The Large Urban Catholic Hospital Revisited

Laforet EG : “The Large Urban Catholic Hospital: Its Role in Contemporary America,” Linacre Quarterly 31: 77–79 May 1964.

It may now be seen as an exquisite irony that the same issue of Linacre Quarterly featured an article by Boston Guild of St. Luke member Joseph E. Murray on the ethics of organ transplantation (LQ 31: 54-56). Dr. Murray's pioneering work, later to be recognized by a Nobel Prize, was carried out principally at Harvard Medical School and Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, neither of them a bastion of Catholicism.

This development would surely have disconcerted Rev. Alphonse Schwitalla S.J. , long-time director of the Catholic Hospital Association. As an Irish bull might have it, “If Father Schwitalla were alive today he'd be rolling over in his grave.”

Perhaps in an effort to compete in the secular corporate world, the journal of the Catholic Hospital Association, Hospital Progress, gives no intimation by its name of any Catholic affiliation. Nor do its contents regularly feature any topic of religious interest such as medicai ethics.

Of which there are many, such as Por Christo (treatment of maxillo-facial/dental defects in Latin America).

e.g., the Rose Hawthorne Lathrop Hospital in Fall River, MA, where for many decades (and long antedating Cicely Saunders’ remarkable Hospice initiative), care has been freely provided to needy cancer patients.

“(Signs of the Times): Catholic Health Care May Shift Away From the Hospitals” America 180: 11–12 5 June 1999.