Commonwealth Report

In 1918, Mrs. Stephen Vanderburg Harkness of Manhattan set aside $10,000,000 "to do something for the welfare of mankind." This money was used to launch the Commonwealth Fund. By 1926, when she died, she had left $38,000,000 to the Fund. It is managed by Mrs. Harkness' serious-minded son Edward, who is one of the few men in this world who lie awake nights worrying about how to spend their money. The original endowment has now grown to almost $50,000,000. In 1939, according to Mr. Harkness' latest report, published last week, the Fund spent almost $2,000,000 on U. S. research and public health,* a medical philanthropic giant topped only by the Rockefeller Foundation and Education Board's world-wide expenditure of $13,000,000.

Less concerned with laboratory work than with modernizing medical practice throughout backward sections of the U. S., the Fund spent the greater part of this money to build or enlarge 13 small country hospitals (mostly in the South), send visiting nurses to out-of-the-way farms, inspect village water supplies, establish small-town clinics for tuberculosis, venereal disease and child health. Rather than spread hospital money thinly throughout the U. S., the Fund prefers to "experiment" with "dramatic" model hospitals that make it possible "for key communities to take a long step forward all at once, and so to set the pace for others."

Among 1939 Fund projects:

>Public-health activities, in connection with State health departments, were sponsored in country regions of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Oklahoma. Some of these communities had never paid much mind to medical guardians. "In Seminole County [Okla.] ... it took a midnight raid with flashlight photographs to put an end to the bootlegging of forbidden grades of milk. ... In another [county] a sanitation officer persuaded the authorities of a little city to do something about their water supply by the good old device of putting dyestuff down a suspected privy and watching it color the water of the spring whence the citizens quenched their thirst."

>Twelve medical fellowships were given to "young teachers of medicine," for study in biochemistry, pharmacology, obstetrics. "One interesting award sends a man from a physiological laboratory to a school of engineering, so that he can bring back from hydraulics and mathematics principles and techniques applicable to the study of blood pressure, blood flow, and the like." Every year, twelve young men receive scholarships to medical school on condition that "they practice for a term of years in small towns." Now practicing in southern and New England villages are 44 of these sponsored graduates. "To help older men practice good medicine in country districts . . . the Fund continues to experiment with fellowships providing for a month or more of postgraduate study at good medical schools."

>For continuation of hospital and university research in rheumatic fever, kidney disease, mental hygiene of children, pneumonia, infantile paralysis and streptococcic infections, the Fund spent almost $400,000.

*Only non-medical fund projects: 1) publication studies on U. S. Law; 2) 60-odd fellowships (like Rhodes scholarships in reverse) for British scholars to study at U. S. universities.

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