12/16/2023 0 Comments Us army general orders alms![]() ![]() ![]() The Free African Society, a nondenominational organization founded for the benefit of free African Americans, recruited African American volunteers to provide nursing care for white citizens in the face of an acute shortage of nurses. The Free African Society provides organized nursing care to yellow fever victims The presence of an epidemic illness created demand for organized caregiving arrangements. In 1902, the institution received its final name: Philadelphia General Hospital.Ī yellow fever epidemic hits Philadelphia, the capital city, killing close to 10 percent of the populationĮpidemics such as yellow fever, smallpox, malaria, and typhus were common in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, often overwhelming the communities in which they occurred and straining the traditional sick care system that relied on family and friends as nurses. The Philadelphia Almshouse, one of the oldest and most famous, was reorganized and renamed several times. The frequent occurrence of epidemic illnesses drove local governments to establish such institutions in order to separate sick and potentially contagious individuals from the healthy population, even if it required public monies to do so. Later, many of these institutions shed their almshouse identities and assumed the status of general hospitals.ĭuring the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, providing institutions to care for the sick was in many ways more self-serving than altruistic. As many almshouse inmates were elderly, sick, very young, or otherwise infirm, the need emerged for a section of the almshouse devoted to caring for the ill. In more populous areas, such as Philadelphia, these institutions were part of the municipal almshouse, an establishment providing housing and living services for those unable to provide their own. In the early American colonial period, local governments established institutions to care for sick individuals without families or other means of care. Philadelphia opens an almshouse, which later becomes Philadelphia General Hospital ![]()
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