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P1'bli& H ealtlt and Social Welfare Work
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tion of the entire city. It is maintained by a corps of over fifty Sisters. It has accommodations for more than three hundred patients. The Santa Fe Hospital. r89r. Employees of the Santa Fe Railroad had for years been receiving hospital treatment at St. Mary's Infirmary in Galveston. This presented the inconveniences of distance; patients had to travel far for treatment. At the suggestion of Doctor Wilkinson, the company planned to establish a hospital exclusively for the employees m a more centrally located city like Temple. The officials were anxious, however, to secure the gentle and kind ministrations of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. They applied to Mother M. Augustine Edwards in Galveston for aid, who readily gave her consent, and in February, 1891, five Sisters accompanied Dr. Wilkinson to Temple to prepare a small frame building for a hospital. This was opened formally in June and has since become the well-known institution it is today. The Sisters' devotion to the care of the sick is largely responsible for its success. When they first went to Temple, and for many years after, the Sisters endured a great inconvenience in maintaining the spiritwal exercises their state of life requires and from which they draw the greatest strength for their work. The scarcity of priests made it necessary to attend the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the parish Church. Not until 1930 did they have the satisfaction of securing the services of a private chaplain to say Mass daily and minister to the spiritual needs of the hospital. 25 Sured Heart Hospital, Orange, r892. Hardly had Mother M. Augus- tine sent five Sisters to Temple than she found herself besieged by an insistent request from Doctor Hadras, the son of a prominent Galveston physician and friend of St. Mary's Infirmary, who was practicing medi- cine in Orange, Texas. Reluctantly and against her better judgment, she hesitatingly agreed to send a few Sisters to establish another hospital. Early in February, 1892, three Sisters from Galveston opened Sacred Heart Hospital in Orange under the direction of Mother Joseph. Its patronage was confined shortly to the employees of the lumber company :md their families, instead of being used by the patients of all physicians in the town. The Sisters were reluctant to give up the effort and tried to run a school in connection with the hospital. The revenue from both was insufficient to keep up the work. Because of this lack of general support. and because there was no prospect of the Sisters having the Sacrifice of the Mass offered regularly in the new hospital, Mother Augustine with-
2SSi!-ter M. C. Shelly, op. cit., 19-20; Diamond /11bilee, 41.
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