Nostalgia Sunday – Shaare Zedek Hospital’s Schwester Selma
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Medical Breakthroughs, Nostalgia Sunday, Profiles
I didn’t know Schwester Selma but there is one time when perhaps our paths might have crossed. That would be in 1973, when my sisters and I were rushed to Jerusalem’s old Shaare Zedek hospital after a car accident (we came out with minor cuts, bruises, a few stitches in my sister’s forehead and a lifetime of self-enforced responsible driving ahead of us). Schwester Selma served from 1916 as head nurse and retired in 1973, so who knows?
The country’s first trained nurse, Schwester Selma was one of those legendary Jerusalem institutions from the pre-State era that people of my mother’s generation knew well, their children knew somewhat and their grandchildren know not at all. I encountered Schwester Selma’s biography while looking into the background of a series of photos documenting the old hospital building, which believe you me, was nothing like the new one – I can still remember the patchwork of floor tiles – but thank goodness the hospital was easy to reach and not in the middle of some out-of-the-way forest like some other Jerusalem hospitals I could mention if I cared to.
Here it is on Jaffa Road. The building now houses the Israel Broadcast Authority offices.
Then, as now, Shaare Zedek prided itself on being the only centrally located hospital in Jerusalem. There were the Misgav LaDach birthing hospital and general hospital Bikur Holim was under construction but Shaare Zedek was pretty much it during the World War I when Selma Meyer arrived to do her wartime service in Palestine (the Turkish Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany during the war).
Her autobiography includes a couple of juicy tidbits about illness and cure back in the so-called Good Old Days: “There were two epidemics right them. We were the only Jewish hospital in the new city. The old Bikur Cholim had also started building in the new city, which, however, could not be continued because of the war. Typhoid, typhus, and meningocael meningitis, all very severe cases, were hospitalized with us. Thousands of typhoid cases were passing through our hospital, probably caused by dirt; there was hardly any water. Additionally the people suffered terribly from hunger; there was hardly anything to eat.” Out of discretion to the reader, I’ve cut out the part about the lice bath.
It must have seemed like heaven for patients to come to a place like Shaare Zedek, which had a European-trained staff and clean sheets. There was no running water, but who had running water in those days?
After all, Jerusalem was no modern city. “There was still no transportation. The transportation of patients was therefore still very complicated. If somebody had to be brought it would have to be done by stretcher. We did not have enough personnel to send along and therefore the relatives had to help or hire two porters.”
During the global polio epidemic, Schwester Selma ran the country’s only isolation ward. “In those days the isolation department was even more primitive than the main house. The bathtub was made of tin, on wheels. It used to be filled with water that was brought in and then wheeled into the respective room. The toilets had no plumbing. Of course there was no heating system. In spite of all this I can maintain with a good conscience that we ran this department as a real isolation station even if this demanded many many efforts, which were well worth it in every respect.”
Schwester Selma founded the country’s first nursing school in 1934 over the objections of her hospital director who believed that too much theory and not enough practicum was a bad thing in a young nurse. But Selma, together with one father who wanted to make sure his daughter got a good education, prevailed. (Selma seated 2nd row, 3rd from left).
In recognition of her achievements, “Schwester” Selma Meyer was named a Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem (Yakir Yerushalim). She died in 1984 at the age of 100.
More amazing photos of Shaare Tzedek hospital and other Jerusalem landmarks, can be found at Photography in Jerusalem, an online archive sponsored by Hadassah College Jerusalem and educational website Snunit.
Israel picks up the bill
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Medical Breakthroughs, Politics, War, coexistence
While the news is full of Israel’s “crimes” against the civilian population in Gaza, here’s one “crime” you probably haven’t heard about. Israel routinely admits residents of Palestinian Authority controlled territory into its hospitals – and the Israeli taxpayer foots the bill. Not only that; Israel even helps pay for treatment of patients in PA hospitals, where the patient never even comes near an Israeli hospital!
While many of us probably have heard of exceptional cases of Israeli doctors treating PA Arabs, I, and probably you, were under the impression that it was limited to high profile or complicated cases, such as the Save a Child’s Heart Foundation – with ill PA residents coming to Israel as a last resort. That kind of thing has been going on for a long time – even during the current war, as evidenced by the photo (courtesy of the IDF spokesperson), captioned “Injured Palestinian receiving medical treatment by Israeli and Palestinian medical personnel at the Erez crossing.” 
But Israel’s contribution to the health of Palestinian Authority residents goes far beyond emergency assistance; according to some folks I interviewed for a story on a new database system being developed by an Israeli software company for hospitals in Bethlehem and Ramallah (an amazing story in and of itself!), Israel’s Health Ministry often pays for care of PA residents both in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority itself!
The company building the database, called i-Rox, is located in Bnei Brak, and consists almost entirely of ultra-Orthodox women programmers (this story just gets better all the time!). According to the company’s CEO, the programmers are building in a component that allows PA hospitals to share their information with Israel’s Health Ministry, because in some cases, Israel’s health funds help provide – and pay for – treatment of patients in PA hospitals.
Yes, I had a hard time believing it too – until I Googled this World Health Organization PDF document. According to this eye-opening reporting (for 2006-7), “Approximately 60,000 Palestinians from the West Bank area have been treated in Israel hospitals over the past year. Around 20,000 were hospitalized, and about 40,000 received ambulatory services of all sorts. Approximately 5,000 patients from the Gaza area have been treated in Israeli hospitals over the past year – about 2,000 hospitalized and about 3,000 receiving ambulatory services of all sorts. Among the patients receiving medical care in Israel, approximately 2,500 were children, the majority of whom received long-term treatment for cancer and complicated operations.”
As far as Israel providing services to PA hospitals, “Public health laboratories at the Israel Ministry of Health continue to regularly provide assistance to the Palestinian Health Authority in the way of laboratory tests for poliomyelitis, measles, mumps, influenza and other viral diseases,” the report says. Israel – via the health funds and the Health Ministry – continued those tests throughout the year, “in spite of the fact that the Palestinian Authority delays or halts payments.” Of course, the anti-Israel forces out there have never let themselves get confused by the facts – but at least we know the truth, and in this day and age, that’s no small feat.
The Golden Hour
Filed under: General, Life, Medical Breakthroughs, Technology, War
If there’s one thing Israeli medics are good at, it’s first aid. As a result of battlefield experience over 60 years of war, chovshim, as they are called in the IDF, have learned how to treat serious injuries with few supplies under heavily pressure.
The lessons learned on the battlefield prove invaluable for major civilian emergencies as well, such as the tragic bus crash outside Eilat. Sixty Russian tourists on a junket to Eilat plunged off the side of a narrow, twisty road to a ravine nearly 200 feet deep. Twenty four people died, and the rest were all in serious condition, as of Tuesday night. While many were killed on the spot, several died of the injuries they sustained later on,
What if the injured had gotten treatment sooner? Could they have been saved? Maybe, say doctors who advocate the Golden Hour theory that even severely injured people have a higher chance of surviving if they get substantial, emergency room style treatment within the first hour after they’re injured. The problem is getting them to the treatment site especially under difficult field conditions, such as when a bus is stuck at the bottom of a ravine, with no path or road to the top, and no place for a helicopter to land. Not to mention that moving the injured often makes things worse, exacerbating the problem and making treatment at the facility more complicated.
There is a solution on the horizon, though. As it happens, I spoke to Dr. Eran Shenkar today, a battlefield medical expert who has helped develop a new concept vehicle for remote medical care, called the MedUAV. Interviewing Dr. Shenkar and others at the Fisher Institute in Herzliya in preparation for an article for 21C (look for it soon!), I had no idea how relevant the conversation would be just a few hours later.
The MedUAV, says Dr. Shenkar, can essentially bring the emergency room to the field. Developed for the battlefield, it’s also ideal for civilian emergencies in difficult to reach circumstances. As a remote UAV, it’s smaller, cheaper, and more compact than a helicopter meaning it can go places a helicopter can’t, and, in times of war, there’s nobody to shoot down. The MedUAV can land or take off vertically, meaning it’s ideal for use in, say, a narrow ravine where there’s no place for a helicopter to land. The MedUAV can carry sophisticated equipment equipped with Wi-fi sensors, allowing a field medic to hook up a patient and allow a doctor to provide remote treatment, by giving instructions to the medic. And, after it delivers its supplies, the MedUAV can transport patients back to the medical tent, where they can be transported to hospitals by helicopter.
It’s a great solution to the golden hour problem and when it’s ready for field use, chances are good that tragedies like today’s bus crash will end up being a bit less tragic, with perhaps many more of the injured being restored to good health more quickly.
Jessica has twins
For all those readers who were wondering where on earth our writer Jessica has got to over the last couple of months, then wonder no more.
She’s had twins!
Two little cute boys who were born two minutes apart on October 13th. Ziv Maimon weighed in at 2.2 kilos at birth, while Lev Yehuda weighed in at just 1.2 kilos.
The boys were born prematurely at week 34, and while Ziv was in hospital for just 10 days, it took Lev six weeks before Jessica could finally take him home.
It’s no doubt been an exhausting couple of months for both Jessica and her husband, Daniel, but the boys are now doing well, eating enormously and gaining weight quickly. Ziv already weighs 3.3 kilos, while Lev has reached 2.4 kilos.
Congratulations Jessica and Daniel! They’re gorgeous, or as Karin – our own green prophet – told me earlier: “They’re cutie poopoo’s.”
Our Hospital Adventure
Big government is making a big comeback, what with $700 billion bank bailouts, so the term “socialized medicine” isn’t as scary as it used to be. And we all know how expensive health care is in the States. But, as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for. Despite the high cost, “everyone knows” how much higher the quality of health care is in the U.S., and how inferior it is in countries with socialized medicine, like the U.K., where people have to wait for months for simple procedures, and those who can afford it flee the public health system, and go private.
Having lived in Israel for some 15 years – moving here from the U.S. before the huge increase in health insurance costs – I can’t speak of what typical Americans, or Britons for that matter, have to go through to either get or pay for health care. I can only speak about what I’ve experienced here in Israel.
I bring this up now because I – and my wife – have just had a hospital experience. She was “in” for a couple of days last week for a procedure (let’s just leave it at that). This isn’t the first time, of course – we’ve had three of our five kids here. And in her previous experiences, she would have at least partially agreed with the conventional wisdom that private medical care is better.
But things have changed dramatically over the past few years; the service is no longer surly, and even the old, broken down hospital seemed brighter and spiffier this time around. Hospitals aren’t a pleasant place to stay, no matter what, but the hospital she had to spend a night at while she recuperated was completely refurbished, with pleasant chairs and plenty of light. Some of the personnel weren’t as pleasant as we would have liked, but I have seen far worse behavior on the part of hospital workers in the States – and in Israel, hospital staff don’t immediately call in security when you would put up an argument with them. They even seem to have gotten the paperwork right – one form was all it took, and she was enrolled in the computer, with all the information transmitted to all the appropriate departments immediately.
And the total cost for everything – would you believe 130 shekels? That’s about $35 in today’s money. Although many pundits would say that Israel is losing its socialist spirit (the official poverty figures can be pretty shocking), it’s clear that that spirit still reigns supreme in health care. True, it’s more expensive that it used to be, but try even talking to a doctor in the U.S. for $35.
It was a real surprise to an American immigrant who still expects Israeli medical care to be second rate – the whole process was pretty first rate, as far as I could tell. There seems to be a lot of that going on in Israel today – take highways and roads, for example. All sorts of new highways seem to be popping up all over the place; you can get around the Tel Aviv and even Jerusalem metropolitan areas pretty quickly now. But don’t we pay excessively high taxes for all this? Nope; if you live in the New York Metropolitan area and include your state, city, federal, and real estate taxes, it doesn’t really add up to more than we pay here overall. Pretty shocking, huh?
A tenuous coexistence
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Religion, coexistence
The Yom Kippur shutdown usually works. Whether you’re a secular Jews or a non-Jewish resident of Israel, you know that on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, you don’t drive or play music in public out of respect to those who are observing the holiday.
But one man in the northern coastal mixed Jewish-Arab city of Acre didn’t abide by the unwritten societal rule – and as a result, all hell broke loose.
According to The Jerusalem Post’s report,
Tawfik Jamal – a resident of Acre’s Old City – made his way to the predominantly Jewish Ben-Gurion neighborhood in the eastern part of the city, blasting loud music from his vehicle., Jamal denied he had intended to provoke local residents, saying he had driven with his 18-year-old son and the son’s 20-year-old friend carefully and quietly from the Old City to the Ben-Gurion neighborhood, three kilometers away, to pick up his daughter from her fiancée’s home.
But police dismissed Jamal’s claims.
“This was a provocation. An Arab driver arrived in a Jewish neighborhood on Yom Kippur with blaring music, and refused to leave when asked to by local residents. We believe he was intoxicated. This was a deliberate act,” Galilee Police spokesman Ch.-Supt. Eran Shaked said.The verbal confrontation between Jamal and the local residents quickly deteriorated into violence, as rocks and bottles were thrown at Jamal’s vehicle.
According to Jamal, he and his two passengers fled the car. The three were taken to hospital where they were treated for light wounds and discharged.
And then, to show you how rumors can spread faster than reason, false reports that Arabs were seriously harmed or killed by Jews reached the Old City, and then things began escalating.
Responding to the rumors, hundreds of Arabs set out from the Old City toward the Ben-Gurion neighborhood, walking down a main road, smashing store windows and cars along the way. Reports said the mob shouted “Kill the Jews,” “Allahu Akbar,” and “If you come out of your homes, you will die.”
At the same time, a few hundred Jews had congregated in the streets of the Ben-Gurion neighborhood. Fearing a deadly clash, police acted quickly, mobilizing “a very large force” to prevent the two groups from confronting one another, police said.
So, was it a deliberate provocation from an Acre Arab? An overreaction from the Acre Jews? And was the escalation simply the culmination of animosity that’s been built up between the two sides over years of living near each other?
Let’s not forget that in the scores of other areas in the country – in Haifa and the Galilee and in Jerusalem – there weren’t any similar reports. Let’s hope this was an aberration, and not a sign of a deterioration in relations between Israel’s Jews and Arabs.
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