Interview with Father James Murphy

Interview with Father James Murphy

Nebraska State Hospital for Tuberculosis, Chaplain, Death, Oral History

Father James E. Murphy served as the Chaplain at the TB Hospital from 1955 to 1961. This is a clip of an interview with him in 2017, where he talks about death at the Nebraska State Hospital for Tuberculosis.

ca. 2017

Female and Male interviewer

James E. Murphy

Unknown

FM: I was really getting on call for the [chuckles] terminally ill. I mean, when they were dying. About the only time I was called there was when a patient was dying. So, almost all of the ones I visited with did die, yeah. One of them did live for a while after, he lived a while after the anointing, I know that—it was, they always wait until they were really close to death before they call me. The one that didn’t he was, he was on the stool and they called me without movin’ him, so I anointed him on the stool and he did survive. And they called me and said he lived for a while. But I know in going to the place, it was a very gloomy, scary place. There were a lot of trees around and the dark, brick building, just gloomy to be with and just seeing it was old and decrepit. But I—I have known people who did survive. Quite a few from the Scottsbluff area, they had the Mexicans. Apparently, a lot of them had tuberculosis and went to the TB hospital. And I went out to Scottsbluff in a ministry out there, and I met quite a few of them who did survive, so they did cure quite a few, but in my—in the 20’s and 30’s it seemed like it was a death sentence to be sent to the TB hospital. When I was a little kid, you would try to keep it secret if you thought somebody had TB, cause it would be a death sentence to go there and never come back alive. We never thought about the danger to the people that were around them. We were just thinking of the person who had TB, we didn’t want to send them there to die. That was—those were the main memories I have of the TB hospital.

Audio recording

2:49