Before 1934, New York City's municipal hospitals were not model institutions. Ward leaders ordered special diets for pet patients, inmates of the City Home on Welfare Island were persuaded to make wills leaving their paltry goods to the superintendent, and at the Farm Colony on Staten Island many employes were habitually drunk.
When Mayor LaGuardia was elected, he appointed as hospital commissioner a stern-faced doctor who for years had been head of top-flight Mt. Sinai Hospital, and onetime chief of Manhattan's department of health — Sigismund Schulz Goldwater. Dr. Goldwater fired political appointees, drew up strict rules for the management of all...