PETER: When we think of hospitals today, we think of sick people, but back in Medieval Europe, that’s even before the 17th century, hospitals took in pilgrims, travelers, and strangers, anybody in need with no place else to go. It’s no coincidence that hospital sounds a lot like hospitality, both share the Latin root “host space”; host for guests or strangers; and so for hundreds of years, the word hospital was used interchangeably with guest house. Such was the case in the early 1600s when English Colonists established North America’s first hospital, right here in Virginia. BackStory producer, Catherine Moore, has the story.
CATHERINE MOORE: So you’ve heard of Jamestown, but you might not have heard of Henricus, the second English settlement in the New World. By 1611, it’s turning out that swampy, mosquito-infested Jamestown isn’t the healthiest place to make a new world, so the Virginia Company’s Deputy Governor, a military man named Sir Thomas Dale, sets his sites on a more secure spot, with fresher air. Across the river from the new town, he builds a string of forts, one of which also serves as a place for sick people.
JOHN PAGANO: “We are in the recreation of Mt. Molado, the first English hospital or guest house built here in the New World” . . .
CATHERINE MOORE: I’m standing inside a large wattle and daub-style building. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see a few dozen beds and tables covered with ominous looking medical instruments, herbs and suspicious powders. My tour guide is John Pagano, an interpreter at Henricus Historical Park, who dresses as one of Sir Thomas Dale’s soldiers. It was these soldiers who provided most of the care for the guests at Mt. Malado.
JOHN PAGANO: As part of your agreement, your indenture with the Virginia Company of London that they’ll care for you when you’re ill; they’ll provide food, clothing, shelter, all of it.
CATHERINE MOORE: The Virginia Company, of course, had an interest in keeping its workers healthy, and the indentured folks back home that the New World was worth the trip. But John tells me there was also a larger vision network.
JOHN PAGANO: Sir Thomas Dale’s going to name this area the Commonwealth, because Dale believed that everyone, whether you’re wealthy or whether you’re here as an indenture and you’re from a poor family, that everybody here pitches in to everyone’s else’s work, and everyone will prosper. He probably, if you were to continue that thought into all areas of settlement, he might have called the medical practices here in the hospitals the common health, because no matter what class you were, you got the same treatment as everyone else.
CATHERINE MOORE: Sounds pretty nice. Well, yeah, until you consider the kind of medical treatment that was liberally dispensed across class lines.
JOHN PAGANO: There is a surgeon or two in the Colony, but they’re essentially traveling surgeons, for what they called back then ‘barber surgeons’, they can cut your hair and treat your illness all at the same time. But they don’t really have a lot to go on, so they’ll just go in, and they’ll cut around things, pull things out and look at them, and in this time period, there was no anesthesia, so this isn’t a time period where you want them to go internally into you.
CATHERINE MOORE: Especially when the barber surgeon is stuck down river, and all you get is the soldier with a bone saw. You can understand why people might have been a bit hesitant to check into this guest house, after all, where the sick were cared for by women, at home.
JOHN PAGANO: The common people back then were just touching on this idea of going some place and letting someone else care for my mother or my son. If you think about people today, would anyone go into a strange house and have someone who has no medical training work on them.
CATHERINE MOORE: So how would they have gone about trying to convince people that this was safe or the best way to get the care that they needed.
JOHN PAGANO: It’s such a loaded answer, because we’re going to tell you what to do and you’re going to learn to like it, because we’re the ones in charge, and although you don’t understand the wisdom of why the Virginia Company of London has this, I do.
CATHERINE MOORE: So before you get all misty eyed about common health and Commonwealth, remember that back then, health care was enforced at the end of a stick, so it’s little surprise that as business in the New World starts to pick up and marshall law is relaxed, Mt. Malado becomes a thing of the past. By 1622, Thomas Dale is gone; he succumbed to the bloody flux in India, and the building has been bought by an ironmonger, who probably used it to house his workers, and we don’t see another public hospital in American for over 100 years. In the meantime, there were a few alms houses for the poor, pest houses for serious epidemics, and itinerant doctors for the very wealthy. But most importantly, there were more families. Early Americans looked after their own. Only strangers to a New World needed other strangers to take care of them.
ED: That’s BackStory producer, Catharine Moore. You can see pictures of the Henricus Hospital at our website, BackStoryRadio.org.