Denver Jewry Builds a Hospital
(1899)
The arrival of masses of Eastern European Jewish
immigrants during the 1880s and beyond corresponded with a rapid increase
in the number of tuberculosis cases in the United States. Known as the
"white plague," physicians at the time knew of only one treatment
for TB: clean air and sunshine. Denver, with its mountain air and crisp
climate, became a preferred destination for infected Jewish immigrants from
places such as New York’s Lower East Side. Yet, Denver was ill prepared
for the arrival of these poor Jews and their families.
It was the vision of Frances Wisebart Jacobs that made
Denver a center for the organized treatment of tuberculosis in the United
States. The daughter of immigrants from Bavaria, Frances Wisebart was born
in Harrodsburg, Kentucky in 1843. At age 20, she married Abraham Jacobs and
the couple moved to Colorado. In 1872, Jacobs launched her first foray into
organized Jewish charitable relief by forming the Denver Hebrew Ladies’
Relief Society, which assisted Denver’s small population of needy Jewish
residents.
According to historian Marjorie Hornbein, writing in the
American Jewish Historical Society’s Jewish Women in America: An
Historical Encyclopedia, Jacobs "realized that the problems of
poverty, sickness, malnutrition and unsanitary living conditions were not
limited to the Jewish community." In 1874, she helped organize the
Denver Ladies’ Relief Society and, in 1887, she joined with the city’s
Congregational minister and the Catholic archdiocese to form the Charity
Organization Society, forerunner of Denver’s community chest. Her efforts
would later earn her the name, "Denver’s mother of charities."
Jacobs left her most enduring mark in the area of
tuberculosis relief. According to Hornbein, hundreds of TB victims from the
industrial Northeast, Jewish and non-Jewish, who made their way to Denver
in search of a cure found that "no facilities existed to give them
treatment or even shelter." Even worse, "Most of the Denver
community ignored those who roamed the city coughing or hemorrhaging."
But not Jacobs. Unafraid to touch the ill, she would help them when they
fell on the street, get them to a physician and pay for treatment. However,
as there was no place for tubercular individuals to stay during treatment,
many were transported to the local jail.
Jacobs insisted that the Denver community face the
reality that the city was attracting needy tuberculosis victims. According
to a Denver journalist at the time, "Everyone put down his pencil to
hear her tell of the crucial need for a hospital. Although she could move
any hardboiled editor, the response was always the same – ‘What you say
is true, but this is the Queen City of the Plains, and we can’t blacken
the name of the city’" by making it a TB refuge.
Jacobs found an ally in the newly appointed rabbi of
Denver’s Temple Emanu-el, William S. Friedman. In 1889, Friedman argued
from his pulpit in favor of Jacobs’s plan to build a Jewish-sponsored
tuberculosis hospital. In April of 1890, Denver’s Jewish Hospital
Association was incorporated and, in October, a hospital cornerstone was
laid. A month later, Frances Jacobs contracted pneumonia while visiting
among the city’s poor. In early November, she died at the age of 49. The
hospital’s trustees voted to name the hospital for her, and construction
was completed in 1893.
A precipitous drop in silver prices that year caused a
depression in the western mining states, and the Frances Jacobs Hospital
stood empty for lack of operating funds. In 1895, Louis Anfenger of Denver,
the district president of national B’nai B’rith, asked that
organization to adopt the Denver tuberculosis hospital as a national
project. According to Hornbein, "In 1899 the B’nai B’rith decided
that the hospital in Denver was the responsibility of all American Jews and
that the [Denver] lodge would supervise it." On December 10, 1899, six
years after Frances Jacobs’s death, the hospital opened its doors.
While a project of B’nai B’rith and the Denver
Jewish community, the renamed National Jewish Hospital was
non-denominational. Its first patient was a Swedish woman from Minnesota.
To reflect its openness to the impoverished of every background, the
hospital adopted the motto, "None may enter who can pay, and none can
pay who enter."
Another aspect of the hospital’s philosophy was more
controversial. The trustees limited admissions to those who had incipient
(early stage), rather than advanced, cases of TB. However, a large number
of Orthodox Jews with advanced cases traveled to Denver in search of a
cure. The National Hospital would not admit them. Further, the National
Hospital, organized primarily by reform German Jews, did not have a kosher
kitchen. The Orthodox would not eat there even when admitted.
After a debate in which some members of the city’s
German Jewish elite argued that Denver must not be swamped with "dying
consumptives," Dr. Charles Spivak, a physician sympathetic to the
Eastern European faction, organized the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief
Society, which built a new hospital for those in advanced stages of the
disease. The new hospital served kosher food.
Today, tuberculosis is no longer epidemic – in part
because of research done at the National Jewish Hospital. The
"National" remains, however, after several evolutionary
transformations, one of America’s great research hospitals for
respiratory diseases.
In Colorado’s state capitol, there are 16 stained
glass windows depicting important state pioneers. The only woman
represented there is Frances Wisebart Jacobs.
Sources: American Jewish Historical
Society |