Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Famous Hospitals

  • Thomas Guy and his statue

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England Thomas Guy was probably the greatest charitable benefactor in eighteenth-century Britain. At his death, he had amassed a fortune of over two hundred thousand pounds (worth around 500 million pounds in today’s money). His largesse was directed primarily at Guy’s Hospital in Southwark, London. As a governor of St Thomas’s Hospital,…

  • Dipinto di blu: Turning blue in a Florence hospital

    Giulio Nicita Florence, Italy   A view of Villa Monna Tessa. From the author’s archive. We were in the middle of the 1970s in Florence, Italy. We had concluded the long, tedious years of university study. Real work awaited us in Villa Monna Tessa, a large early 1900s four-story building. It housed several departments of…

  • What’s in a name?

    Aaroh Dubey London, England   St. Bart’s quadrangle fountain. Photo by author. “What’s in a name?” Juliet asks the audience in Act 2 Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet. The play laments the folly of holding onto the past and giving undue meaning to names and titles.1 Outside of Shakespeare, however, things are rarely as…

  • The origins of the word “hospital”

    Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “hospital” is derived from the Old French “ospital,” meaning hostel, shelter, lodging, or shelter for the needy. The origin can be traced to the Latin “hospitale” and persists in the modern French “hôpital.” The OED states further: The sense of “charitable institution to…

  • St. Fabiola and her hospital

    In about AD 380, a wealthy patrician matron gave money for a hospital to be built in Portus, the ancient port of Rome. This hospital was one of the first of its kind in the western part of the Roman empire, designed to provide care for the multitude of poor people living in the capital.…

  • Great Ormond Street and JM Barrie

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Cover of Peter Pan and Wendy by JM Barrie, 1915. Colorized by Binaire on Wikimedia. Bloomsbury: Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Crop of photo by Nigel Cox on geograph.org.uk via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 2.0. James Matthew Barrie (1860–1937) was a Scottish novelist and playwright. He wrote about thirty novels…

  • Long before Pearl Harbor, an entire hospital was sent to help England in World War II

    Edward TaborBethesda, MD, United States Harvard University President James B. Conant had the idea of sending a fully staffed hospital to England to help the British in their war with Germany in 1939, more than two years before the US entered the war. It became a collaboration between Harvard University and the American Red Cross.…

  • Las Animas: A Cuban yellow fever hospital

    Enrique Chaves-CarballoKansas City, Kansas, United StatesDavid SchwartzAtlanta, Georgia, United States John Hay, U.S. Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt, described the Spanish-American War as “a splendid little war” because it was brief and resulted in relatively few casualties.1 The Treaty of Paris, formally signed on December 10, 1898, ended Spanish occupation of Cuba and established…

  • Guadalupe: One of Spain’s oldest schools of medicine

    Nicolás Roberto Robles Badajoz, Spain   Figure 1. The Monastery of Guadalupe. Main entrance. Photo by Rafa G. Recuero. Via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0 ES. Guadalupe, a small Spanish town in the district of Cáceres, Extremadura, arose around a monastery. Legend says that a shepherd named Gil Cordero was looking for a stray sheep when…

  • St. Godric and the lost leper hospital of Darlington

    Stephen Martin UK   Fig 1. Godric praying to the Virgin, c 1400. PD-US, accessed: wikimedia, original: ©British Library Board, Cotton, Faustina, VI, ii 16 V. In the late 1100s, the English monk Reginald of Durham wrote an account in Latin of the hermit St. Godric, whom he knew personally.1 Reginald attributed over two hundred…