© The Hospital Library ARLY hospital libraries existed, with one or two | exceptions, in private mental hospitals only, while today sanatoria for tubercular patients, children’s hos- me pitals and municipal general hospitals are demanding | not only books but libraries and library service. Doctors and nurses returned from the army to their fy home towns, remembered the organized libraries and me selected books, the bedside service, and the contented patients of war days and wondered why something of the sort would not work in city hospitals. Librarians who had served in the camps looked at the full shelves | of their home libraries and remembered how much “the boys” had liked those books when they were sick. So one of these librarians went to the superintendents of the six general hospitals in his city and offered to start a “drive” for permanent collections of books for each hospital, lend books from the public library, and pro- i vide a hospital librarian from his staff who would visit the wards and carry books to the bed patients. Every- one was enthusiastic, six book wagons of the A. L. A. pattern were bought, and Sioux City became the proud pioneer in the new type of “group” library ad- ministration whereby the hospital and the public library combine to furnish books to patients. Many other cities and towns have followed this plan with satisfac- tory results. This “group” system is undoubtedly the better method of providing book service in small hospitals, but the “unit” plan as followed by McLean, Bloom- ingdale, and Shepard and Enoch Pratt Mental Hospi- tals and the Massachusetts General and Lakeside Hos- pitals for general and surgical cases, is without ques- tion the ideal one for large hospitals which can afford it. Each of these hospitals has its own medical and general libraries, funds for- buying new books and a librarian attached to the staff. Lakeside Hospital has also a very fine collection of books on nursing and allied subjects for the use of its training school, and it draws heavily upon the Cleveland Public Library for supplementary reading, talks to nurses on books, and co-operation in every way along these lines. At Mc- Lean Hospital, before the war disrupted the training school, courses on books and reading and on fine arts were given by the librarian to the nurses as a part of the curriculum. As the value of hospital libraries is now fully ac- knowledged, their future seems assured. ‘The super- intendent of one general hospital remarked: ‘These libraries are wonderful things for the patients. We doctors used to think that when we had performed a successful operation our duty was ended. If the pa- tient died of homesickness after it, that was none of our concern. We knew that a contented mind was 0276 % J 76 ie REMOT E STOR, rw cop4 half the battle, but we took little pains to make him contented. Now we consider that the hospital must look after the mental health of a patient during con- valescence, and we have learned that wholesome books do more than almost any other one thing to keep him happy and help him get well.” If there were space enough I might tell of the book service in one of these big general hospitals; of the children eager for picture books and the story hour; of the foreigner, whose eyes light up pathetically at sight of his own language on the printed page; of the stu- dent enabled to keep on with his classes through books borrowed from school or public library; of the rough mechanic who begs for an Alger one day and an abstruse book on machinery the next; of the sailor who fretted for the smell of salt water till Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus and a book of Japan were put into his hands; of the blind man, tossing restlessly, lips moving, face tense and strained, hands clutching the rods of his cot, who relaxed completely when Treasure Island in braille was given him. ‘The work is so intensely hu- man, so full of pathos and humor, there 1s little wonder that librarians engaged in this service are an enthu- silastic group.—From The Hospital Library, edited by E. Kathleen Jones, formerly Librarian McLean Hos- pital, Waverly, Mass. Now printing. (Price, $2.25.) | Chicago THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION 1923 a ‘Qo1AJOS AIeIGH SUIMOYS ‘Tedsop] AU UOIsOg ey) JO JuaUNIedeq s.VoIp[Ty oy) Jo Jousoo Auuns YW 3 0112 061918832 UIA