“While few know this history, health care has gotten so far
away from the notion of caring for the population of our state that we need a
reminder of why our growing health care system was created in the first place.”

After breakfast with a colleague and a visit with my
octogenarian mother, I headed north on Marquette Street from Davenport towards
Interstate 80 and home. Marquette takes me past my birthplace where Mercy
Hospital stood a few yards from the road. The building where I was born is
gone and is now a construction site where workers were hanging vast expanses of
glass on a new building on Friday. According to the sign, the new building
would be home to yet another medical group.

As I crested the hill, on the left was the wrought iron
fence around the
cemetery where Mother Mary Borromeo Johnson of the Sisters of Mercy is
buried. Mother Borromeo and four other sisters opened the first hospital in
Iowa. They admitted its first patient on December 8, 1869 in Davenport. It is
noteworthy that the medical staff was not organized until after the
hospital opened. The hospital was established to serve the “neglected insane”
and the “sick poor.” For that, they did not need a medical staff right away. In
1873, Mother Borromeo established an emergency clinic in downtown Davenport to
serve cholera victims during the epidemic. Today one can still see the unmarked
mass grave of some of its victims. In some ways, the Sisters of Mercy were the
public health system during this cholera epidemic.

In 1873, Mother Borromeo and three other sisters arrived in
Iowa City and opened the second hospital in Iowa. Mercy Hospital was to serve
as a clinical setting for the University of Iowa Medical College. When we look
at the medical complex that has grown in Iowa City to be the University of Iowa
Hospitals and Clinics, the Veterans Administration Hospital and Mercy Hospital,
it is hard to imagine those
four sisters riding from the train station sitting on bags of grain in a
farm wagon to open the hospital. When the H1N1 ethics
committee was counting the number of medical service providers for vaccine distribution
last year, we figured that there were some fifteen thousand of them in Johnson
County. The health care system has grown since that initial wagon trip.

The Sisters of Mercy are no longer directly involved in
managing the health care enterprise that their early efforts helped spawn in Iowa. There
was talk about moving the cemetery where Mother Borromeo is buried in 1994 when Genesis Health System assumed
management of the Davenport hospital from the Sisters of Mercy. I am
glad they didn’t. While few know this history, health care has gotten so far
away from the notion of caring for the population of our state that we need a
reminder of why our growing health care system was created in the first place.
Sometimes it seems like only a few of us remember the work of Mother Borromeo
and her sisters.

As Leonard Cohen wrote of the Sisters of Mercy,
“If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn, they
will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.” Their work now belongs to us.

If you get a chance, read Sister Mary Brigid Conlon R.S.M.’s
From Obscurity to Distinction: the Story of Mercy Hospital. A few
copies are still available in thrift shops and on Amazon.com.

More importantly, for what must seem like the hundredth time, contact your US
Congressman and Senators and urge them to do something to reform the broken
health care system. If not now, then when?

~Paul
Deaton is a native Iowan living in rural Johnson County and weekend
editor of Blog for Iowa. He is also a member of Iowa Physicians for
Social Responsibility and Veterans for Peace. E-mail Paul Deaton

**BFIA ACTION ALERT**

Click on the links to write our elected officials now and ask them to vote for the health care reform bills before the congress. If we don't do this now, then when?

US Senator Chuck Grassley

US Senator Tom Harkin

First District Congressman Bruce Braley

Second District Congressman Dave Loebsack

Third District Congressman Leonard Boswell

Fourth District Congressman Tom Latham

Fifth District Congressman Steve King