ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the historical record, to demonstrate government involvement in voluntary hospitals well before the Depression of the 1930s. It examines more closely the different meanings of public and private that have been inherited and that haunt contemporary debate. The chapter analyzes the nature and utility of myth and suggests that a poor sort of memory has only short-term benefits. Government aid to private charities, whether these were hospitals or universities, assumed a broader, if unspecified, public good, a mutual interest in charitable care, and cooperative patterns of development. The hospital as an institution long antedates the scientific changes in medicine of the late nineteenth century. Hospitals were becoming financially more independent in the sense of not having to rely to a great extent on charitable or tax contributions, and more "private" in the sense of gaining most of their income from the sale of services. But tax-exemption and liability-exemption provisions of "public charities" remained.
