Health Care and Hospitals

Hospitals have always existed with the purpose of facilitating health care. However, our methods to amend suffering of the ill and wounded have improved dramatically in the last century. Unlike modern hospitals, alleviated by the help of revolutionary medicines such as penicillin and anesthesia, hospitals one hundred years ago were forced to proceed with unconventional methods of practice. The changes that have been implemented have served to produce more reputable results.

Some of the very first executions of health care were provoked by the church. Public health and religion coincided, creating negligence in the actual curing of diseases. All primary actions were influenced heavily by the belief that the job was ultimately left for God to complete. Treatments would mainly include several reverent acts of prayer without the patient undergoing any further ministration. Hospitals would be more accurately described as a place for one to go to die (Mohr, 1999).

Health care was first elicited as more of an experimentation towards patients. Without our advancements in science and education, the treatments issued often endangered the patients even further. To prevent the spreading of infection limbs were regularly amputated. Instead of using reformed anesthesia, chloroform was administered to render the patient unconscious. This resulted in several cases of overdose and death, forcing them to endure intense pain and agony to avoid anesthetics.

Our advancements in healthcare have been holistic. Psychiatric care facilities of the 19th century were abhorrently inhumane. The hospitals were institutional prisons for the mentally ill, seeking more to confine them from the general public than to minimize their discomforts. Treatments ranged in severity, escalating as far as to be considered torturous for the patients. It was common for them to inject patients with large amounts of insulin and prefrontal leucotomy (Brunton, n.d.), or conduct electroshock therapy