With the war just over, there were more than enough veterans for the hospital to service. The Veterans Administration inquired about taking over the hospital four days later. The last patient left the facility on April 26, 1946. Some fifty-years later, Heddy spoke of Butler fondly as he remembered a woman who shook his hand as a way to give him five dollars, a tailor who cleaned his uniform, and a shoe store owner who gave him a pair of shoes.įollowing the conclusion of World War II the Army announced that the hospital would be closed by June 30, 1946. Heddy’s recovery was slow but soon he could maneuver the hospital in a wheel chair and eventually venture farther on crutches. In 1945, Private Edward Heddy experienced this support first-hand after coming to the Deshon General Hospital with internal injuries, spinal damage, and fractured bones in his legs and pelvis. Over the next four years, the Army added more than seventy buildings to the hospital.įrom the outset Butler’s citizens, enthusiastically welcomed and supported the hospital and the wounded it housed. The Hard of Hearing Section was one of three Army hearing centers in the U.S. The hospital served the Army as a General medical and Surgical Hospital, with a specialty center for soldiers with hearing impairments. After much construction work, the Deshon General Hospital received its first patient on December 7, 1942. George Durfee Deshon, who helped to create legislation that reorganized the medical department in 1908. The building was renamed the Deshon General Hospital, in honor of Col. After months of negotiations with the Commonwealth, the Army Medical Department took over the hospital in October 1942. By February 1942, the US War Department began to officially investigate taking over the facility. James saves a few dollars for the next few years.” Despite such arguments, the building remained eerily empty for the next three years, being designated Butler’s “white elephant.”įollowing the bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was an increasing amount of talk about using the building as a soldier’s hospital. On one occasion Sipe painted a vibrant image claiming, “I can hear the clods falling on their coffins, while Mr. Hale Sipe, who repeatedly advocated for the sanitorium on the senate floor. James maintained that the existing state hospitals were enough to accommodate current tuberculosis patients and opening the sanitorium was “an unjustifiable expense.” Many Pennsylvanians took issue with this notion, including Senator C. James, decided to delay the sanitorium’s opening. Facing a deficit and budgetary restrictions the new Pennsylvania Governor, Arthur H. However, by the next year the sanitorium became a point of contention in Pennsylvania politics. Pennsylvanian public health advocates attributed many of these deaths to the four to six months it took for patients to be admitted to a state hospital.Īs a result, in May 1938, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania began construction on the Western Pennsylvania Tuberculosis Sanatorium. Despite these advances, 70,000 Americans died from the disease in 1938. By the 1930’s, advances in medicine produced more effective treatments for tuberculous. Tuberculosis was well known to be devastating, and often referred to as the white plague, because of the effect it had on one’s lungs. It was originally built as a 500-bed tuberculosis sanitorium. The Butler Veterans Administration Hospital was not intended to be a veteran hospital. By Alysha Federkeil and Dylan Vamosi Text
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