Kalighat Home for the Dying
{{Short description|Hospice in Kolkata founded by Mother Teresa}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=November 2018}}
{{Use Indian English|date=November 2018}}
Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart (Nirmal Hriday)[https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/04/AR2007090401194_pf.html 10 Years Later, Mother Teresa Remembered]. Washington Post, 4 September 2007. (formerly Mother Teresa's Kalighat Home for the Dying Destitutes) is a hospice for the sick, destitute and the dying established by St. Mother Teresa[https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE4D7103EF933A15753C1A9659C8B63 Her Legacy: Acceptance And Doubts Of a Miracle] by David Rohde. New York Times. 20 October 2003.[https://web.archive.org/web/20110526034926/http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070902/asp/7days/story_8265270.asp The house that Mother built] The Telegraph. Sunday. 2 September 2007. in Kalighat, Kolkata, India. Before Mother Teresa sought permission to use it, the building was an old abandoned Hindu temple to the goddess Kali,[http://www.indiatoday.intoday.in/index.php?issueid=54&id=13139&option=com_content&task=view§ionid=30 NIRMAL HRIDAY, KOLKATA: Home bodies]. India Today. 14 August 2008. the Hindu goddess of time and change. It was founded by St. Mother Teresa on her 42nd birthday in 1952,[https://web.archive.org/web/20090211091217/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,138292,00.html?iid=digg_share SEEKER OF SOULS] TIME. By SUBIR BHAUMIK AND MEENAKSHI GANGULY. CALCUTTA. 24 June 2001. two years after she established Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata.
St. Mother Teresa opened this free hospice in 1952, next to the famous Kalighat Kali Temple in Kalighat Calcutta.[http://www.hindu.com/fline/fl1419/14190170.htm Mother Teresa of Calcutta] Frontline Vol. 14 :: No. 19 :: Sept.20 - 3 Oct. 1997. With the help of Indian officials, she changed an abandoned building which previously served as a temple for the Hindu goddess Kali into the "Kalighat home for the dying", a free hospice for the poor. Later on she changed the name to "Kalighat the Home of the Pure Heart (Nirmal Hriday)". People who were brought to the home received medical attention from the Missionaries of Charity and were given the opportunity to die with dignity, according to the rituals of their faith; Muslims were read the Quran, Hindus received water from the Ganges, and Catholics received the Last Rites.Spink, Kathryn (1997). Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography. New York. HarperCollins, p.55. {{ISBN|0-06-250825-3}}. "A beautiful death," she said, "is for people who lived like animals to die like angels—loved and wanted."
Quality of medical care
In 1994, Robin Fox, then editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, visited the Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and described the medical care the patients received as "haphazard".{{cite journal|author=Fox, Robin|year=1994|title=Mother Teresa's care for the dying|journal=The Lancet|volume=344|issue=8925|pages=807–808|doi=10.1016/S0140-6736(94)92353-1}} He observed that sisters and volunteers, some of whom had no medical knowledge, frequently made decisions about patient care because of the lack of doctors in the hospice: "There are doctors that call in from time to time," Fox wrote, "but usually the sisters and volunteers (some of whom have medical knowledge) make decisions as best they can."{{Cite journal|last=Fox|first=Robin|date=September 17, 1994|title=Calcutta Perspective: Mother Theresa's care for the dying|journal=The Lancet|volume=344|pages=807–808|via=Elsevier Science Direct}} Fox witnessed one patient with high fever being treated with paracetamol and tetracycline, an antibiotic, only to be diagnosed later with malaria by a visiting doctor, who prescribed chloroquine. Fox specifically blamed Mother Teresa for these conditions, writing, "Mother Theresa prefers providence to planning". Fox also observed that staff either declined to use or lacked access to blood films or "simple algorithms that might help the sisters distinguish" between curable and incurable patients: "Investigations, I was told, are seldom permissible".
Fox conceded that the regimen he observed included "cleanliness, the tending of wounds and sores, and loving kindness", but critiqued the sisters' "spiritual approach" to managing pain: "I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics. Along with the neglect of diagnosis, the lack of good analgesia marks Mother Theresa's approach as clearly separate from the hospice movement. I know which I prefer."
Mary Loudon, who volunteered at the same facility, observed "syringes run under cold water and reused, aspirin given to those with terminal cancer, and cold baths given to everyone"{{Cite journal|last=Loudon|first=Mary|date=1996-01-06|title=The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice|url=https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&issn=17592151&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA17899217&sid=googleScholar&linkaccess=abs|journal=British Medical Journal|language=en|volume=312|issue=7022|pages=64–66}} as well as overcrowding. Loudon also recalled speaking with a visiting doctor whose fifteen-year-old patient was dying because the sisters had not given him antibiotics for a "relatively simple kidney complaint", and refused to transfer him to a nearby hospital for a needed operation.{{cite book|author=Christopher Hitchens|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=t3qoIwJWGLIC&pg=PT51|title=The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice|date=24 April 2012|publisher=McClelland & Stewart|isbn=978-0-7710-3919-5|pages=40–41, 51|author-link=Christopher Hitchens}}
There have been a series of other reports documenting inattention to medical care in the order's facilities. Similar points of view have also been expressed by some former volunteers who worked for Teresa's order. Mother Teresa herself referred to the facilities as "Houses of the Dying".{{cite journal|author=Robin Fox|title=Mother Teresa's care for the dying|journal=The Lancet|volume=344|issue=8925|pages=807–808|doi=10.1016/s0140-6736(94)92353-1}}; cf. "Mother Teresa's care for the dying," letters from David Jeffrey, Joseph O'Neill and Gilly Burns, The Lancet 344 (8929): 1098
In 2013, a group of Université de Montréal academics joined the foregoing criticism,{{cite journal|author1=Larivée, Serge|author2=Carole Sénéchal|author3=Geneviève Chénard|year=2013|title=Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa|journal=Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses|volume=42|issue=3|pages=319–345|doi=10.1177/0008429812469894}} targeting, among other issues, the missionary's practice of "caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it, ... her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce". Questioning the Vatican's motivations for ignoring the mass of criticism, the study concluded that Mother Teresa's "hallowed image – which does not stand up to analysis of the facts – was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign" engineered by the Catholic convert and anti-abortion BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge.{{cite web|date=1 March 2013|title=Mother Teresa: Anything but a Saint...|url=http://www.nouvelles.umontreal.ca/udem-news/news/20130301-mother-teresa-anything-but-a-saint.html|url-status=bot: unknown|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160401151627/http://www.nouvelles.umontreal.ca/udem-news/news/20130301-mother-teresa-anything-but-a-saint.html|archive-date=2016-04-01|publisher=U de M Nouvelles}}
Baptisms of the dying
St. Mother Teresa encouraged members of her order to baptize dying patients, without regard to the individual's religion. In a speech at the Scripps Clinic in California in January 1992, she said: "Something very beautiful... not one has died without receiving the special ticket for St. Peter, as we call it. We call baptism ticket for St. Peter. We ask the person, do you want a blessing by which your sins will be forgiven and you receive God? They have never refused. So 29,000 have died in that one house [in Kalighat] from the time we began in 1952."{{citation needed|date=April 2017}}
Critics have argued that patients were not provided sufficient information to make an informed decision about whether they wanted to be baptized and the theological significance of a Christian baptism.
Some of St. Mother Teresa's defenders have argued that baptisms are either soul-saving or harmless and hence the criticisms would be pointless (a variant of Pascal's Wager). Simon Leys, in a letter to The New York Review of Books, wrote: "Either you believe in the supernatural effect of this gesture – and then you should dearly wish for it. Or you do not believe in it, and the gesture is as innocent and well-meaningly innocuous as chasing a fly away with a wave of the hand."{{cite journal | title= Letters: In Defense of Mother Teresa| last= Leys | first= Simon | date= 19 September 1996 | journal= The New York Review of Books| volume= 43 |issue= 14| url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/09/19/in-defense-of-mother-teresa/ | access-date= 21 April 2017 }}
References
{{Reflist}}
External links
- [https://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1986/february/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19860203_nirmal-hriday_en.html Address of Pope John Paul II at Nirmal Hriday, 3 February 1986] at Vatican
- [http://www.wimklerkx.nl/EN/PROJECTS/TV.html Teresa's volunteers] (Photo document on volunteers working at Nirmal Hriday by photographer Wim Klerkx, 1998)
- [https://www.amazon.in/Mother-Teresa-Untold-Aroup-Chatterjee/dp/8175993316 Mother Teresa: The Untold Story] - The 2016 edition of the popular book
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Category:Organisations based in Kolkata