I wrote this brief history of Queen's Medical Center in the comments section to one of the Limbaugh threads, but I thought it was probably worth a diary entry, so here goes:
It's worth nothing that the history of the hospital is a story of the success of socialized medicine and free medical care. It was founded in 1859 by Queen Emma and her husband Alexander Liholiho (King Kamehameha IV), to thwart the extinction of the Hawaiian people.
After Captain Cook arrived in the 1770s, waves of infectious disease decimated the native population, which had no immunity. Before Western contact, the native population is estimated to have been between 400,000 to over a million people. (To put that in perspective, the state's population today is about 1.2 million, with approximately 350,000 in Honolulu). By 1848 it had dwindled to just 90,000, and in that year epidemics of dysentery, measles, whooping cough and influenza broke out. Of the 1,500 children born in 1848, not one lived past age two. By the end of 1849, the epidemics had killed another 10,000 people; in 1853 smallpox killed 6,000 more. The dead numbered so many that, under threat of fine or imprisonment, able-bodied men were recruited to help bury them.
Queen Emma, who was only 22 at the time, went door-to-door raising money to build a hospital. Medical care was to be made available to “all indigent, sick and disabled Hawaiian subjects, native and naturalized.” The hospital was kept afloat by money that came from the kingdom, private donors and those patients who did pay: A major operation was $25, a minor operation $10, and a patient could have a private room for $2.50 a day. In its first twenty-two months, Queen’s treated 3,055 patients, for everything from whooping cough to cancer. A total of 2,966 patients were cured; only forty-nine died. In addition, 8,774 free prescriptions were dispensed. These were significant numbers given that the entire population of Honolulu at the time was about 14,000.
Three years after she founded the hospital, Emma would lose her child to brain fever and her husband to chronic asthma.
This year is the 150th anniversary of Queen’s, which is today Hawai‘i's largest hospital. In 1909 the hospital was privatized; like any other private hospital, it treats to patients based on their ability to pay. But that doesn't make Emma's motivations any less noble, nor the hospital any less successful in achieving its mission. The Hawaiian people survived. And as her husband said when he laid the cornerstone of the hospital in 1860, “There is something wholesome in being called from time to time to acknowledge however strong our own health may be, and however prosperous our fortunes, that, after all, the destitute and sick are our brothers and sisters.”
[Some of this information is adapted/cited from an article,"The Queen's Gift" in Hana Hou!, the magazine of Hawaiian Airlines, by Catharine Lo.]