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Don’t hold it against the folks in Southampton that they preferred a jaunty game of tennis or a leisurely round of golf to, say, a bothersome appendix operation. It’s just the way things happened, and no one’s fault really that the Meadow Club was already around for twenty-two years and the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club for eighteen before it occurred to someone that it might be a good idea to have a hospital as well. All the other East End villages, extremely relieved that they did not have start hospitals, formed auxiliaries to help raise money for Southampton.
This is not as frivolous as I make it out to be. Before the twentieth century, patients were taken care of at home, certainly here in the Hamptons as well as in the rest of rural America. Urban institutions were often thought of as servicing the poor. The whole idea of hygiene and professional health care on a community level was just catching on. Judged on the standards of the time, the Southampton Hospital founders would have been considered progressive.
The Southampton Hospital Association, which was incorporated in 1909, started with rented space before constructing a handsome fireproof building in its present location in 1913. (Those founders could hardly have imagined the future price of real estate in their prime south-of-the-highway location.) By the time Jacqueline Bouvier was born there in 1929 the hospital had already added a nursing school and residence.
Those original buildings are still there, mostly integrated into later additions and renovations, but you can still see the handsome brick façade on the south with its federal style detailing. Then, as now, the hospital served both the year-round population and summer residents, both groups not only recipients of medical care, but among its financial supporters.
For more than thirty years Southampton Hospital has been the beneficiary of the Hampton Classic Horse Show. But the precedent goes back many years. In 1916 the Southampton Horse Association, which included a polo field and racetrack off Hill Street, contributed $9,808 to the hospital.
The annual summer benefit, which takes place August 1st this year and is organized as a centennial celebration, also has precedents. A “Masque of Queen Bersabe” and related events in 1919 raised more than $18,000. Elaborate fairs with exotic themes and costumes and celebrities such as Enrico Caruso helped keep the hospital afloat through the 1920s. The Great Depression of the following decade brought hardships to the hospital, which then had to deal with the deaths and devastation of the hurricane of 1938.
The 21st century brought difficulties of a different sort to traditional small hospitals. Medical equipment and delivering medical care are expensive, recruiting doctors difficult, and merely keeping up to date on contemporary hospital practices challenging. Partnerships in specific areas, such as the one with Stony Brook University Medical Center, strengthens the quality of medical care at a hospital that now serves an ethnically diverse community. Not to mention a new generation of tennis and golf players.