Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Famous Hospitals

  • The great hospitals of Paris

    Few cities have shaped Western civilization as profoundly as Paris, the “city of light”. For over 500 years, until the mid-twentieth century, Paris was the undisputed center of European culture, encompassing art, literature, and philosophy. Historians trace its early history to 451 CE, when Saint Genevieve saved it from the Huns, and to about 500…

  • Thomas Coram and the Foundling Hospital

    Elizabeth SteinhartJMS PearceHull, England Nineteen years after good Captain Coram’s heart has been so touched by the exposure of children, living, dying, and dead, in his daily walks, one wing of the existing building was completed and admission given to the first score of little blanks [foundling children].—Charles Dickens, “Received, a Blank Child” in Household…

  • Grady Memorial Hospital

    Umut AkovaAtlanta, Georgia, United States In late 1889, during the years following Reconstruction, the Atlanta councilman Joseph Hirsch introduced a resolution to create a public hospital in honor of journalist Henry W. Grady, who had become a major force in Georgia politics and advocated for a public city hospital. By September 1890, the city had purchased a…

  • 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 NicitaFlorence, Italy 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 Medicine as well as Urology. The edifice, once an elegant patrician residence,…

  • What’s in a name?

    Aaroh DubeyLondon, England “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 black and white: names are important, the past shapes…

  • 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 FischerUppsala, Sweden James Matthew Barrie (1860–1937) was a Scottish novelist and playwright. He wrote about thirty novels and twenty plays. He is best known for his 1904 play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, which later became the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy. When Barrie was six years old, his brother…

  • 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.…