Health care in India and Iowa

“How Six Nuns Transformed India.” That was the headline on a full-page article in the New York Times on April 3. Not interested, you might think, but bear with me. This is a story that captures the power of women religious to bring about change. More important, it’s a story that resonates here in Iowa as much as it does in India.

In compelling prose, Jyoti Thottam writes about six Catholic nuns from rural Kentucky who built a hospital in the small town of Mokama in northern India. Her story is an excerpt from her new book, “Sisters of Mokama: The Pioneering Women Who Brought Hope and Healing to India.”

It’s hard to comprehend the dire strait of health care in India in the years after World War II. “The starkest numbers were among children,” Thottam writes. “Children under 10 accounted for nearly half of all the deaths in India.”

The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth heard the call and agreed to staff a primitive hospital. They arrived at the end of 1947 with little more than an abiding faith that they could save lives. In that quest, the sisters were aided by a dynamic young Indian woman who served as the bridge to the community.

The health care challenge was daunting. The sisters needed a doctor and a continuing supply of medicine. They had been hardened by poverty and suffering in Appalachia, but their hearts were broken by the daily death of women and children who were beyond their care.

Through it all, Nazareth Hospital emerged in Mokama. By the summer of 1948, they had a doctor, and the order found a way to keep the sisters supplied with medicine. Other challenges — clean water, for example — were handled with practical Kentucky ingenuity.

But health care is labor intensive and six nuns from Kentucky went only so far. The sisters realized quickly that they needed more and better nurses to make any progress in improving health care. Not surprisingly, the sisters established a nursing school.

“The nursing school eventually attracted generations of Indian women as students,” added Thottam, “some of them just teenagers, many of them also motherless or fatherless.” It was these nurses who helped to change health care across that vast and diverse country.

What’s the connection between health care in India and here in Iowa? Simply put, one vital element in the Iowa health care enterprise is the contribution of women religious. For more than 150 years, the Sisters of Mercy and other orders have cared for the sick, the elderly, the indigent, and the dying here in Iowa.

It can be argued that health care in Iowa in the nineteenth century was not much better than the conditions in India after World War II. We can only imagine what heath care would have been like in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, and so my other Iowa communities without the care and compassion of women religious.

So, let’s acknowledge the nuns who have done so much to transform health care both here in Iowa and around the world. Thoughts and prayers are welcome, but so are gifts to the charitable foundations that support these women and their health care operations.

Timothy Walch has been a public historian for more than 50 years and often writes for The Gazette and other Iowa newspapers.