THE BUILDING OF HOSPITALS 91 



1904, the growth indicating the interest that is awakening to 

 the subject. 



But if scores of the larger institutions are springing up 

 for the consumptive, there are hundreds of individual sani- 

 tariums springing into form in the country, in the country 

 town, and in the still more crowded city. To-day there is 

 scarcely a case of tuberculosis in the United States which has 

 not been l^rought to a reahzation of its infectiousness and the 

 sufferer schooled to sanitary precautions against its spread. 

 Somebody has said of the small sanitariums in general that a 

 good doctor with one patient in a shanty in a pine forest 

 makes a sanitarium that is bound to grow. 



One of the proposed new experiments with the tubercu- 

 losis hospital movement is the establishment of the hospital 

 on a community basis which shall leave the patients to live in 

 the hospital and yet be within reach of their work or their 

 interests, whatever they may be. The idea is especially adapt- 

 ed to the small town and city where, owing to the absence of a 

 municipal water supply and modern drainage, the threat of 

 tuberculosis may be more than normal. In such a place the 

 establishment of a hospital, built after the best sanitary design, 

 offers a home better than the average boarding place, in which 

 the sufferers are under supervision and yet within reach of 

 their work, presupposing that under modern conditions the 

 sufferer from the disease will be discovered and admitted be- 

 fore he has lost vitality to the extent of disability. 



The small town which only a few years ago looked upon 

 the hospital as one of the institutions of the great city, com- 

 paring in a measure with a city prison and poorhouse, has 

 come to look upon the hospital as a necessity for even the small 

 community. There are hundreds of towns and cities, with 

 from 4,500 to 7,000 population, where the hospital is looked 

 upon to-day as one of the first institutions of the corporation. 

 The citizen of the small town has been educated to the hospital 

 method. He has learned that the home primarily is for well 

 persons, just as the modern hospital is pre-eminently the home 

 for the sick, and injured, and suffering. He has learned that 

 treatment for the suffering may be better administered and 

 more cheaply in the small hospital than m his home. He is 



