Puck's Hint for "Hospital Sunday"

Joseph Keppler's cover for Puck (Vol. XVI, No. 407) frames a Christmas-season appeal for hospital charity. A robed female figure—Charity—holds a bouquet and stands beside a crippled boy on crutches, his foot bandaged, who offers her flowers in return. To their left, Puck himself, bare-chested and wearing a top hat, gestures toward a collection urn inscribed: "Here Christian, Jew & Pagan meet, / All meaner thoughts above, / Go lay at Charity's dear feet / The offerings of love." Behind them stretches a crowded hospital ward. The caption reads "Puck's Hint for 'Hospital Sunday.'" The argument is ecumenical and sentimental: private charitable giving, crossing religious lines, should sustain public hospitals—a Progressive-era alternative to state funding that Puck's largely middle-class readership would have recognized as respectable civic duty.