
A Century of Healing: Centennial Reflections on the John D. Archbold Memorial Hospital
In the summer of 1925, the John D. Archbold Memorial Hospital opened with 100 beds, an active medical staff of 15 physicians, and a staff of 11 registered nurses. At the time, it was the most modern and advanced medical facility of its size anywhere. Today, the 264-bed hospital is served by a medical staff of over 130 physicians and nearly 650 nurses and is the anchor of a healthcare system that serves fifteen counties in Southwest Georgia. A Century of Healing tells the story of an institution's journey from a small-town hospital to a regional hub. The growth of the John D. Archbold Memorial Hospital paralleled the development of Thomasville and Thomas County, Georgia, and the increasing sophistication of U.S. healthcare. Over a century, Archbold's directors and trustees ensured that the hospital remained at the forefront of American healthcare by overseeing brick-and-mortar additions, expansions of service lines, extensions of services beyond the local area, and the acquisition of cutting-edge technology. With A Century of Healing, Dr. Bragg achieves a balance between careful and accurate documentation of facts and readability to craft a historical account that covers facts but still holds the general reader's interest. His analysis is certainly more macroscopic than microscopic. Nevertheless, it comes with the realization that a centennial history or institutional memoir of a hospital is not just the story of a brick-and-mortar building. Instead, the brick-and-mortar building is the story's setting of a people-a small Southwest Georgia town's doctors, nurses, patients, technicians, families, citizens, politicians, businesspeople, and "winter visitors"-and their healthcare. To that end, he has not hesitated to detour his narrative down whatever interesting rabbit holes he encountered to tell the human side of the story of a big-city hospital located in a small Georgia town.