A Hospital Built for Industry’s Toll
How the Dominican Sisters established a critical medical lifeline for Aberdeen’s dangerous logging and mill works.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
One of the best and most important institutions in Aberdeen is the hospital established here this last summer by the Dominican sisters of New York, an institution calculated to do great good on account of the accidents resulting from the many mills and logging camps that are in continual operation in this Grays Harbor country. The sisters at present occupy three frame buildings, but the plans have just been completed for a large and commodious brick structure that will be built at once. From October 1st to December 31st, twenty-one patients were treated in the hospital, coming from all parts of the harbor. In almost every instance the patients were suffering from accidental injuries.
“An institution calculated to do great good on account of the accidents resulting from the many mills and logging camps.”
This snapshot illustrates the brutal human cost of the 19th-century timber industry. The necessity for a specialized hospital to handle 'accidental injuries' highlights how labor in the early mills was fundamentally high-risk, a reality that forced early civic infrastructure development to catch up with industrial growth.
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