During the seventeenth century, urban London was growing enormously, yet there were only two hospitals-St. Bartholomew's and St. Thomas's. The demands made upon these two institutions gradually resulted in an important change in function. Instead of caring for all patients, they shifted their emphasis to patients who could be cured, leaving the incurables to asylums and prisons. In 1700, St. Thomas's orders stated flatly: "No incurables are to be received"-a harsh order, but one with the encouraging implication that medicine was beginning to divide its clientele into those who could be helped, and those who could not. The situation was made more humane a few years later when a wealthy merchant, Sir Thomas Guy, financed one of the first private, voluntary hospitals to care for all patients, curable or not.

By now the hospital was becoming demonstra-bly more modern in purpose, but it remained a place to be feared and shunned. George Orwell notes that "if you look at almost any literature before the latter part of the nineteenth century, you find that a hospital is popularly regarded as much the same thing as a prison, and an old-fashioned, dungeon-like prison at that. A hospital is a place of filth, torture, and death, a sort of antechamber to the tomb. No one who was not more or less destitute would have thought of going into such a place for treatment."

Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that the first American colonists were in no hurry to build hospitals.

Although there was only one physician among the original passengers on the Mayflower, generally speaking the early immigrants to Massachusetts were remarkably well educated. According to one estimate, in 1640 there was an Oxford or Cambridge graduate for every two hundred and fifty colonists. This may have been the reason why Massachusetts had the first college (Harvard, 1636), the first printing press (in Cambridge, 1639), and the first newspaper in the Colonies (Boston, 1704).