James A. Hughes Recalls Early Vassar Hospital by Helen Myers (Poughkeepsie New Yorker, April 1, 1945) Several years ago, the late Dr. William A. Krieger had a bronze tablet put in one of the student nurses' classrooms at Vassar Hospital. It reads: "To James, in appreciation of faithful service since 1895." The tablet honors James A. Hughes who began work at the hospital exactly 50 years ago today, and is still on the job. "James" or "Jimmy" to everyone at Vassar, from student nurses to staff doctors, Mr. Hughes has worked under all the hospital's superintendents: Dr. Guy C. Bayley, Dr. Henry G. Bugbee, Dr. James T. Harrington, Benjamin Fowler, Alexander Candlish, Sidney Barnes, and Joseph Weber. When he began his long service eight or ten patients was the average in summer, 18 or 20 in winter and he has seen the time when Vassar had only one patient for a full week. People didn't have much confidence in hospitals in those days, he says. "When I first came, it was good for a column in the front page of the newspapers when a prominent man came here," he says with a grin. "People thought he was as good as dead." True, he adds soberly and proudly. "We have 260 patients or something like that now, and Vassar has always been classed as a number one hospital as long as I have known it." Mr. Hughes was born in Walden, Orange County, June 23, 1860. He remembers hearing his father read items about the Civil War soldiers parade on the race track at Goshen, near his home. When he was five or six he moved with his family to New London, Connecticut. His first job was as a farmer in Connecticut. He later went to New York to learn the plumbing trade, but gave it up because it was too dirty. He didn't like the jobs he had to do right after breakfast, he says with a characteristic grin.
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