Ministry and Meaning: A Religious History of Catholic Health Care in the United States

National Catholic Reporter, June 16, 1995 by Arthur jones

The photographs from the congregational archives are not just faded memories of Catholic women religious nurses on the frontier -- Sisters of Providence on horseback in the Northwest and Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word in a Houston smallpox hospital.

The pictures are also integral pieces of American history, including the history of U.S. medicine, as Christopher Kauffman explains in his new book, Ministry and Meaning: A Religious History of Catholic Health Care in the United States (Crossroad, 308 pages, $29.95).

Indeed, so much are they part of history, the nursing nuns of the Civil War have their own monument in Washington.

The early story is of hardships and endurance.

Some orders, such as the Alexian Brothers, brought medical experience with them from Europe; others, such as the Sisters of Charity who arrived in St. Louis in 1828 to staff the three-room, log-cabin hospital, knew little of nursing beyond rudimentary home care learned from their mothers.

Yet, as Kauffman unfolds the story of U.S. Catholic health care -- from its earliest down to the present, when the Catholic Health Association's reform plans dovetailed easily with the unsuccessful Clinton reform plans -- the speed with which experience was gained is impressive.

How some hospitals ended up where they did seemed quite providential. Mother Xavier Ross, a Sister of Charity of Leavenworth, Kan., was waiting for a train transfer in Cheyenne, Wyo., in 1875 when one of the two local priests recognized her. The county needed a hospital, the Union Pacific Railroad needed care for its workers, said Fr. Eugene Cusson, and within months, two nursing sisters arrived to establish the first hospital in the territory.

These days, under profit-or-perish pressures, some of the early foundation hospitals are no more.

Ministry and Meaning is more than nostalgia, however. It is a book to leave the reader realizing that the challenges for continued Catholic health care, though totally different now, are as daunting as ever if the ministry behind the medicine is to continue.