Thomas, Kent Willmann, and Tom Wissman are friends who’ve encouraged and supported me for a long time—as have my nephew Brendan Sherlock, my niece Kieran Poulos, and my cousin Carole and her husband Chet Nocek.

Sister Mary Regis Leahy, RSM, has been a guide and inspiration, particularly after I began to discover the extraordinary contribution that Catholic Sisters made to the development of healthcare in Colorado. She and Sister Cyrilla Wolfe, RSM, answered questions and pointed me in the right direction.

Kathy Lindquist-Kleissler of the Denver Medical Society has provided reality checks and historical information that I couldn’t have done without. Sharon Martin and Diane Tobin of the HealthONE Dorsey Medical Library could not have been more professional and helpful.

Seven members of the faculty and staff at the University of Colorado School of Medicine read parts of the manuscript while I was working on it. The early encouragement of immunologist and medical school historian Henry Claman, MD, was particularly appreciated. Drs. Frank deGruy, Larry Green, and Ben Miller of the Department of Family Medicine guided and encouraged me more than I had a right to expect. Rita Bertolli, Maribel Cifuentes, and Linda Niebauer each made insightful suggestions.

At iUniverse, Denise Benefiel helped me in dozens of ways for more than six months, and both Dianne Lee and Cherry Noel patiently answered my questions during the final stage of manuscript preparation.

This Book’s Website

1. This book’s website⁷ will gradually include a series of overviews on topics that are keys to understanding the origin and development of healthcare in Colorado during the nineteenth century.

2. The bibliography—which covers the period from 1800 to 1999—is on the website as well.

Google Books and other online libraries that offer digitized versions of books of historic interest are quickly changing the way we do research, including research on Colorado’s healthcare history. An amazing amount of information that was formerly difficult to access is now a few keystrokes away, and some of the listings in this bibliography have links to online versions. I’ve also consulted hundreds of websites, physical books and periodicals, and Wikipedia, of course.

The online version of my bibliography will always be the most up-to-date, and will include links to many of the books that are currently available for purchase as eBooks or in paper versions.

3. The online Acknowledgements section will allow me to mention the large number of people who have helped to make this book possible.

4. The book’s website will gradually include as many historical photographs as are made available.

5. Perhaps most importantly, the website will include an Updates section where additions, corrections, and clarifications will be arranged chronologically.

1799—The End of an Era

On December 14, 1799, George Washington—the first President of the United States and the Father of His Country—died at age 67 in his home at Mount Vernon, Virginia, of a pulmonary disorder that developed after he inspected his farm on horseback in snow, hail, and freezing rain. A courier was sent to Philadelphia to tell President John Adams and Representative John Marshall of Virginia, who made the announcement to Congress.

On December 18, 1799, there was a private funeral and burial at Mount Vernon.

On December 26, 1799, Representative Henry Light-Horse Harry Lee III of Virginia—who had been a major general in the Continental Army and a close personal friend of President Washington—delivered the nation’s official eulogy in the presence of the Congress. His address included these words:

First in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen, he was second to none in the humble and endearing scenes of private life. Pious, just, humane, temperate and sincere—uniform, dignified and commanding—his example was as edifying to all around him as were the effects of that example lasting… .

Correct throughout, vice shuddered in his presence and virtue always felt his fostering hand. The purity of his private character gave effulgence to his public virtues… . Such was the man for whom our nation mourns.

Thousands of people in the US wore mourning clothes for months, and Napoléon declared a week of mourning in France.

1800-1853—The Louisiana Purchase

There’s not much to say about healthcare in Colorado in this first section, but the events we chronicle provide important background and context for what happened in the Colorado Territory (1861-1875) and during the early years of statehood (1876-1899).

Familiarity with the political, economic, social, cultural, and religious environment in which Colorado’s healthcare-delivery system developed will make it easier to understand our state’s healthcare pioneers and what they handed down to us.

An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen (1798)

On July 16, 1798, President John Adams signed the Act for the relief of sick and disabled seamen, which authorized the master or owner of every ship or vessel of the United States to deduct 20¢ per month from each seaman’s wages to fund the medical care of sick and disabled seamen and to build hospitals for that purpose.

This 1798 Act was the beginning of the federal government’s involvement in healthcare.

Native Americans—The Original Inhabitants of Colorado

When President Thomas Jefferson bought France’s claim to Louisiana from Napoléon in 1803, the Rocky Mountains—the Shining Mountains—became the western border of the United States, and the purchase included parts of present-day central and northern Colorado that are east of the continental divide.

The original inhabitants of what is now Colorado were the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Jicarilla Apache, and Ute people. Kiowa, Navajo, and Plains Apache territory sometimes extended into Colorado, and Bannock and Shoshoni sometimes came into the extreme northwestern corner of Colorado.

1800

1800: Two pieces of legislation created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland:

• The Union with Ireland Act 1800—Parliament of Great Britain, July 2, 1800

• The Act of Union (Ireland) 1800—Parliament of Ireland, August 1, 1800

1800: The population of the US was determined to be 5,308,500, including about a million African-Americans, 90% of whom were slaves. Free African-Americans were not counted in the census.

Beginning in June 1800, the federal capital was moved from Philadelphia to the new District of Columbia on the banks of the Potomac. The federal government had 123 employees, and the population of the new capital city was 3,087, including 623 slaves.

On November 1, 1800, President John Adams and Abigail Adams moved into the newly completed White House. Federalist John Adams was president from 1797 until March 1801.

1800: Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21, by Ludwig van Beethoven, premiered on April 2, 1800, at the Austrian national theater—the Kaiserlich und Königlich Hoftheater nächst der Burg (Imperial and Royal Court Theater next to the Castle)—in Vienna.

1800: Napoléon, 31, conquered Spain, which meant that he also took control of the Louisiana Territory.

1800: Barnaba Niccolò Maria Luigi Chiaramonti, a Benedictine monk, was elected Pope Pius VII (1800-1823).

1800: Dr. Philippe Pinel of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in Paris—a 55-year-old native of Jonquières, France, who had received his MD in 1773 from the University of Toulouse—published Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale ou La manie (Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Insanity or Mania).

Dr. Pinel pioneered a more humane approach to the treatment of patients who were mentally ill.

1800: The Royal College of Surgery was founded in London.

1800: Benjamin Waterhouse, MD—a 46-year-old professor at Harvard Medical School, which was founded in 1772—introduced smallpox vaccination in the US (see 1855) and published A Prospect of Exterminating the Small Pox.

Edward Jenner, MD, of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England, worked on vaccination beginning in 1796, and announced the effectiveness of the smallpox vaccine in 1798.

During the early decades of the nineteenth century, the methodology of modern clinical medicine began to be developed by physicians and scientists including Philippe Pinel, Edward Jenner, Thomas Beddoes, Friedrich Sertürner, Charles Bell, Benjamin Rush, René Laënnec, James Parkinson, Georges Cuvier, and Joseph Lovell, for example.

1800: Scottish physician William Buchan, MD (1729-1805), published the first edition of his popular family guide to medicine in 1769. By 1800, it was being published in the US as Domestic Medicine: or, The family physician: being an attempt to render the Medical Art more generally useful, by showing people what is in their own power, both with respect to the Prevention and Cure of Diseases (Philadelphia).

About 22 editions were published in the UK and the US, and it was widely popular among American families until the middle of the nineteenth century, when John C. Gunn’s Domestic Medicine (1830) became the favorite.

1801

1801: On January 20, President John Adams nominated Secretary of State John Marshall to be Chief Justice of the United States (1801-1835). Justice Marshall—a 45-year-old Virginian who was a dedicated Federalist—was sworn in on February 4, 1801, and began establishing the foundations of constitutional law and the US legal system.

1801: On March 3, Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, 58, became the third president of the United States and the first to be inaugurated in Washington, DC. President Jefferson was re-elected in 1804.

1801: Thomas Beddoes, MD, published Observations on the Medical and Domestic Management of the Consumptive; On the Powers of Digitalis Purpurea; and On the Cure of Schrophula.

Dr. Beddoes (1760-1808), who earned his MD at Oxford in 1786, ran a tuberculosis clinic (1793-1799) in Bristol, England. In 1799, he opened the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, where he tried treating tuberculosis by having patients inhale various gases, an experiment that he eventually decided to discontinue. The essay in this volume contains his mature thoughts on treating tuberculosis. Scrofula is a form of tuberculosis of the neck.

1802

1802: French Romantic author François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) published Génie du Christianisme, ou Beautés de la religion chrétienne (The Genius of Christianity, or Beauties of the Christian Religion)—an influential defense of Christianity that he had written while he was in exile in England during the 1790s.

The Recession of 1802

When the Treaty of Amiens temporarily ended the war between the French Republic and the United Kingdom, the US economy went into recession because Americans could no longer sell supplies to the combatants. A second cause for the recession was that the US had been ransoming US sailors captured by pirates, as well as sending financial support to Algeria, which was trying to stop piracy along the Barbary Coast. Those payments, combined with the end of the Anglo-French war, led to two years of financial problems in the US.

1802: Dr. Philippe Pinel of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in Paris published La médecine clinique rendue plus précise et plus exacte par l’application de l’analyse: recueil et résultat d’observations sur les maladies aigües, faites à la Salpêtrière (Clinical Medicine Made More Precise and Accurate for the Purposes of Analysis: Data Collection and Observations on the Outcome of Acute Illnesses, Made at the Salpêtrière), by a pioneer in the humane treatment of psychiatric patients.

1802: The Hôpital des Enfants Malades (Hospital for Sick Children) in Paris—the first pediatric hospital anywhere—opened in June 1802.

It wasn’t a hospital by any standard we would recognize—and there were allegations that some medical researchers thought of the young patients as little more than subjects for experiment—but it was a start.

1802: The Massachusetts Medical Society published the first official pharmacopoeia in the US, listing medicinal drugs along with directions for their preparation and use.

1803

1803: On February 19, President Jefferson signed the act of Congress that made Ohio the 17th state in the union.

1803: In Marbury v. Madison (February 24, 1803), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Judiciary Act of 1801 was unconstitutional—marking the first time that the Supreme Court overruled an act of Congress and establishing the concept of judicial review. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the opinion, which famously included this:

It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases must, of necessity, expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the Courts must decide on the operation of each.

1803: On May 2, President Jefferson bought France’s claim to Louisiana from Napoléon, and thereby nearly doubled the potential size of the US. The purchase also ended the power of France and Spain to block American use of the Mississippi River and access to the port of New Orleans.

President Jefferson doubted that the purchase was constitutional. He explained himself in September 1810, when he wrote to John B. Colvin:

The question you propose, whether circumstances do not sometimes occur, which make it a duty in officers of high trust, to assume authorities beyond the law, is easy of solution in principle, but sometimes embarrassing in practice. A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest.

The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher