Hospital patients and institutional inmates in Chicago, 1880--1930

This thesis explores an unduly neglected yet vitally important subject in the history of hospitals: patients. Although much about them remains unclear, the knowledge on who they were is essential to the interpretation of what hospitals were because well into the 20th century hospital admission had as much to do with the person suffering from illness as to do with the illness itself. Hospital patients were to such an extent a socially designated group. This thesis seeks to understand who they were.;This thesis focuses on the patients in Presbyterian, Cook County, and Dunning Hospitals in Chicago from the late 19th to early 20th century. Dunning Hospital was a state mental institution; Cook County Hospital was a public hospital for the sick poor; and Presbyterian Hospital was a private hospital for the sick who could afford better accommodations. What makes those hospitals worthy of scrutiny is their close integration. Jury trials over the commitment of the allegedly insane took place in Cook County Hospital, which transported the defendants ruled insane to Dunning Hospital. Cook County and Presbyterian Hospitals faced each other from the opposite corners of an intersection. There the separation of the sick into paying, charity, and institutional patients was easily discernible due to the three hospitals' actual and virtual proximity.;This thesis examines such a sorting system of the sick to uncover what turned them into the patients in the three hospitals. Patterns gleaned from that system leave little doubt that demographic traits of the sick determined which hospital they were to be admitted to as much as the illnesses they were suffering from or their ability to pay for treatment. Demographic disparities in institutionalization similar to those observed in Chicago also appeared in many other places across the North. Demographic traits of the patients, however, hardly affected the outcome of hospitalization, further underscoring stark demographic disparities in hospital admission. This thesis thus brings to light the sorting system in Chicago that steered the sick to certain hospitals according, in no small part, to who they were.