USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 5 > Part 48
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It was in many ways a splendid heritage to which Arch- bishop O'Connell succeeded, this see of Boston which was about to celebrate its hundredth anniversary. Within a cen- tury it had grown from the humblest beginnings to become one of the strongest and most flourishing dioceses of the Catholic world. The age of pioneering, of teeming immigra- tion, of establishing in most places at least the minimum apparatus of the Church-"the brick and mortar period"- might be regarded as ended. Further and notable expansion
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THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
there was to be; but henceforth the problem was not so much of extensive as of intensive work. The great needs were for a better organization of the forces already at hand; for quickening and deepening the spiritual life of the people; for developing to the utmost all the many-sided activities of the Church; for introducing certain new methods and modes of action adapted to the new age; and for making the Church better understood and more articulate in a community where it had hitherto been rather backward in offering its contribu- tion towards the solution of social, moral, and intellectual questions.
The new archbishop was precisely the man for such a situation. Apart from abounding health and energy, wide experience of men and affairs, and great personal charm and distinction, he has brought to his task a deeply cultivated, versatile, and incisive mind; prompt judgment, courage, and inflexible will-power; broad vision and keen discernment of the trend of the times; remarkable talents for organization, administration, and leadership. Above all, he has shown a superb faith in the cause that he represents and an unfalter- ing devotion to duty. And he has been supported in his undertakings by his people with a loyalty and a generosity that could scarce have been surpassed.
MATERIAL PROGRESS (1907-1930)
Under such intelligent and forceful leadership splendid progress has been made in every field. There has been the usual increase in the number of Catholics, and an extraordi- nary increase in the number of new churches (138 built be- tween 1907 and 1923), parochial schools, high schools, academies, colleges, charitable institutions (a total of 53 in 1925, as against 23 in 1907), and houses of religious orders and congregations. What is most distinctive of the present regime is the systematization and centralization of effort. In most fields the Cardinal's method seems to be the same : first a careful survey of existing agencies, their methods, merits and defects; then a reorganization with the purpose of secur- ing proper coordination, uniformity, efficiency, and the saving of money and labor ; and finally, a persistent effort to derive the maximum results from the systems and policies adopted.
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From a photograph by Clifton Church
BOSTON COLLEGE
531
SPIRITUAL PROGRESS
Many are the outstanding achievements of the period. Charitable enterprises have been entirely reorganized, with the result that in this field Boston is one of the most com- pletely equipped and best organized Catholic dioceses in the United States. Great improvements have been made in the work of the parochial schools through closer supervision and standardization. A uniform diocesan course of study and uniform diocesan tests have been introduced. Extension courses and a summer school for Catholic teachers have been established. Other notable achievements have been the build- ing of the splendid new St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton; and the transfer of Boston College to its new site at Chestnut Hill, where its Gothic buildings, rising high above the waters of twin lakes, already make it one of the fairest of American colleges and may in time earn for it the name of the "Ameri- can Oxford."
SPIRITUAL PROGRESS (1907-1930)
Still more important have been the numerous evidences of a quickened spiritual life in the diocese. One sign of that is the development in almost every parish of the St. Vincent de Paul Society (ministering to the poor) ; the Holy Name Society, whose annual processions of 40,000 to 50,000 men have become a familiar and impressive spectacle in Boston; the Sodality for women; and the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, which has brought the annual contribution of the diocese for home and foreign missions from $1,400 in 1898 up to $750,000 in 1925.
Equally striking is the vast growth of professional guilds of Catholic men and women (physicians, dentists, teachers, business women, stenographers, telephone operators, factory workers, etc., etc.) for social service and spiritual better- ment, or the founding of two great "retreat houses"-the Passionist Monastery for men, and the Convent of the Cenacle for women, both in Brighton-where each year thousands of Catholics and many non-Catholics retire for a few days of prayer, reflection, and the renewing of the inner life.
Most striking of all, perhaps, is the astonishing growth among Catholic people of the practice of frequent Com- munion. The diocesan statistics for 1922 show three million
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THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Communions on week-days, four million on feast days and "first Fridays," and ten million on Sundays. The diocese of Boston stands almost at the head of the Catholic world in the annual number of its young men and young women who dedicate themselves to the service of God in the priesthood, in missionary work, or in religious orders.
His Eminence has done much to facilitate understanding and good relations between Catholics and non-Catholics, both by his readiness to cooperate with others in all ways that are possible to him, as shown notably during the World War, and also by his efforts to make the Catholic Church and its point of view better known to the rest of the community. His public addresses, instinct with patriotism and always marked by vigor, clearness, and candor, have been received with universal attention and respect.
Another means for promoting understanding has been the creation of the Catholic Truth Guild, whose representatives have toured the State, and indeed the country, speaking to crowds in the open air. The Common Cause Forum is an arena for weekly free discussion. Annual courses of public lectures have been organized. A diocesan newspaper, The Pilot, has been established. Very recently the radio has been regularly in use for presenting Catholic doctrines and stand- points to the public. In short, this has been an episcopate replete with activity and achievements, and one that will doubtless remain illustrious in the history of the see of Boston.
THE DIOCESES OF SPRINGFIELD AND FALL RIVER (1870-1930)
The diocese of Springfield has been ruled by three bishops : Patrick T. O'Reilly (1870-92), Thomas D. Beaven (1892- 1920), and Thomas M. O'Leary (since 1921). Under their leadership the Church in western Massachusetts has had a remarkably vigorous development, whether as regards its growth in numbers, the efficiency of its organization, the variety and excellence of its charitable institutions, or the number of vocations to the priesthood and the religious life, for which the diocese of Springfield has long been famous.
Fall River has hitherto had but two bishops : William Stang
533
CHARITABLE INSTITUTIONS
(1904-07), Daniel B. Feehan (since 1907). Recent as is its creation and small as it is in area and population, this diocese, too, has grown and expanded its activities in highly creditable fashion.
EDUCATIONAL AND CHARITABLE INSTITUTIONS
The position which the Catholic Church has come to hold in the Commonwealth may best be indicated, perhaps, by the statistics for 1929, taken from the latest volume of the United States Catholic Directory:
Total Number of Catholics
Churches
Priests
Archdiocese of Boston
999,000
350
1,062
Diocese of Springfield
446,752
230
447
Diocese of Fall River
195,000
113
199
Total
1,640,752
693
1,708
According to the federal religious census of 1916 (the last for which the data are available), 71.3% of the "church members" of Massachusetts were Roman Catholic; 73.5% of the population of Boston that had any religious affiliations were reported as Catholics: 62.4% in Cambridge; 69.1% in Worcester; 71% in Lowell; and 86% in Fall River (the highest percentage of Catholics to be found among the fifty largest cities of the country).
The strength of the Catholic Church may be further measured by the fairly complete educational system which it has built up, which in 1929 included 264 parochial schools, 79 high schools, 26 academies and preparatory schools, and 6 colleges. In all 163,000 young people are being trained under Catholic auspices.
The Church's charitable institutions in Massachusetts in- clude 18 orphan asylums, 3 infant asylums, 1 school for deaf- mutes, 5 industrial or reform schools, 15 hospitals and 19 homes for the poor and aged. By providing institutions for the needs of helpless infants and indigent or wayward mothers; for homeless children beyond infancy and for way- ward boys; for the comfort and protection of wage-earning women who are without homes; for the aged, the sick, and
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THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
the victims of chronic and incurable diseases, as well as by its many-sided work of a non-institutional kind, the Catholic Church has made itself a social asset of the utmost value to the Commonwealth, second only to the State in the magnitude of its charitable activities, and able to do many things that the State can never do.
The work of the Church in Massachusetts is greatly helped by the presence here of religious communities representing nearly seventy different orders and congregations of men or women. Whether they are engaged in teaching school children or in training college youth, in rescuing fallen women or nursing sufferers from cancer, in incessant preaching tours "on the mission" or in cloistered prayer and contemplation, the lives of these people are a perpetual inspiration to Catholics, and a reminder to the world at large that the age of faith and idealism and heroic self-renunciation is not yet past.
CONVERSIONS TO CATHOLICISM
While the immense growth of Catholicism in this State has been due primarily to immigration, the fact should not be overlooked that since the days of Cheverus every generation has furnished a large number of converts to the Catholic faith from the older stock, including many men of high intellectual distinction. The most famous of these converts was Orestes A. Brownson (1803-1876), one of the leading figures here in the stirring days of Transcendentalism and Brook Farm. After a spiritual Aeneid that led him from Presbyterianism to atheism, he found his way to the Catholic Church in 1844. Brownson's writings on religious, philosophical, political, and social questions would fill a library. But he was more than prolific: he was probably one of the ablest thinkers this country has produced.
Among other converts of the nineteenth century, one may name: the gifted Barber family, no less than seventeen mem- bers of which came into the Church at about the same time, most of them to become priests or nuns; Rev. James Kent Stone (Fr. Fidelis, C. P.), who after being president of Ken- yon and Hobart Colleges, became a Catholic, a missionary, and the most famous and venerated figure that the Passionist
535
CATHOLICS IN PUBLIC LIFE
order in this country has produced; Fr. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, S. J., son of a mayor of Boston, a Harvard man, and a cap- tain in the Civil War; Fr. George M. Searle, C. S. P., also a Harvard graduate, who ended his life as director of the Vatican Observatory; Fr. George M. Haskins, a former Prot- estant clergyman, who bears one of the greatest names in the history of Catholic charities in Boston; General Joseph W. Revere, Paul Revere's grandson; Fanny Allen, the "first nun from New England," the daughter of Ethan Allen; and Julia Hawthorne Lathrop, daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose last years were spent as the head of a religious com- munity which she had founded for the purpose of caring for sufferers dyeing of cancer.
CATHOLICS IN PUBLIC LIFE (1841-1930)
It was but slowly and tardily that Catholics were admitted to public office in Massachusetts. The first notable case is that of Dr. Henry C. B. Greene (a convert), who was elected to the legislature in 1841. The first election of a Catholic as a common councilman in Boston came in 1857; as an alder- man in 1870; as a congressman from Massachusetts in 1882. Hugh O'Brien became mayor of Boston in 1884, but not till the turn of the century did it become common to see Catholics sent to Congress or chosen mayors of the larger cities. The Hon. David I. Walsh has the distinction of being the sole Catholic who has hitherto served either as governor of the Commonwealth or as Senator from Massachusetts.
Among the Catholics who have distinguished themselves in the political, professional, or business life of the State, are: Patrick A. Collins (1844-1905), who rose from poverty to become an able lawyer, one of the outstanding leaders of the national Democracy, Congressman, and twice mayor of Boston, a man universally esteemed for his sterling character and absolute integrity; Charles F. Donnelly (1836-1909), a talented lawyer, who has left his mark equally by his success- ful championship of Catholic schools during the battle of 1888-1889 and by his thirty years of eminent service to the State Board of Charities; Dr. Thomas Dwight (1843-1911), a convert, a famous anatomist, and successor of Oliver Wen- dell Holmes in the Parkman professorship in the Harvard
536
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Medical School; Andrew Carney (1794-1864), whose suc- cess in business made possible the philanthropies of which the Carney Hospital in South Boston is only one example ; Patrick R. Guiney (1835-1877), who rose from private to brigadier general in the Civil War, lost an eye, and went through the rest of his life with shattered health but smiling face, the personification of chivalry, integrity, and deep religious feeling.
In the field of literature Catholics are proud of such names as Brownson, Robert Dwyer Joyce, Charles B. Fairbanks ("Andrew Aguecheek") ; John Boyle O'Reilly (1844-1890), that many-sided genius and most lovable of men, who played so great a role in the intellectual and social life of Boston in the twenty years after 1870; Katherine Eleanor Conway; and Louise Imogen Guiney, author of what one discriminat- ing critic calls "the most authentic and exquisite verse America has yet produced."
A PERSISTING PROBLEM
Of O'Reilly it was said by Thomas Wentworth Higginson that he gave his later life to "the mission so momentous for Boston, so momentous for America," of working for "recon- ciliation in this community between the Roman Catholic Irishman and the Protestant American." The history of the past century testifies to the need of that reconciliation and to much progress made towards that end. But "the gulf, though narrowed, is visibly still here."
On this subject one cannot do better than cite the words of the present Archbishop of Boston, uttered in a memorable address of 1908: "No lover of New England will stand pas- sive in this problem before us. There are rents enough grow- ing in the social fabric without perpetuating those made by our fathers, the baneful influence of which in every walk of life even today we still feel. To harmonize into a common sympathy and patient forbearance these varied inhabitants of the land, so that while each retains the birthright of his race, each learns from other something worth acquiring for the common good-that is the only sensible, practical, and effica- cious method by which concord and fellow feeling can become a reality, for the peace of all and for the nation's strength."
From a photograph by Notman, Boston
JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY
537
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
American Catholic Historical Researches (29 vols., Phila., 1884-1912).
AMERICAN CATHOLIC HISTORICAL SOCIETY .- Records (Phila., 1886 and later years).
American Catholic Quarterly Review .- (Phila., 1876 and later years).
A Brief Historical Review of the Archdiocese of Boston 1907-1923-(Bos- ton, 1925).
BROWNSON, HENRY FRANCIS .- Orestes A. Brownson's Early Life, Middle Life, Later Life (3 vols., Detroit, 1898-1900).
Catholic Historical Review (Washington, 1915 and later years).
CONNOLLY, Rt. Rev. ARTHUR T .- "Historical Sketch of the Rev. John Thayer" (United States Catholic Historical Magazine, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 261-273).
CONWAY, KATHERINE E., AND CAMERON, MABEL WARD .- Charles Francis Donnelly, a Memoir (New York, White, 1909).
CORR, BERNARD, editor .- Memorial of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Consecration of Most Rev. John Joseph Williams, Archbishop of Boston, March 12, 1891 (Boston, 1891).
CULLEN, JAMES BERNARD .- The Story of the Irish in Boston (Boston, Cullen, 1890).
CURRAN, MICHAEL PHILIP .- Life of Patrick A. Collins (Norwood, Nor- wood Press, 1906).
[DONAHOE, PATRICK] .- The Charlestown Convent; its Destruction by a Mob, August 11, 1834. Also the Trials of the Rioters (Boston, Dona- hoe, 1870).
DRUILLETTES, GABRIEL, S. J .- "Journal of an Embassy from Canada to the United Colonies of New England in 1650" (New York Historical So- ciety, Collections, Second Series, Vol. III, part I, N. Y., 1857)-See pp. 303-328. Translated with notes by J. G. Shea.
ENGLAND, Rt. Rev. JOHN .- Works (5 vols., Baltimore, 1849)-Vol. V, pp. 232-347, contains the chief documents bearing on the burning of the Charlestown convent.
FITTON, Rev. JAMES .- Sketches of the Establishment of the Church in New England (Boston, Donahoe, 1872).
GRIFFIN, MARTIN IGNATIUS JOSEPH .- Catholics and the American Revolu- tion (Privately printed, 3 vols., Ridley Park, Pa., 1907-1911).
GUILDAY, Rev. PETER, and KEENAN, Rev. L .- The Life and Times of John Carroll, Archbishop of Baltimore (2 vols., N. Y., Encyclopedia Press, 1922).
HAMON, ANDRÉ JEAN MARIE .- The Life of Cardinal Cheverus, Archbishop of Bordeaux (Boston, Munroe, 1839)-Translated by E. Stewart.
HAMON, ANDRÉ JEAN MARIE .- The Life of the Cardinal de Cheverus, Archbishop of Bordeaux (Phila., Hooker and Claxton, 1839)-Trans- lated by R. M. Walsh.
HAMON, ANDRÉ JEAN MARIE .- Vie du Cardinal Cheverus, Archevêque de Bordeaux (Paris, Périsse Frères, 1841)-Second edition, corrected from new material recovered at Boston, Montauban and Paris.
LEAHY, WILLIAM A .- "Archdiocese of Boston" (History of the Catholic Church in the New England States, 2 vols., Boston, Hurd & Everts, 1899)-See Vol. I, pp. 1-350.
MCCOY, JOHN J .- "Archdiocese of Springfield" (History of the Catholic Church in the New England States, 2 vols., Boston, Hurd & Everts, 1899)-See Vol. II, pp. 465-587. Printed separately, with slight changes.
538
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
"Memoir of Bishop Cheverus" (Boston Monthly Magazine, 1825, Vol. I, pp. 2-21).
NEW ENGLAND CATHOLIC HISTORICAL SOCIETY .- Memorial value of the One Hundredth Anniversary Celebration of the Dedication of the Church of the Holy Cross, Boston (Boston, 1904).
O'BRIEN, MICHAEL JOSEPH .- A Hidden Phase of American History; Ire- land's Part in America's Struggle for Liberty (N. Y., Dodd, Mead, 1919).
Official Catholic Directory (N. Y., Kenedy, 1913 and later years)-First issued in 1886 under the title Hoffman's Catholic Directory, Almanac and Clergy List; in 1900 as Catholic Directory, Almanac and Clergy List; in 1906 as Official Catholic Directory and Clergy List.
O'GORMAN, REV. THOMAS .- A History of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States (New York, Christian Literature Co., 1895).
ROCHE, JAMES JEFFREY .- Life of John Boyle O'Reilly (New York, Cassell, 1891).
SEXTON, REV. JOHN E .- Cardinal O'Connell, a Biographical Sketch (Bos- ton, Pilot Publishing Co., 1926).
SHAUGHNESSY, Rev. GERALD .- Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith? A Study of Immigration and Catholic Growth in the United States 1790- 1920 (New York, Macmillan, 1925).
SHEA, JOHN GILMARY .- History of the Catholic Church in the United States (4 vols., N. Y., Shea., 1886-1892)-An old classic, and a mine of information in which all later writers have quarried.
UNITED STATES : BUREAU OF THE CENSUS .- A Century of Population Growth, 1790-1900 (Washington, 1909).
UNITED STATES : BUREAU OF THE CENSUS .- Religious Bodies, 1916 (Wash- ington, 1920)-Bulletin No. 142.
WALSH, JAMES JOSEPH .- Our American Cardinals (N. Y., Appleton, 1926) . WHITNEY, MRS. LOUISA (GODDARD) .- The Burning of the Convent. A
Narrative of the Destruction by a Mob, of the Ursuline Convent on Mount Benedict, Charlestown, as Remembered by One of the Pupils (Cambridge, Mass., 1844).
WINSOR, JUSTIN, editor .- The Memorial History of Boston (4 vols., Bos- ton, Osgood, 1882-86).
CHAPTER XVIII
MEDICINE IN MASSACHUSETTS (1620-1930)
BY WALTER L. BURRAGE, A.M., M.D.
THE TASK
The Venerable Bede said twelve centuries ago: "The hard condition of the historian is that if he speaks the truth he provokes the anger of man; but if he commits falsehoods to writing he will be unacceptable to God, who will distinguish in his judgments between truth and adulation." This chapter aims to be a necessarily brief recital of the efforts of the medical profession of Massachusetts to advance the standards of the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases in this Commonwealth. It is understood that the medical profes- sion is distinguished from a business in that it is devoted to its own destruction, the major purpose of the medical profes- sion being to prevent the ills that flesh is heir to and to keep every one well. Medicine has progressed by rejecting the old truth for the new. In spite of its best efforts in the past the millenium of perfect health seems even yet to be far in the future. Although in this short sketch we are to put greatest emphasis on the last fifty years, the story would be neither complete nor understandable without a resumé of what has gone before.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PRACTITIONERS
Any account of medicine in the old Bay State must begin with the arrival of the first physician to these shores, namely Samuel Fuller (1580-1633), who came to Plymouth in the Mayflower and ministered most acceptably to the medical needs of the colonists, not only at Plymouth but also to the Puritans at Charlestown. William Bradford tells nearly all we know about Fuller in his History of the Plymouth Planta-
539
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MEDICINE
tion, bearing testimony to the high repute in which he was held by the settlers.
Few were the educated physicians among the colonists in the seventeenth century, and these few belonged primarily to the clerical profession. Instance Giles Firmin (1615-1697) of Ipswich, the first lecturer on anatomy in the country, who, although practising medicine all his life, became a dissenting parson and pamphleteer in England at the age of thirty-four. When Firmin had been two years a practitioner in Ipswich, Massachusetts, he wrote to Governor Winthrop: "I am strongly sette upon to study divinity, my studyes else must be lost : for physic is but a meene help." Firmin was the insti- gator of the first anatomical clinic, for he instructed students in that art by means of a skeleton, thereby stimulating the General Court to pass an act in 1647 which recited the neces- sity that "such as studies physick, or chirurgery may have the liberty to read anatomy and to anatomize once in four years some malefactor in case there be such as the court allow." No other anatomy act was passed until 1830, nearly two hundred years later.
The first woman to practise medicine in the Commonwealth was Anne Hutchinson, who came to Charlestown in 1636. She was said to be an accomplished midwife, as was Samuel Fuller's widow. We know that Patience Miller, wife of Wil- liam Miller, tanner, and mother of eight children, was the only practitioner in Northfield during the first two settlements, 1673 and 1685.
Thomas Thacher, the first minister of the Old South Church, Boston, was in 1677 the author of the earliest medical publication in America, entitled A Brief Rule To Guide the Common People of New England how to order themselves and theirs in the Small Pocks or Measels. Charles Chauncy, the second president of Harvard, had been trained in medicine at Cambridge University, England; he instructed students in the art, as did his successor as president, Leonard Hoar.
In the year 1649 the General Court passed the first law of its kind in the country, namely an act which restricted the practice of medicine and surgery to such persons as might be judged competent by "some of the wisest and gravest, or most
541
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINE
skilful in the same art." As early as 1647 a quarantine law, the first in America, had been enacted in order to keep out yellow fever, brought from the West Indies.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MEDICINCE
One of the chief events in medicine in Massachusetts in the eighteenth century was the introduction of inoculation of smallpox as a preventive of that disease, by Zabdiel Boylston (1679-1766) of Boston, incited and assisted by the Rev. Cotton Mather. William Douglass (1692-1752), a learned and highly educated physician from Scotland, organized the first medical society in the country, in Boston, in 1735. He suggested the formation of a board of physicians and surgeons to examine all practitioners of medicine as regarded their training and capabilities, an advance in the protection of the public that was destined to be postponed for some fifty years, when the Legislature conferred such power on the Massachu- setts Medical Society, in 1781. Dr. Douglass wrote the first adequate description of scarlet fever, was a voluminous writer on meteorological and statistical subjects, but had a quarrel- some temper. Cotton Tufts (1731-1815) of Weymouth, tried to organize a state medical society in 1765, the year be- fore the beginning of the New Jersey State Medical Society; later (1781) he was instrumental in starting and fostering the Massachusetts Medical Society.
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