New Orleans Hospital

High above the half-deserted docks of New Orleans gleams the new, 20-story tower of Charity Hospital, largest State hospital for acute and contagious diseases in the world. Last week Charity directors paid the last of their contractor's bills. Meantime ugly rumors clustered about Charity's head.

Latest rumor concerned the hospital's shifting foundations. Doctors all over the U. S. have heard fantastic tales of Charity sinking 15 feet, of buckled plumbing, twisted elevator shafts, volcanic fissures in the marble entrance halls. Fact is that the 150,000-ton hospital has sunk scarcely a foot, that all New Orleans buildings, supported on a bed of sand and clay, take 15 or 20 years to settle. Only blemishes on Charity's face are several ugly cracks across the front, similar to those in other New Orleans buildings. Last month Yale and Harvard experts gave the hospital a clean bill of health, estimated that $35,000 would cover repairs, that the building would stand firm for at least 100 years.

Founded in 1737 by a wealthy French sailor, Charity is one of the oldest general hospitals in the U. S. Its troubles began in 1928 when Huey Long kicked out the old director, appointed in his place Surgeon Arthur Vidrine, a promising young man scarcely out of medical school. Then Huey invited Cajuns, Creoles and hillbillies to come on in for quick cures. Result: patients were packed two and three in a bed, many sleeping in the halls, under crumbling plaster.

When Huey was shot, Dr. Vidrine operated on him, against the advice of some more conservative surgeons. After Huey's death, an unfair cloud of suspicion drove Dr. Vidrine from Charity, and in 1936 he was succeeded by Dr. George Sam Bel, a courtly Creole. Last year, shortly before the new hospital was finished, Dr. Bel died. New Orleanians whispered that he had killed himself, suspected that he was involved in some dark construction scandal. But the elderly heart specialist, his colleagues proved, was felled by a heart attack.

Present head of Charity is rotund, cheery Dr. Roy William Wright, first cousin of defeated Governor Earl Long.

But the real master of Charity is the man who raised its new building, who supervised the planting of every one of the 10,000 supporting pylons: Pathologist Rigney D'Aunoy. Descendant of an old Creole family that moved to New Orleans around 1750, warm-hearted Dr. D'Aunoy (pronounced Doe-nwah) is No. 1 U. S. authority on the little-known third venereal disease, Lymphogranuloma inguinale.

Although he was Huey's personal physician, attended Huey's successor Dick Leche, and many another Louisiana boss, Dr. D'Aunoy sticks to his laboratory, stays out of politics. For his tireless six-year labors at Charity the board of directors awarded him the empty title of Medical Consultant.

The hospital cost more than $12,000,000 ($3,600,000 contributed by WPA), but so thriftily did Dr. D'Aunoy manage contracts that 30 FBI men, snooping from last June to January, could scent no trace of graft, a situation amazing in spoor-heavy Louisiana. Planted squarely between Tulane and Louisiana State University Medical School (built by Huey in a burst of rage against aristocratic Tulane), the hospital offers both schools equal laboratory and clinical facilities.

Built in the shape of an H, 2,500-bed Charity contains separate wings for Negroes and whites, luxurious dormitories, a gymnasium for interns, a solarium for doctors, a drug-manufacturing department, laundries, a printing shop. Each ward, a complete unit with special treatment rooms, bathrooms, doctor's office, nurses' cage and pantry, contains only twelve beds. The 50 operating rooms and delivery rooms are paved and walled in soft blue tile, contain unique, explosion-proof operating lamps which Dr. D'Aunoy designed. He also planned a pneumatic tube system between operating rooms and pathology department, to bring surgeons quick microscopic reports on tissues while they are operating.

Many growling New Orleans doctors consider Charity a first step toward socialized medicine. But nobody denies that Charity does a big job: from the cane and Teche country, patients swarm in to its clinics at the rate of 12,000 a week.

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