America's oldest hospital preserves the nation's history of medicine and health care

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: There’s a new museum in Philadelphia, but its building and mission date back to before this country was founded.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown went to see past and present meet at the Pennsylvania Hospital Museum, part of our ongoing coverage of health and arts for our Canvas series.

Man: Welcome to Pennsylvania Hospital Museum.

Jeffrey Brown: An old hospital, the oldest chartered hospital in the nation, celebrating its 275th anniversary.

Man: It was founded specifically as the first hospital in the colonies for the care of the poor.

Jeffrey Brown: And now a new museum.

Man: Everything you see is original.

Jeffrey Brown: Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hospital was founded in 1751 by Dr. Thomas Bond and none other than Benjamin Franklin for, as its charter put it, “the reception and cure of poor sick persons free of charge.”

Today, it continues as a high-tech teaching hospital, part of the larger University of Pennsylvania Health System. but its original Pine Building is now a museum preserving and displaying some of its rich history, an effort led by archivist and curator Stacey Peeples, who combed through boxes and old records for hidden and other treasures that tell the life of the institution.

By her own account, she was an unlikely person for the job.

Stacey Peeples, Archivist and Curator, Pennsylvania Hospital Museum: You know, I remember when I was younger and I was afraid to go into hospitals, right?

Jeffrey Brown: You? Yes.

Stacey Peeples: Like, there — I was. They’re scary places. If somebody had told me I would spend the next 25 years walking into a hospital, I would have laughed. But it’s when you feel that at a different level, when you experience the community that exists here…

Jeffrey Brown: And the history and everything that goes with it, yes.

Stacey Peeples: And the history of it — it all comes together.

Jeffrey Brown: Emphasize here the hospital’s long-running place in its community, its focus unusual for the time on maternity and mental health, the caring of soldiers from the Revolution on, pandemics from Yellow Fever in 1793 to COVID-19.

There’s a reconstruction of the hospital’s apothecary, a preserved medical library, the nation’s first, with books dating to the 18th century, and individual items, including the original petition for the hospital written by Franklin, and receipt books capturing details on staffing and inventories.

So it’s the life of an institution in a way you don’t usually see it.

Stacey Peeples: It is. You know, we don’t have a door that we can open and magically see what it would have looked like to be here. But when you see these records and you kind of think about people coming in, getting their pay, also interacting with the people who were dropping off the food for the hospital, the linens that we need, all of the activity that it would take to make this institution run every single day.

It is a beautiful window into that, probably the best window that we’re going to have.

Noah Wyle, Actor: Good vitals.

Jeffrey Brown: No, this isn’t “The Pitt,” which so intensely brings viewers inside a modern emergency room.

Noah Wyle: Good morning, Mr. String (ph). Do you want to go home?

Actor: Hell yeah.

Jeffrey Brown: Instead, the nation’s first surgical amphitheater dating to 1804, where a different kind of performance by surgeons teaching students took place in an earlier era.

Stacey Peeples: I like to say, what did surgeons do? They performed surgery in here.

Jeffrey Brown: They performed, literally performed, yes.

Stacey Peeples: Yes, indeed. They were performing because they had an audience. So unlike — yes.

Jeffrey Brown: OK, so it was for learning.

Stacey Peeples: Education, absolutely. So you would have people viewing so that they would be able to learn.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Of course, these surgeries were performed without anesthesia.

Stacey Peeples: We can take this person and we can start to remove layers all the way down to the skeleton.

Jeffrey Brown: Today, contemporary visitors can get inside bodies in less invasive ways through a high-tech Anatomage Table.

Another focus here highlighted for us by Pennsylvania Hospital CEO Alicia Gresham, the hospital’s role is a trailblazer in medicine.

Alicia Gresham, CEO, Philadelphia Hospital: This is a great example of not just pioneering the care and pioneering the science, but also creating space for leaders, women leaders, for women leaders of color.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s important for you to highlight.

Alicia Gresham: Exactly. It’s an important part of the history that we don’t often get a chance to talk about.

Jeffrey Brown: Most relevant, perhaps most urgent, the parallels to today, including issues of cost and access to medical care.

Alicia Gresham: When you think about care that was provided in the late 1700s, it was only to people — you could only get a doctor if you had money and the doctor would come to your house. And so when Dr. Thomas Bond thought about the idea of a public hospital, the idea was that now anybody could get care.

Jeffrey Brown: For archivist Stacey Peeples, that’s the point in connecting past and present.

Stacey Peeples: I want people to come in here, and I want them to have that kind of interaction. So if you’re looking at a document, what is something in there that you can take away from that, inspiring anyone to come in and to learn a little bit more about health care and about medicine and how that has evolved. So what has changed and what has not changed dramatically?

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the Pennsylvania Hospital Museum in Philadelphia.