Conference Papers - 1902 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BEPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON INSTITUTIONAL CARE OF DESTITUTE ADULTS. At the First New York State Conference of Charities and Correction, held in Albany one year... more » ago, Mr. Byron M. Child, Chairman of the Committee on Institutional Care of Destitute Adults, gave such a comprehensive and characteristically thorough statistical report of what had been accomplished in the matter of institutional care of adults up to that date that it would seem to be of email interest to this Conference to present subject-matter that can so easily be referred to in the proceedings of last year. Institutional care of adult dependents should begin before admission to an institution through the careful examination, by an expert, of every applicant. Indiscriminate and free admission to the almshouse must be to a large extent demoralizing. The exigency of the situation confronting a superintendent of the poor, commissioner of charities, or overseer of the poor, when a political leader insists that an unworthy person, or one who is perfectly able to care for himself, be admitted to an institution, demands a strenuous nature and a rigidity of backbone that the average official, working with an eye on the contingency of his reelection seldom possesses. Political influence in the administration of our charities should be eliminated, just as the school boards in our cities are, in a large measure, being taken out of politics. We are pleased to report a decided decrease in the population of our almshouses during the past year. Inquiry as to the cause points to the general prosperity of the country as one factor, but we believe that much greater and more intelligent care in the admission of patients to almshouses and hospitals has had a large effect on the result. The test of a medical examination by the ...« less