"Harriet Ryan worked first as a maid, then a seamstress and then as a hairdresser to the fashionable ladies on Boston's Beacon Hill. Her parents, Irish on the father's side, French on the mother's, had come to Boston in the 1820's from Nova Scotia. The family was devoutly Catholic, at a time when the Catholic population of the city was still relatively small and was looked upon with suspicion. Harriet was not well educated. But she had learned to care deeply about the plight of poor women suffering the last stages of consumption. The Mass General did not accept patients with chronic disease. Most dying consumptives had a family or friends with resources to provide care, but for the poor, especially poor women without a family, often there was little alternative to death in a cold, solitary, sometimes rat-infested garret.

"Harriet's mother had frequently taken such women into her home and ministered to their needs. She had required her children to help and thus Harriet had an early acquaintance with consumptive women and with what she came to see as "God's work" in caring for them. When she reached adulthood she continued her mother's practice, bringing terminally ill women to her own meager lodgings, providing nourishment, warmth and cleanliness, which was the only useful treatment then possible. Some of Harriet's wealthy clients became aware of what she was doing and they helped with money and gifts.

"As Harriet Ryan realized that the need was far greater than she could meet but that there were others who might help, she began to seek space where larger numbers of sick women could be housed. And she did not have to look far - she was living near Channing Street, a street recently renamed for William Ellery Channing who for nearly 40 years had been minister at the Federal Street Church which stood at the corner of Federal Street and Channing Street (today it is the heart of the financial district). Channing had died in 1842. He was much loved throughout the city as one of the founders of Unitarianism, a strong advocate of liberal theology and morality, and a leader in social reform. Many of Harriet Ryan's clients were members of the Federal Street Church.

"Harriet easily persuaded the current minister to rent her the large vestry room, and with further help from her friends she was able to convert it to a home appropriately called the Channing Street Home for Sick and Destitute Women. The first patient arrived May 1, 1857 and within a short time the remaining six beds were also filled. Two physicians, graduates of Harvard Medical School, offered their services. There was little active nursing - clean linen, warm blankets, nourishing food and kindness were still the main prescriptions, though whiskey, brandy, and opiates were often administered.

"Harriet Ryan was the nighttime nurse, after long hours spent at her various jobs. She stood in line at Parker's Hotel for free soup, and because of her quiet determination and her dedication to suffering women, she continued to receive very important help from her friends and their families. After her marriage to John Albee, a poet well connected with Boston's intelligentsia, she continued to supervise the home until 1873 when she too died of consumption, undoubtedly the result of a lifetime's exposure to the disease.

"Within two years of the opening of the Home the church moved westward to Arlington Street (it's now called the Arlington Street church and William Ellery Channing's statue is on the Public Garden side of Arlington Street, directly opposite the church). The Channing Home for Sick and Destitute Women had to move, first to South Street, near to today's South Station, and, twelve years later, to McLean Street, close by the Massachusetts General Hospital. The mission remained the same, though the number of beds had increased, and although the etiology of consumption had been explained by Koch and those who followed in his footsteps, bed rest and fresh air were the primary form of treatment.

"In the first fifty years, the Channing Home received more than 1,100 indigent women, of whom nearly four-fifths died of consumption. The Home was well known throughout the city. It received support from many wealthy people, there was a Ladies Committee that provided flowers and small gifts to the patients, and the Board of Trustees included some of the elite of Boston philanthropy.

"In 1907, coincident with its fiftieth anniversary, the Channing Home moved westward to the rapidly developing Longwood area of Boston. A building was constructed at the corner of Francis street and Pilgrim Road, close to the Quadrangle of white marble buildings into which the Harvard medical School was moving and close to the acres already designated for the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Children's Hospital and the Deaconess Hospital. In 1907 there were an estimated 4000 cases of contagious tuberculosis in Boston despite better understanding of contagion and improved public health measures.

"Over the next fifty years, the Channing Home, now in its fourth location, attained national stature as a treatment center for tubercular patients. It developed a fine record in clinical investigation, bacteriology, education and occupational therapy. The home-like atmosphere that Harriet Ryan Albee had initiated continued to prevail, primarily because of the style of the nursing staff. With the exception of one part-time physician, all of the medical staff worked voluntarily. The medical staff included many outstanding physicians associated with Harvard Medical School and with its teaching hospitals, especially Boston City Hospital.

"After World War II widespread use of antituberculous drugs suggested that tuberculosis would soon be eradicated in this country, perhaps throughout the world. Events at the Channing Home confirmed this hypothesis. There was an increasing number of empty beds. The trustees decided to admit male patients, but this could be only a temporary solution. Facing the inevitable, in 1958 the building and land were sold to the adjacent Deaconess Hospital. But the endowment funds remained. The Trustees, of whom many were of Harvard men, thought that those funds should go to support work in one of the Harvard teaching hospitals but similar to that of the Channing Home. The Harvard teaching hospitals were very interested, especially the Boston City.

"Boston City Hospital was founded in 1865 as a municipal hospital for the "worthy poor," and it had become one of the premier hospitals in the nation. The Thorndike Memorial Laboratory was generating clinical research in many medical specialties and the Harvard Medical Service brought students, residents and senior physicians together in a remarkably stimulating atmosphere of intellectual inquiry, scientific investigation and medical accomplishment. (If you don't believe me, read Max Finland's book about the Harvard Medical Unit and the Boston City Hospital, or ask any of the physicians who were part of it).

"Ed Kass had come to the City Hospital in 1947 to work in pathology at the Mallory Institute, and over the next ten years he had developed a close relationship with Max Finland which led to an appointment at the Thorndike and research in many aspects of infectious disease, including the role of hormones in mechanisms of resistance to infection, the clinical effectiveness and pharmacologic behavior of new antimicrobial agents, and most notably in the incidence and pathological aspects of urinary tract infections. He had also worked on pulmonary infection, had been a visiting physician to the Channing Home and had a good friend in Dr. Ted Badger who headed the Pulmonary Unit at the Thorndike and was on the staff of the BCH. Dr. Badger was also physician in chief of the Channing Home from 1935 to its demise in 1958. He was a wonderful man, warm, jovial, and outgoing.

"With Ted Badger's help, and Max Finland's support, Ed developed a plan for a research laboratory to be situated within the Mallory where Ed was then associate director. They sold the idea to the administration of the City Hospital and to George Packer Berry, dean of the medical school. Ed had guessed that the Channing Trustees would have to turn to the dean to guide their choice among proposals from the various hospitals and he persuaded Dean Berry that research in infection was preferable to work on pulmonary physiology that the other hospitals would propose. (It didn't hurt that Dean Berry had been a professor of bacteriology.) As predicted the Channing trustees did seek the dean's advice and he convinced them that the best plan was for an infectious diseases laboratory at the BCH. Henry Allen, who was on the Board of the Channing Home at this time, once told me that the real secret of Ed's success was the many hours he spent drinking tea with the Trustees, thus charming them and winning their confidence.

"The initial plan was that the new laboratory would receive only the annual income from the Channing endowment, $27,000 a year, for five years. Incidentally, the Proc Soc tradition goes back to those early years when Ed invited the Channing trustees to visit the lab to learn about the research supported by their funds. Evidently they were much pleased because over time the entire endowment was transferred which, first permitted additional funding for research, later the establishment of the William Ellery Channing Professorship. There was also the beginning of a fund for a Harriet Ryan Albee Fellowship, which Dennis Kasper once held. The Albee Fund grew sufficiently, from accruals and additions, to become the Harriet Ryan Albee Chair, held from its inception by Elliott Kieff.

"Thus the Mallory Institute at the BCH was the fifth Channing location, the first as a laboratory. The initial investigations were in pulmonary disease. Gus Lorenzi,the first fellow to come on Channing money, studied defense mechanisms of the lung and made major discoveries, as did Len Berman, Gareth Green, Gary Huber, and Eliot Goldstein. I will not attempt to continue listing all the remarkable people or their work - suffice it to say that medical research, in this country and throughout the world, has been greatly enriched by the people who came to the Channing as young investigators and proceeded up the ladder to positions of considerable status.

"Ed's particular interest in bacteriuria led to questions about the possible relationship of bacteriuria to hypertension and then to a collaboration with Bill Miall, a gifted British epidemiologist, and Ken Stuart, a Barbadean whom many of you know - if not Ken then his son Steven. They worked together first in Jamaica and then in the Rhonnda Valley in South Wales. Mary Kendrick, who had been working with Ed for many years, played an important part in that research. One of the most significant results of those studies was what Ed called his "twelve years preceptorship in epidemiologic methods and approaches to the study of chronic diseases." Archie Cochrane was then director of the epidemiologic research unit in South Wales and it was he who provided much of that tutorial. Archie was also a great connoisseur of modern art and had befriended a young sculptor, Peter Nicholas, who lived and worked in a barn on Archie's estate. It was Peter Nicholas whom Ed commissioned to create the sculpture, the massive stone piece, presently in the lobby, for the new building on Albany Street where the Channing was next located.

"By the early '60s space at the Mallory became too limiting for the work that was ongoing or could be started if there were more room. Ed's enthusiasm and intellectual curiosity had attracted many researchers (many of you who are here today) who wanted to work under his direction. Many brought new and interesting projects of their own with them. Ed put together a package that included NIH funds, money from the City (for diagnostic facilities for the hospital), and a substantial amount from Max Finland, who always knew how to raise money, as did Ed. The Laboratory for Infectious Diseases, as it was then called, was adjacent to the Mallory Institute. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it was wonderful space, five floors, of which the first was the diagnostic bacteriology lab, the next three for research and administration and the fifth for Dr. Finland's use subsequent to his retirement as director of the Harvard Medical Service.

"The outpouring of work from the Channing in those years is mindboggling. You have only to look at the volumes of collected papers of realize what a remarkable tradition it has. Both in infectious disease and epidemiology it became world renowned. Rather than specify any one project, I will mention instead what may be the most unusual group spawned by the Channing, that is the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center. East Boston, directed from its inception by Jim Taylor, was created as a community based center for the study of chronic disease in a stable population. In those years, the late 60s and early 70s, East Boston had a very stable population, about 30,000 people united in their antipathy to the airport, but a textbook population for studies in hypertension, bacteriuria, chronic pulmonary disease, and health problems of the elderly, to mention only a few.

"The Channing remained affiliated with the BCH until 1975, two years longer than the rest of the Harvard unit which withdrew (some would say was forced out) when the City decided to streamline the operation of the hospital (there had been a tripartite arrangement with Harvard, Tufts and BU) and Boston University was designated as the single academic partner.

"So the Channing moved again, to Longwood Avenue, and affiliated with the Brigham. There were obvious advantages in being close to the center of the Harvard medical area with so many teaching hospitals nearby. I remember Ed saying at that time that the new lab on Longwood avenue would be smaller than it had been at the BCH and the he intended for it to remain that way. So much for "the less is better theory." The Channing continued to grow. At Ed's retirement in 1989 co-directors, Dennis Kasper and Frank Speizer, were named because the work in each area, infectious diseases and epidemiology, necessitated more focussed supervision. That the co-directors so adroitly managed the move to the eighth location for the Channing is evidence of their remarkable ability to work together.

"It's quite a stretch from a home for destitute, chronically ill women located in the vestry of a church to the research ongoing in this building. I sometimes wonder what Harriet Ryan Albee would think of it, but then I remember the words she herself spoke on one occasion, "The home has never done good by rule, but according to a present need." Certainly there is a present need for the work going on here and now. Ed too was driven by present need, by the need to move ahead in new and exciting areas of medical research, as well as the need for new and better space in which to house that research. Both he and Harriet Ryan Albee, and Ted Badger and Max Finland, would be greatly pleased by the eighth incarnation of the Channing Home."

Amalie M. Kass
Lecturer on History of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
October 31, 1996