My parents spent all too many days, especially during their last months, in Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital, of Whittier, California. Both eventually died there.
My granddaughter spent the whole of her brief mortal life in Florida Hospital Orlando, part of the health system of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, where the nursing staff and even some of the doctors were phenomenally kind and caring, unafraid to say that they were praying for her and for us.
Taken at his word, Christopher Hitchens’s dictum that “Religion poisons everything!” means that, with such institutions as these, religion has poisoned American health care.
And I’ve said nothing about places like New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York, Holy Cross Hospital and Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Loma Linda University Medical Center and St. Joseph Hospital in southern California, Houston Methodist, the Mount Sinai Medical System in New York, and a host of others.
And have you ever heard of names such as Good Samaritan Hospital and Bethesda Naval Hospital? Those names don’t come from the writings of Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens.
Would we really be better off if such places didn’t exist? Have they poisoned us?
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