Mother Alphonsa

At New Rochelle, N. Y., the mourners for Miss Mary L. Merrill took sad pleasure in reading her will last week. She had directed that $25,000 go to the Rosary Hills Home for incurable cancer victims at Hawthorne, N. Y.

The mourners knew that the cancerous men and women there, almost 100, were getting the devoted care of the Dominican Sisters of the Congregation of St. Rose of Lima. They could picture the white-clad sisters wiping away the fetid pus from cancerous lesions, applying cool unguents, making the patients comfortable, even injecting a merciful dose of morphine.

Mother M. Alphonsa Lathrop, 75-year-old daughter of Poet Nathaniel Hawthorne, widow of Novelist George Parsons Lathrop (died 1898) had established this institution a few years after taking the veil (1899) to provide a place where destitute cancer victims could die in peace. No efforts to cure were made. "So long as they fretted about radium and operations, they were miserable," Dr. John L. Shells, physician to the institution, said only last week. "It seems to me that radium makes them worse, unless it is applied very early. . . .We let them alone and just keep them comfortable, and sometimes they live for years." Mother Alphonsa always had to beg for funds, had donors throughout the country. The New Rochelle mourners of Miss Merrill were sadly contented to join these. They phoned Rosary Hills, asked for Mother Alphonsa to tell her the glad news directly.

"She died this morning" . . . heart disease.