90th anniversary flashback: Journey to Pavilion K reaches its climax

As the JGH’s 90^th anniversary approaches, JGH News today looks back at: 

• The first day of patient care in the newly opened Pavilion K in 2016
• Surgery in the 1930s and ’40s
• The modest fund-raiser whose nickels and dimes helped build the JGH
• Identification bracelets for newborns in the hospital’s early years 

Four new archival items appear every Tuesday in the 90 days leading up to the 90^th anniversary on October 8. Everything that’s been published so far can be found in the JGH News archive.

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In 2016, after a decade of planning, years of construction, months of painstaking preparation, weeks of simulation exercises and a day of extremely intense activity, Pavilion K became the new home of Intensive Care, Coronary Care, Neonatal Intensive Care, the Family Birthing Centre, the operating rooms and numerous other units and services.

The largest, most ambitious and most complicated expansion project in the history of the JGH reached a climax on January 24, with the transfer of 203 patients to their new rooms in just 5½ hours.

Occurring nearly two years after the Emergency Department had been relocated to the ground floor of Pavilion K, the move instantly transformed the new wing into the focal point of the hospital’s critical-care, surgical and birthing activities.

Crucial to the success of the new facility has been the luxury of space—space for all patients to have a room of their own, space for several relatives to visit a patient in full privacy, space for staff and life-saving equipment to cluster easily around a patient’s bed, space for picture windows that provide a crucial, psychological boost of light and airiness for patients (in their rooms) and staff (in their lounges).

For numerous employees, the switchover was also an emotional event. That’s why, in the days leading up to the January move, a multitude of hand-written goodbye messages adorned walls and posters in the legacy building.

In the end, it was all a matter of perspective. As one message noted (in quoting a Beatles song) on the wall of the old ICU: “You say goodbye, I say hello—hello, hello.”

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Taking surgery into the future

The garb and appearance of surgeons and surgical nurses of the 1930s and ’40s may seem a little odd to 21^st-century eyes.

What really mattered, however, was that within the first decade of the launch of the JGH, the hospital was already providing patients with the most advanced treatment and the most up-to-date surgical techniques of that era.

This tradition continues today with the introduction of robot-assisted surgery and many other digital wonders.

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Taube Kaplan, modest fund-raiser par excellence

Only the self-effacing personality of Taube Kaplan kept her from being prominently celebrated during her lifetime as a “rank-and-file” founder of the JGH.

Today she is remembered as one of the earliest and most important grass-roots fundraisers, as well as a supporter of the medical clinics that preceded the hospital.

Mrs. Kaplan and her working-class family lived on Cadieux Street (since renamed de Bullion Street), where she supplemented her husband’s meager income by tutoring boys in Hebrew and religious studies.

Despite her family’s dire financial situation, Mrs. Kaplan believed her life’s mission was to help create and expand medical facilities for Montreal’s Jews. This led her to become one of the most notable fundraisers for the Herzl Dispensary, which opened in 1912 and served as a forerunner of the Jewish General Hospital.

In the 1920s, Mrs. Kaplan became convinced that only a general hospital could meet the special needs of the city’s Jews. Once again, she tramped through the streets—including in the poorest Jewish neighbourhoods—at all hours of the day and night, and in all types of weather, to collect pennies, nickels and dimes from anyone with anything to spare.

When the hospital opened, Allan Bronfman, founding President of the JGH, offered to name a ward after Mrs. Kaplan, but she refused the honour. She entered the Montreal Hebrew Old People’s and Sheltering Home in 1938 and died there in quiet near-anonymity two years later.

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Bracelets for newborns

During the JGH’s early years, newborn babies were sometimes identified by personalized bracelets whose lettered beads were strung by nursery staff.

A (misspelled) bracelet, which Ina Zaritsky donated to the JGH Archives, was placed on her wrist shortly after her birth in 1942.