Category: Famous Hospitals
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Craiglockhart Hospital, head above the parapet
Annabelle SlingerlandLeiden, the Netherlands You are in World War I, back in its notorious trenches, hearing uninterrupted shooting, deafened from the shells, smelling cordite and dead bodies, fellow soldiers fall back on you, wounded or dead, grey with mud. War neurosis, nervous breakdown, neurasthenia or “shellshock” follows you like your own shadow. How on earth can…
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Alcatraz Hospital revisited—patients behind bars
Annabelle SlingerlandLeiden, the Netherlands While many hospitals and their locations become historic icons for the accomplishments of their staff, Alcatraz Hospital is famous for its very walls, its infamous patients, and treatment. It was a hospital inside a maximum security U.S. federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island, which covers twenty-two acres only a little more than…
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Hillman Hospital
A.J. WrightBirmingham, Alabama, United States Alabama’s first operating medical school, the proprietary Graefenberg Medical Institute in the small town of Dadeville, opened in 1852. That school closed at the beginning of the Civil War. The Medical College of Alabama had been chartered by the state in 1856, but no funds provided; a charter from the…
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Hybridity in Hong Kong: The Tung Wah Hospital
Angharad FletcherHong Kong, China In his 1895 government report on the recent outbreak of bubonic plague, Dr Philip Bernard Chenery Ayres, last Colonial Surgeon of Hong Kong, berated the Tung Wah Hospital for its dangerous and insanitary conditions. Ayres listed the many “medical and surgical atrocities” he had witnessed within the walls of this “menace…
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The Massachusetts General Hospital
Andy HungChicago, Illinois, United States The performance was about to begin. The great glass dome lit up the open center stage with bright skylight. It was October 16, 1846, a time in history when surgeons performed their art before spectators, and the audience was about to witness a historic performance. William Morton, a 25-year-old dentist,…
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Peter Bent Brigham Hospital
Anaeze C. Offodile IIJoel T. KatzBoston, Massachusetts, United States Before his death in 1877, Peter Bent Brigham, a prominent restaurateur, businessman and abolitionist in the Boston area, left a significant bequest for the creation of a hospital to provide care for the indigent and sick patients of Suffolk County.1 This would materialize several decades later…
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The origin and evolution of Padua hospitals
Alberto ZanattaFabio ZampieriPadua, Italy The hospital San Francesco Grande in Padua was founded by the Piombino jurist Baldo Bonafari (†1418) and his wife Sibilla de Cetto (†1421), who also financed the construction of the San Francesco church behind the hospital. Work on the hospital began in 1414, and its first patients could be admitted by…
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The National Anti-Vivisection Hospital, London
Alan BatesLondon, United Kingdom In 1935, the National Anti-Vivisection Hospital was in trouble. Its nurses gave up their holidays to raise money, and residents of London’s deprived district of Battersea, which the hospital served, gave their savings, but it was not enough. The hospital’s chairman, Lord Ernest Hamilton, blamed the King’s Fund, the charity responsible…
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The 8076th: A hospital with marching orders
Abigail ClineGeorgia, Augusta, United States November 22 was an unusually cold day at the American hospital in Kumchon County. Otherwise, it was business as usual in the sixty-bed facility. The doctors were scrubbing for surgery, nurses were moving patients among the wards, X-ray technicians were developing radiographs, and the pharmacy was dispensing prescriptions. There was…