Public fl ealtlz and Social Welfare Work
in the memory of Galvestonians. A local newspaper wittingly commented at the time that no man was sick, and that only "Coffin-makers are starv- ing." The Hospital "had risen," notes Dr. Wilkinson in a history of the institution written in 1880, "within the short space of sixty days from a hospital with one invalid to a fast-filling, well-paying home for the sick, numbering on its books an average list of twenty-five to thirty patients a day." 11 To meet the demand for additional space required by the rapid increase c,f patients, a new frame building was erected in 1872, measuring eighty by forty feet. Two years later, in October, 1874, plans were made for another brick building. The Sisters sent an agent on the nineteenth to Houston to buy half a million bricks for its erection. Shortly aftenvards work was begun on a structure whose front measured 150 feet. Slowly it rose to three stories in height, a handsome building in Renaissance style with Mansard roof. Work was completed early in the summer of 1876. It had twenty-seven private rooms with a bed capacity of 150. The attractive and substantial home for the sick brought the total bed capacity of St. Mary's Infirmary to 250, which was in operation until seriously damaged by the terrific hurricane of 1900, when the old plant had to be largely rebuilt. But as late as 1941, the old structure built in 1875 stood as the center of the present hospital group, "a monument to the constructive genius that first erected it." 19 It is of interest to note that in 1875, the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word of Galveston paid, in a way, their deep debt of gratitude to France and Lyons, whence the first members came, by sending back Sisters M. Angelic Devaux and M. St. Laurent Bemechere to open a hospital in Bron, in the outskirts of Lyons, France. It has become itself the independent Motherhouse of several foundations which in the course of time have given their loving care to the people of France. Thus, Sister Angelic, who had come to Galveston in 1869 to join the new com- munity, had served as the third superioress, and had been one of the founders of St. Therese Hospital in Hearne, Texas, now had also the unique experience of returning to her motherland to carry to it the bless- ings of modem hospitalization, and to found a Novitiate for an inde- pendent house at Villeurbonne in the suburbs of Lyons. Years later, in 1894, it was at Villeurbonne that the Bishop Dubuis
18 C. H. Wilkinson, History of St. ,J/ary's lflfirmary, GaJveslo11, 1880. 1 9 Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, Diamund Jubilu, 36-37.
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