Hospitals Exclude Patients with "Incurable Diseases"

Boy have times changed.  In the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Emily Abel describes "American Hospitals and Dying Patients before World War II."  Very interesting is her explanation of how hospitals excluded patients with "incurable diseases" both by not admitting them in the first place and by dumping them onto public hospitals (in a pre-EMTALA world).  For example, noting that some patients had died soon after admission, Pennsylvania Hospital urged "physicians to pay strict attention to rules that say no incurable patients can be admitted."