Transcript

Introduction and Setting the Stage

Music

Jake:
[0:05] Welcome to Hub History where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the Hub of the Universe.
This is episode 294 the rise and fall of Black Boston’s first hospital. Hi, I’m Jake.
This week, I’m talking about Plymouth Hospital, the South End institution that became the first training school for black nurses in segregated Boston.
I usually like to say that I don’t need to do anything special for Black History Month because I talk about Black history when it’s not February too.
But I just look back at the past year and I realized that I haven’t released an episode that’s primarily about black people since last February.
When I profiled two black restaurant tours.
This time, we’re gonna talk about a different type of entrepreneur, Doctor Cornelius Nathaniel Garland moved to Boston from the Deep South to seek opportunity.
But while he did find opportunity in the hub, he also found a deeply segregated medical establishment to fight back against this system and to provide opportunities for Black Bostonians in medicine.
He founded a hospital and nursing school within just a few years.
However, the most radical civil rights leader in Boston would accuse Garland of reinforcing the very same system of segregated medicine that he fought against.

Thanking Patreon Sponsors and the Cost of Producing the Podcast

 

[1:28] But before we talk about Doctor Garland in Plymouth Hospital, I just want to pause and thank everyone who sponsors us on Patreon.
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Now it’s time for this week’s main topic.

The Opening of Plymouth Hospital and Nurse Training School

 

[2:48] 116 years ago. On February 26th, 1908, the Boston Globe announced the opening of a new south end institution.

[2:58] Colored nurses school, new institution at 12 East Springfield Street established the efforts of Doctor CN Garland, the Plymouth Hospital and Nurse training school.
The first institution of its kind to be conducted by colored people in the city opened yesterday afternoon at 12 East Springfield Street.
Its establishment is due to the efforts of Doctor Cornelius in Garland.

[3:23] Today, the south end is one of the most expensive and exclusive neighborhoods in Boston, full of trendy restaurants and boutiques, but also home to some of the greatest wealth disparity in the city.
Its quiet streets are lined with trees and brownstones, many of which are multimillion dollar condos.
Now it wasn’t always like that though.
As recently as the 19 nineties, it was a transitional neighborhood at best and a century ago.
It was very different in a 2014 article in the journal of the bu School of Medicine Historical Society.
Alison Barnett describes the neighborhood as it would have existed when Plymouth Hospital opened.
East Springfield Street is a tree lined block between Washington Street and Harrison Ave where it meets Boston City Hospital.
Plymouth Hospital was closer to Washington Street.
The majority of property owners on East Springfield Street were Irish with some Eastern European Jews and the south end as a whole was a mix of Irish Canadian, Syrian, Lebanese, Greek, German and eastern European Jewish immigrants, a large lodging house district with many charities and settlement houses.
Garland may have chosen the location because the L an elevated train that started running down Washington Street in 1901 made for easy access.

[4:43] According to a 2012 article in the Bay State Banner, there are about 20 black doctors in Boston.
When Garland arrived here, many of them were graduates of Harvard Medical School and most of their practices were concentrated in the south end.
By 1908, the black population of the south end in lower Roxbury was growing fast as the great migration of black families from the deep south to the northeast and the Rust Belt was just getting started.
Black-owned medical practices were popping up throughout the neighborhood.
Some of which were also led by doctors who trained at the college of physicians and surgeons on nearby Shamed Ave.

[5:20] On July 30th 1909, on July 30th 1909, the Nashville Globe, so not our local Boston Globe reported on the meeting of the National Medical Association, which was the black answer to the segregated American Medical Association, under a headline proclaiming Boston to be the Mecca for Negro doctors.
The paper gave an extensive overview of Boston’s importance to medical history and a guide to the historic sites that visiting doctors could take in along with the travel guide.
The paper gave this overview of the conference itself which was to be hosted in part by Garland.
At his Plymouth Hospital, arrangements are being made for operations and clinics and well equipped hospitals among which are the Massachusetts General Hospital, the oldest of all the Boston City Hospital where after the clinics luncheon will be served complimentary to the visiting doctors, the Plymouth Hospital, the Blossom Street Children’s Hospital and the Boston dispensary and the Saint Monica’s Consumptive Hospital.

Boston as a Mecca for Black Doctors and Garland’s Role

 

[6:23] The scientific exhibits, the clinical exhibits and the practical clinical demonstrations will prove sufficient scientific entertainment to well repay attendance.
Harvard Medical School and Tufts Medical School with their well equipped pathological laboratories will be thrown open to the profession for inspection.

[6:42] At that same conference, Garland was elected as Secretary of the National Medical Association as reported in our own local Boston Globe.
On August 27th, the Surgical section of the National Association held its meeting in the morning, Dr AM Curtis of Washington, presiding, Doctor George C Hall of the Provident Hospital of Chicago and Doctor Willis E Stirs of Decatur Alabama were elected as members of the executive Committee of the National Medical Association for the Surgical Section.
Doctor CN Garland of Boston was elected secretary.
A surgical clinic was held at the Plymouth Hospital 12 East Springfield Street.

[7:23] Now Boston may have been a mecca for black doctors but the Nashville Globe was grading on a curve at the time, the south end was full of black medical practices now joined by a hospital and nursing school.

The Segregated Medical Establishment and the Need for Black Institutions

 

[7:37] However, these institutions existed for a reason with Alison Barnett writing.
While other small hospitals that began in the south end Children’s Hospital, New England deaconess and the free hospital for women may have benefited from their proximity to City Plymouth Hospital could not.
In 1908, Boston City Hospital was the city’s main teaching hospital where both nurses and physicians learned their trades.

[8:06] In her biography of William Monroe Trotter titled Black Radical past podcast guest, Carrie Greenidge describes why aspiring nurses in the neighborhood surrounding the hospital couldn’t train there unlike the New England Hospital for women and Children.
However, Boston City hospital’s nurse training school was segregated despite early protestations that such segregation did not exist.
Boston City’s administrators and trustees insisted the colored applicants were only prevented from training in their facilities due to the objections of white students and the need to maintain order.
And so by the 19 twenties, Boston City Hospital had the distinction of being located in an increasingly black area of the city where the only black people in the hospital were either cleaning staff or patients.

[8:55] Unlike in the South, this segregation in Boston was enforced more by custom than by legislation making it an attractive destination for internal migrants. At least on paper.

Early Life and Education of Dr. Cornelius Nathaniel Garland

 

[9:06] At first, I couldn’t find out much about Cornelius in Garland’s early life.
According to his obituary in the journal of the National Medical Association, Garland was born in Alabama.
Then he moved to Raleigh North Carolina for medical school.
Luckily, I stumbled across a fantastic profile for WBR written by Lisa Gordon who interviewed Garland’s granddaughter shortly before her death.
In early 2023 granddaughter, Joan Rapper said that Cornelius was the youngest of 12 Garland Children.
His father was a coffin maker and a carpenter and the family moved around a lot while Cornelius was young with financial help from a white family that he worked for.
Cornelius. Garland was able to attend college at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina.
After completing his studies there, he went on to Shaw University in Raleigh for medical School.
According to a brief profile in the 1920 issue of the N A AC PS magazine, the crisis.
Doctor Garland studied at Livingstone College, received the degree of Doctor of Medicine from Shaw University in 1901 and went to England for a postgraduate course in a London Hospital.
Two years later in Boston, Massachusetts, he began the practice of his profession.
And in 1908, he purchased a dwelling which he converted into a small hospital.

Garland’s Public Service: Boston City Council and Plymouth Hospital

 

[10:27] In 1906. Garland stood for election to the Boston City Council for Ward 10 but he didn’t win soon after he found another form of public service in Plymouth Hospital.
In her chapter about the hospital carry Greenidge notes when Cornelius E Garland opened the Plymouth Hospital and nurse training school at the corner of East Springfield Street in 1908.
The steady influx of black and brown migrants from the south and the Caribbean was already a crashing wave that transformed the granite based walk ups and brick sidewalks into the famous Negro district of the 19 twenties.
The three story brownstone at number 12, surrounded by over 1000 square feet of lawn and pavement had been a private home.
But by the time Garland admitted Plymouth’s first patients. In late 1908, the oak floors and pocket doors that were once bedrooms and parlors held adjustable hospital beds in glass medicine bottles.

[11:26] Plymouth Hospital and nurse training school was greater Boston’s first and for nearly 20 years, the only black-owned medical facility with 17 patient beds and a steady rotation of talented doctors from around the world, except for the Boston College of Physicians and Surgeons on Shame Avenue.
However, racial discrimination prevented most black doctors and nurses from internships at local hospitals or appointments.
On the medical staff of Massachusetts General Hospital or Boston lying in, the Plymouth Hospital and nurse training school then filled a demand within the South end that went unmet by Boston City Hospital, the main facility for the city’s poor and working class since its opening in 1864.

[12:10] So Plymouth Hospital was able to fill a demand that went unmet by city hospital training black nurses while also providing free and subsidized care to the South end community.
Doctor Garland could provide these free and discounted services through a community partnership that replaced the revenue that full price customers would have brought in.

Community Partnership and Support for Plymouth Hospital

 

[12:30] This partnership was described in the February 26th, 1908 edition of the Boston Globe.
In the article about the hospital’s opening, in addition to several wards, there is a nurse’s ward, an outpatients ward, an operating room, an office and a dining room.
The wards are named after the church organizations which contributed to their furnishings and will continue to maintain them.
The words are to be known as Taborn Love and Charity, Columbus, Ave am E Zion Church, Emma Spiller, Mount Hebron and Charles Street AM E Church.

[13:08] As you can tell from those names, each patient ward was supported by a south end church and they all held fundraisers to ensure that their patients would have all the medical supplies.
They need comfortable accommodations and appropriate furnishings.
For example, the May 14th edition of the Globe in that same year included notice of one of the fundraisers in aid of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church ward in the Plymouth Hospital, West Concord Street.
A concert was held last evening in the Columbus Ave AM E Zion Church under the direction of Leroy J Johnson.

[13:44] Along with cash, the community supported Plymouth Hospital with in kind donations as reported also in the Boston Globe on March 31st 1909, instead of a baby shower or a wedding shower.
The hospital held a different kind of shower.
The nurses of the Plymouth Hospital and nurse training school 12 East Springfield Street had a linen shower at the hospital.
Yesterday afternoon and evening, the hospital was visited by a large number of people who brought with them presents of linen.

[14:16] That’s one way to make sure you have clean sheets on November 1st 1909.
The globe reported on a meeting of the Plymouth Linda Hands Society, another community organization that was founded to support the hospital, a public meeting which crowded the Columbus Ave African Methodist Episcopal Zion church was held yesterday afternoon in the interest of the Plymouth Hospital on East Springfield Street under the auspices of the Plymouth Linda Hand Club.
In her book, Carrie Greenidge notes that one of the founders of that Linda Hand Society was William Monroe Trotter, which you’ll find as funny as I do in a few minutes.

Generous Donations and Nurse Training School

 

[14:57] The Boston Globe reported on the first annual report of the Plymouth Hospital on September 20th 1909 showing how the contributions of the Linda hand club churches and individual community members supported the work of the hospital.
The report shows that generous donations in regard to equipment have been given to the institution by colored people and by their churches and various associations, in the nurse training school.
22 students have nearly completed the first year’s course.
The hospital is treated free of charge. 100 16 patients, there have been 52 cases in free district work cared for by the nurses in the school.
The expenses were $2093.30 cash received $1323.

[15:48] Even before graduating its first nurses. Plymouth Hospital was making a difference in the community having treated 100 16 people who might not have received care otherwise.

[15:59] Finally, after a two year course of study, the hospital was ready to send its graduates into the world to care for their communities.
On July 1st 1910, the Boston Globe reported on the graduation ceremony for the first seven nurses to complete the training program at Plymouth, the Plymouth Hospital and training school for nurses held its first graduating exercises yesterday afternoon in Lorrimer Hall, Tremont Temple building, diplomas being presented to seven graduates by Councilor Thomas F Kinney, acting for Mayor Fitzgerald before an audience that filled the hall.
The Plymouth Hospital and Training School is on West Springfield Street and is an institution founded and supported by colored people in Boston and vicinity, since it’s been in operation.
It has done splendid work among the people. It was founded to aid.
The exercises were opened at 330 with a selection from an orchestra.
The invocation was by Reverend Doctor George A mcguire of Saint Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge who also presented the class with emblems and pronounced the benediction.
The commencement address on the real mission of the truly trained nurse was delivered by Reverend GF Durgan of the Bromfield Street Methodist Episcopal church.

Celebrating the First Graduation of Plymouth Hospital Nurses

 

[17:19] Doctor Garland himself had the last word at the first graduation.
I believe the Plymouth Hospital and Training school has put out a class of nurses that will be a benefit to the community.
The institution exists in order to meet a long felt need.
Our colored women are scarcely admitted generally in the hospitals of the state.
This condition should not properly exist and there is left nothing else for us than to have a training school where young colored women can become trained nurses.
As there is a demand today for skilled colored nurses.

A Hospital That Grows to Serve the Excluded Black Community

 

[17:54] Each year, the hospital grew, taking in more nursing students and providing needed medical and surgical care to a black community that was excluded from many other hospitals.

Plymouth Hospital: Providing Care for the Black Community

 

[18:07] In her article, Alison Barnett wrote from 1909 to 1914, 100 35 male and 457 female patients were admitted as doctor Garland was a surgeon.
Surgical patients were the majority and there were many appendectomies, hysterectomies and tonsillectomies.
600 people including Children were seen in the free outpatient department and 200 cared for by nurses doing free district work or home visits into the homes of the poor and needy.
So at the height of its enrollment, the Plymouth Hospital offered both free care for a predominantly black community and the only opportunity for black nurses to get professional training in Boston.
So how could anybody have a problem with that?
Well, for that, we need to reintroduce William Monroe Trotter.
Monroe Trotter was born into black intellectual royalty.
His father, James was one of the first black officers in the US Army serving with distinction in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, Monroe grew up in Hyde Park where he was the valedictorian of Hyde Park High, then attended Harvard, graduating magnum laud and finishing his master’s in 1895.
He made a name for himself by confronting Booker T Washington and demanding more radical action to further civil rights than Washington advocated for.

[19:32] He was an early ally of Web. Du Bois co-founded the Niagara movement with him and contributing to the early development of the N A AC P.
By the time Doctor Garland opened his hospital, Trotter was at the helm of the influential Boston Guardian newspaper.
And he had a reputation as one of the most radical black voices in the country.

[19:54] Also had a reputation as someone whose uncompromising nature made him almost impossible to work with.
We have two past episodes about Trotter which I’ll link to in the show notes this week, Trotter had no patience for Booker T Washington and assimilationist policies which he saw as maintaining segregated institutions while promoting gradual economic uplift.
When Monroe Trotter looked at an all black hospital in the south end, all he saw was one more segregated institution keeping black people down.
Trotter took to the pages of the Guardian in 1908 to oppose the new hospital.
Dividing opinion among his readers in black radical carry Greenidge notes, many new Negroes including the usually supportive Negro world criticized Trotter’s efforts.
The Guardian they claimed was out of touch with the needs of the new Negro.
Boston Quixote and famous tilt against segregation in form of a proposed hospital by race doctor screamed the New York Age headline.

[20:57] In an oral history interview given in 1976 a nurse who trained under Garland 50 years earlier, shared her perspective on Trotter’s campaign against Plymouth Hospital.
Trotter. And them fought against the thing all the time because he felt it was segregation for a black person to start anything in Boston.
He couldn’t see that Irish Italians Jews were starting things but he fought doctor Garland like anything because he was the one that threatened Booker T Washington when he came here.
Despite this growing perception of trotter, even within the black community as an obstructionist, other community leaders saw the necessity of Plymouth Hospital with Alison Barnett quoting Mel Nia CASS as saying, Garland wanted a place where colored people could go and freely train.
We needed that hospital if we had put our forces behind it, white and black would have gone there.
It was a monument to Black people’s ingenuity.

[21:54] Carrie Greenich continues. But Trotter’s Citizens Committee which included most of the black physicians and nurses whose early careers were stymied by racial discrimination in the city did not see Plymouth Hospital as the problem.
After all, many of them worked at Plymouth Hospital over the years serving the patients that Boston City ignored and teaching the students that few facilities agreed to train.
Rather many on the Citizens Committee argued segregation and persistent health inequity in one of the premier medical centers in the country represented all of the institutionalized inequities caused by racial segregation.
Black patients needed a hospital that met their needs but in providing them Plymouth reified the very discriminations that made it necessary in the first place.
This was not the fault of Garland or his staff, but of segregation itself, lack of quality equipment and limited funds meant that black patients suffered not because Garland and his staff didn’t care but because the city’s other hospitals received resources that Plymouth did not.
For instance, when one patient suffered a gruesome arm injury, Garland lacked the staff to properly restrain the woman as her broken bones split through the skin and nearly caused toxic shock.

[23:10] Garland and his nurses managed to set the brake but without the equipment of Boston City or Massachusetts General, the set led to further injury.
The woman was forced to get additional treatment at Boston City Hospital where they managed to save her arm but not without significant nerve damage.
She sued doctor Garland for $600 which the Massachusetts Superior Court upheld since Garland could only plead that outdated equipment and lack of funds to replace it resulted in this mistake.

[23:40] In 1928 Garland made an offer to buy another larger hospital facility in Roxbury.

Plymouth Hospital’s Struggles and Closure

 

[23:46] He needed a more modern operating room to meet state regulations and stay in business.
According to that same 1976 oral history by a nurse who trained at Plymouth.
In the mid twenties, the state changed the standards for nursing education in about 1924.
And Garland’s Hospital was in danger of losing its accreditation.
The year that I went in there, they had told him that he had to get it enlarged and get more equipment and pick up the standards more because we wouldn’t be able to take the State Board.

[24:16] That warning came true in 1928 when Plymouth Hospital was forced to close Monroe Trotter took to the pages of the Guardian yet again to try to block Garland’s purchase of a Roxbury hospital.
While at the same time pressuring Boston City Hospital to begin accepting black nursing students.
Carrie Greenidge writes, a writer accused anti hospitals agitators like trotter of objecting to Garland’s plan only after the doctor tried to purchase a larger facility in Roxbury to accommodate the increase in patients and the demand for a modern operating room.
In the end, Trotter’s effort was successful and doctor Garland was forced to close Plymouth Hospital when he couldn’t expand into a modern or, Brookline historian and past podcast guest, Ken Liss describes how the Garland family moved from a brownstone that they purchased in 1908 to nearby Brookline after the hospital closed.
Cornelius and Margaret Garland lived on West Canton Street in the south end on the edge of the back bay and a 15 minute walk from Plymouth Hospital in December 1928.
After the closing of the hospital, they purchased a newly built home at 173 Mason terrace in Brookline.
The deed was in Margaret’s name.
Garland continued to practice medicine in Boston out of an office at the West Canton Street brownstone while renting the rest of the former home to tenants.

[25:45] Under pressure from William Monroe Trotter and others.
BC H started admitting black nurse trainees in 1929 and black medical interns in 1932 the first black doctor joined the staff of Boston City Hospital in 1949.

[26:02] Doctor Garland continued to practice medicine and he served as a civil defense official in Brookline during World War two.
Margaret died in 1945 and on June 28th, 1952 William Monroe Trotter’s old newspaper.
The Boston Guardian ran an obituary for Doctor Cornelius in Garland at the top of the front page.
He was 76 years old when he passed.
The funeral was held at Ebenezer Baptist church. And Doctor Garland is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery to learn more about Doctor Cornelius Garland in Plymouth Hospital.
Check out this week’s show notes at hubor.com/two 94.
I’ll have links to all the sources I quoted from this week. There will be a ton of contemporaneous globe articles as well as articles from other papers including the Guardian and the Nashville Globe.
Along with newspaper articles. We’ll also provide links to Garland’s obituary in the journal of the National Medical Association.
Alison Barnett’s profile in the journal of the Bu School of Medicine Historical Society and in oral history with Lucille Allen who studied under Garland.
I’ll also include a link where you can support your local bookstore and the show by purchasing Carrie Greenidge biography of William Monroe Trotter.

[27:21] This week. You should also be sure to read Lisa Gordon’s reporting about the Plymouth Hospital for WBUR, which she was inspired to write after realizing that her apartment was part of doctor Garland’s old hospital, and which culminated with her interviewing Garland’s granddaughter Joan.
It’s a really great article and it tipped me off to this show topic.
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Wrapping up and sending out with a blooper mishap

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Jake:
[28:20] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listeners.
I’m gonna send you out this week with this blooper where I kind of accidentally made a wrap out of an early 20th century newspaper article, in aid of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church ward in the Plymouth Hospital. What?
In aid of the African Method in aid of the African Methodist Episcopal church, in aid of the African Method in aid of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church ward in the Plymouth Hospital, West Concord Street, and the aid of the African Methodist Episcopal, either of the African Methodist Episcopal, E of the African E of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church.
Aid of the African in the aid of the African Methodist Episcopal in the aid of the African Methodist.
Yeah, it’s almost there.