Editor’s note: This is the second story in a series looking at the 1911 attempt to oust the Western Maryland Hospital superintendent from her job.
In 1911, a group of doctors at the Western Maryland Hospital took action against Superintendent Florence Tanney, charging her with being “temperamentally unfit” to administer the hospital.
This was the third investigation taken of the hospital’s care in its 23-year history.
The charges required a hearing before the hospital board of directors. The doctors felt confident they would have Tanney removed.
Tanney’s hearing took place before the hospital’s board of directors in the hospital’s sun parlor on the evening of Dec. 19. A.A. Doub represented Tanney and David A. Robb represented the doctors.
During his opening arguments, Doub said he did not know what was meant by “temperamentally unfit” and didn’t believe anyone else did. It was something he expected the doctors who had leveled the charges to explain.
The first witness was Dr. James Johnson, and Doub asked him to explain the meaning of the charge. Johnson said, “her conduct was calculated to make the patients unhappy and cause them to leave the institution and it also disturbed the mental poise of the hospital.”
He said the nurses couldn’t take orders from him unless they were written, and he had wanted some specimens delivered once but they weren’t.
“Miss Tanney said she didn’t have any orderly and she was not going to make the nurses carry specimens to physicians and thus neglect patients,” Johnson said.
He had been upset when Tanney had reprimanded for sending someone to be admitted to the hospital who shouldn’t have been.
Doub asked the doctor if he had read the rules of the hospital.
When Johnson said he had, Doub pointed out one of the rules that said requests needed to be in writing.
“Suppose someone to who you have verbally directed a nurse to give oxygen and strychnine had died, who would have been responsible?” Doub asked. “As I take it, strychnine is a poison.”
“Well, a nurse who couldn’t execute a verbal order couldn’t execute a written one,” Johnson said.
“Aren’t some nurses here students and would you trust a verbal order or such moment as the one referred to, to a student?”
“If they had intelligence enough to be fitted for nurses I would.”
Dr. Leo Franklin was the next witness. He testified that he had been told there was no room for a woman who was giving birth. She happened to be his cook. Franklin sent her to the hospital anyway. She had eventually been admitted, but the doctor said she had not been treated right. The baby had not been bathed, and the mother was not given anything to eat.
Doub elicited from the doctor that he had kept the woman working in his kitchen until her labor began because cooks were scarce.
When the doctor mentioned that Tanney had not reduced bills he had requested be reduced, Doub got the doctor to admit that board of directors actually had to approve such requests.
Anna Rose, a former patient, said Tanney had shook her by the wrist because she kept ringing the bell for the doctor. She also complained that she had been given beef broth when she wanted chicken broth, even though some other people had gotten chicken broth.
Another doctor complained that Tanney had slammed a door.
One woman was brought into the sunroom on a stretcher because she was sick and a patient at the hospital. People were shocked at this. “Even Mr. Robb, who represented those who brought the charges, seemed loath to examine her, and Mr. Doub said he wouldn’t cross-examine a woman in her sick condition,” the Cumberland Evening Times reported.
It was not a convincing defense as the newspaper noted, reporting, “as no disinterested person who heard the testimony produced at last night’s session could have been of any other opinion that the charges should have been dismissed by those who preferred them.”
But it would become even more embarrassing.