Low Funding: A Constant Concern
| Year |
Provincial Funding (Daily) |
| 1890 |
.30 |
| 1908 |
.39 |
| 1927 |
.58 |
| 1940 |
.75 |
| 1947 |
.25 |
| 1952 |
$ 1,40 |
| 1956 |
$ 2,25 |
| 1959 |
$ 2,75 |
In 1890, the Quebec Government paid the Hospital thirty
cents per day per patient. Intended to cover lodging, meals,
clothing, and extra expenses, this sum came nowhere near
the amount required to properly meet individual patient needs.
Inadequate funding continued for decades
In 1957, Medical Superintendent Charles Roberts, MD, made
this startling comparison, “The average cost of general
hospital care in Canada is of the order of $15 per day…The
mentally ill must be cared for at an average cost of
less than $4.”
Thankfully, in its first seventy or so years, the Hospital
was allowed to admit private patients, who paid higher
fees and helped make up the shortfall. For example, in
1894, private
patents paid $1.16 to $1.43 per day—approximately four
times the fee received for public patients.
Without extra private patient funds, the Hospital would
have had trouble surviving its first decades of operation. Help for the Protestant Insane
A Grand Christmas
Dinner Projected for Those Unfortunates by the Herald
Send in Your Dollars At Once
Christmas is a season of rejoicing of good will
and happiness to all men. An empty and poorly filled
stomach is a poor preparation for enjoyment of any
sort, unless it be the discussion of an antidote to
that unfortunate state of affairs. A good dinner is
looked upon by all classes as one of the essentials
of a proper observance of that day to days. The rich
who can enjoy good dinners everyday in the year make
special preparations on that day, while the poor men
if they do not have a feast on any other day, strive
to have one then, and will pinch and save for weeks
in advance in order to gratify this laudauble desire.
But there are some among us who are deprived of all
opportunity to provide for themselves, and must look
to the charitable for that which they can not of themselves
obtain. They are the inmates of our public institutions;
and the most helpless of them all – the ones
who perhaps have the fist clam on our sympathy – are
those of God’s poor afflicted who, deprived if
their reason and with it many of the faculties of enjoyment
possessed by their sane brethren, can still appreciate
a good dinner.
The financial condition of the Protestant Hospital
for the Insane is too well known to the readers of
the Herald to call for comment or explanation. With
the directors ot has been up-hill work to make both
ends meet, and there has not been at any time, nor
is there now, any margin left for luxuries.
Mr Alfred Perry, who has made almost surhuman efforts,
first of his endeavors to have the asylum built, afterwards
in attempting to make revenue meet expenditure, is
now anxious to obtain the wherewithal to provide the
inmates with a dinner that will be a joy and a remembrance
to them for days after. At first he thought of a private
collection bit on the advice and at the request of
several gentlemen decided to ask The Herald to star
a one dollar subscription for this most laudable of
objects. One dollar is all that is asked, no more;
no less and it is thought that surely there are many
gentlemen of kindly hearts in this good city of Montreal,
who would little miss that small sum and who could
not do a better deed than when reading this to put
their hand in their pockets, just take out a one dollar
bill enclose it with their card in an envelope and
address it to The Herald with the inscription added, “For
the Protestant Insane Xmas Dinner Fund”. |
A Christmas Feast
Following this article, The Hospital received 437 dollars,
28 turkeys, 6 chicken, 2 geese, 25 pounds of coffee,
nuts and fruit making the first Christmas dinner a
memorable one. Among the donors was none other than John
Crawford—Verdun’s
mayor, and a neighboring farmer who had fought vigorously
against the creation of the Hospital!
|
» 
