[Kunstler] The ruins of Mary McClellan Hospital stand on a hill overlooking the village of Cambridge, New York, in what was a "flyover" corner of the country until the planes stopped flying. The hospital cornerstone was laid July 4, 1917. The USA had entered the war against Germany a few months earlier. The "Spanish" flu pandemic kicked off in January 1918. The hospital opened in January 1919. The flu burned out a year later. The hospital shut down for good in 2003.I’ve lived around here for decades and never actually got a look at the place until I went up there on a blustery spring Saturday before Easter to look around. I like to read landscapes and the human imprint upon them. This one is a ghost story, not just of the bygone souls who came and went here, but of an entire society, the nation that we used to be and stopped being not so long ago....
[Old photos in original story]
American health care, as we call it today, and for all its high-tech miracles, has evolved into one of the most atrocious rackets the world has ever seen. By racket, I mean an enterprise organized explicitly to make money dishonestly. This is what we've become, and the fact that we seem to be okay with that tells you more about what we have become. The advent of Covid-19, along with the extreme economic disorders it has triggered, will probably be the beginning of the end of that racket. We have no idea how medicine will re-organize itself, but I'd guess that it will happen at a much more primitive scale – because that's usually what happens when human societies overshoot badly. Alas, history is not exactly symmetrical.
But read these photos and meditate on what we were once capable of putting together in this land, and maybe you will find some clues about what was truly admirable about the American condition before we stopped caring.