Medicine: Like unto Like

For diametrically opposite reasons the affairs of Manhattan’s foremost homeopathic hospitals have long been unsettled. The splendid modern Fifth Avenue Hospital, for lack of patients, has been losing as much as $100,000 a year, with the result that Chairman Hiram Edward Manville of Johns-Manville Corp. has had to go into his own and his friends’ pockets for more money than he anticipated when he became president of Fifth Avenue Hospital.

On the other hand, fusty, old Flower Hospital, which John D. Rockefeller helped finance before he thought of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, has had an unwieldy $4,000,000 ever since reclusive Ella Virginia von Echtzel Wendel died (TIME, March 23, 1931). The $4,000,000 is tied up in Manhattan real estate whose income is not enough for Flower Hospital to put up new buildings but is enough to pay Fifth Avenue Hospital’s annual deficit.

Last week, therefore, President Charles Day Woodruff Halsey of Flower Hospital and its affiliated New York Homeopathic Medical College, and Mr. Manville agreed to solve their problems by merging their institutions into a fourth Manhattan medical centre.*

* The others: Columbia University-Presbyterian Hospital, Cornell University-New York Hospital, New York University-Bellevue Hospital.