Part 27

First, it has been a great delight to me, personally, to meet you Commanders of these various hospitals. I have a very much better idea of the kind of men that are caring for these institutions and wish to say to you that I am more than pleased with the capacity and the efficiency that you demonstrate. Your contact here with each other has helped you very greatly. To me the whole hospital question is visualized in a much broader way. I thought I had a fair conception of what this proposition meant, but I must say I have enlarged my horizon very materially. As for myself I have received an inspiration such as I have never had before to make of this hospitalization subject a matter for consideration and of engagement of a much higher type. With the idea of its immensity, with a better understanding of many of the details and requirements and difficulties, I myself go forth to the undertakings I have before me as the Chief Coordinator of this Board with much more determination than ever before, with an ambition that has never quite possessed me before, so I feel that I myself have been very greatly benefited.

There are some things you will take back with you out of this crowded program. As the days come and go you will have the experience of referring to this Conference as having given you new light and as having given you an assistance you hardly record today.

It is my own wish that we may be able to put in the hands of each of you quite extensive minutes of all of these proceedings. If I can bring that about in the course of a reasonable length of time, you shall be possessed of such a record.

I wish to thank the speakers for conforming so regularly to the suggestion as to time limit. I wish to thank you for the care with which you have prepared your papers and presented them. I wish to thank those of you who have participated in the discussions. I want to express my appreciation of those of you who have listened so intently and apparently with such interest.

I would be unfair to the occasion if I did not express my gratitude for the assistance that has been given us by the nurses in their association with us here.

One thing I would have you do. You are but single representatives of the institutions from which you come.

It would be somewhat selfish if you were to go home and bottle up within yourselves the experiences that you have had here and the observations you have made. Now, fellows, let me tell you what to do: Go back to your various fields. Call in your associates and your assistants, take up your whole administrative family and try to inject into them a little of the enthusiasm, a little of the spirit, a little of the determination; give to them some of the ideas you take away from here.

I want you to go while you are still under the influence of the inspiration of the occasion, and I want to urge that each of you, as soon as you get home, take up with your administrative family the various things that have been discussed here, and try to instill in them the same renewed earnestness and enthusiasm that you possess this evening, and convey to them for us, this Board of Hospitalization and the great President of this United States of America, Warren G. Harding, the assurance that he appreciates every effort that you are putting forth.

Coming from a doctor’s family, he realizes more fully than you can possibly guess the difficulties that are confronting you every day; and be assured that when you act upon your best judgment that you will find him standing by whatever you may have regarded as necessary to the bringing about of the end-results in this war veteran’s case.

Let me emphasize once more that the concern that the Administration has is not how you may entertain them while they are in the hospital, is not how easy and sympathetic you may be with them, but it is how you engender in them a spirit of determination to get back into the world again as productive citizens. That is your job.

In closing, let me say that at the suggestion of Colonel Patterson and the Veterans’ Bureau which we are serving, that we are hoping that somehow before another year shall have passed around that we will have a real place to which we may invite you to participate in the most interesting program that could possibly be produced. Fellows, I thank you for your presence.

COMMANDER BOONE: I am sorry we are not able to raise our glasses to a toast to the Chief Coordinator and the members of the Federal Board of Hospitalization. The least we can do is to stand for a rising vote of appreciation.

All stood up.

The meeting adjourned at 4:45 P.M.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Table of Contents added by transcriber. 2. Changed “FEDERAL BOARD OF HOSPITALIZATION” to “U.S. FEDERAL BOARD OF HOSPITALIZATION”. The “U.S.” was written in on the original draft. 3. Changed “distance between beds 3 feet” to “distance between beds of 3 feet”. 4. Changed “It takes an unusually patriotic citizen to $30 to $60 a month” to “It takes an unusually patriotic citizen to take $30 to $60 a month”. 5. Changed “We cannot get them admitted as irresponsibles by the Courts. We have no such thing as voluntary commitment” to “We cannot get them admitted as irresponsibles by the Courts. We have no such thing as involuntary commitment”. 6. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling. 7. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 8. Footnotes have been re-indexed using numbers. 9. Enclosed underlined text in _underscores_.