The comic and the saint

FountOfElias has a prayer to St Jude, a cousin of Jesus and the saint of hopeless causes.

so who is this guy?

Heh. Sounds like the one who needs to be asked to pray that the US election goes off without causing a civil war.

but for docs, St Jude is the cancer hospital for children that devised the St Jude protocol, one of the earliest treatments that resulted in curing children with leukemia.

I am old enough to remember when leukemia was a death sentence for children,.... Then suddenly, it became a treatable disease with even a chance of complete cure.

NIH library link has the story of how this happened here.

The irony of course is that St Jude's hospital was not in New York City or Los Angeles, but in the middle of nowhere: Memphis.

There is a reason for this, and the story can be found here.

Comedian Danny Thomas (from the 1950's sitcom Make Room for Daddy) was out of work and prayed to St Jude to let him know if God wanted him in show business or if he should get a regular job.

Then, when he decided to build a hospital to thank the saint, he was advised that southern California had a lot of hospitals, but that there were few options for children in the Southern USA, and there was an especial need for children suffering from cancer.

and years later, his fundraising helped to build the hospital.

There is a twist to the story: Danny Thomas was an Arab, from Lebanon, and he turned to his fellow Lebanese to raise money to raise money to run the hospital, which treated all patients for free.

The American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC) is the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Its sole mission is to raise the funds and awareness necessary to operate and maintain St. Jude.^[1] ALSAC is the third largest healthcare related charity in the United States

In the days before the fragmentation of multiculturalism, one would see this as an example of how all Americans get along and help each other: rich Californians, show business types, Jews and non Catholics helping a Catholic Arab raising money for poor southern black and white children to get badly needed medical care.

or as the hospitals' website says: 

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital opened its doors on February 4, 1962, based on Danny's dream that "no child should die in the dawn of life." Since then, we’ve made incredible strides in childhood cancer research. We’ve helped improve the survival rate of childhood cancer from 20% to 80%. And ALL, the disease with a virtual death sentence in 1962, now has a survival rate of 94 percent.