50 years of the NHS
This month has seen the 50th anniversary of a great British institution – the NHS.
And for the London Chest Hospital in Bethnal Green, it’s a double cause for celebration.
Half a century ago, it joined the fledgling health service. But, exactly a century before, it was set up as a pioneering hospital for the poor of the East End.
At a special service held recently, the London Chest Hospital celebrated 150 years of caring for the sick. And it was not only a testament to the hard work of the doctors, nurses and campaigners who have kept an East End institution up and running – but also to the efforts of a group of philanthropists a century and a half ago.
Towards the middle of the 1800s, the East End was becoming terribly overcrowded as people piled into the area to work in the sweatshops.
Sub-standard housing, with whole families living in one room, was the norm. And with poor nutrition, and smoke from the many factories polluting the air, chronic lung diseases, particularly tuberculosis, became endemic.
Gift to the poor
But a new spirit of responsibility toward the poor and needy was infusing the rich. Victoria Park was being laid out in the east of the borough, in an effort to give East Enders a breath of fresh air.
And in 1848, under the leadership of Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, a group of benefactors came together. The consortium of City bankers, merchants and philanthropists launched a public appeal and, with the handsome response, set up a dispensary in Liverpool Street prescribing medicines to people who previously would have done without.
The dispensary was a huge success, so great in fact that the governors soon realised that there was a greater need – a need for a special chest hospital.
The healthy, green open space of Victoria Park was an ideal location, and a competition was run to find a design for the new hospital building.
Joseph Paxton, famed as the architect of another of Albert’s pet projects, the Crystal Palace, applied his talents to the London Chest.
When the hospital opened its doors in 1855, its work was soon being hailed by the press. Charles Dickens’ weekly journal Household Words describing it as “replete with ingenious contrivances and, indeed, wanting in no essential thing”.
There was controversy when the building costs overran from £10,000 to £12,000, but the hospital soon established world renown, with Joseph Lister, the Essex doctor who pioneered the use of antiseptics in medicine, one of the staff medics.
During the First World War, the hospital was called upon to treat the thousands of wounded soldiers returning from the trenches in France.
Help for gas victims
And the hospital’s particular expertise came into its own, as many of the men had been victims of that most horrible of weapons – poison gas.
The hospital became a victim of enemy bombs itself in the Second World War, the North Wing and chapel being destroyed.
Then, in 1948, the hospital joined the new NHS and moved from the treatment of TB, by then a declining problem, into pioneering open heart surgery.
And a century and a half on, through enormous change, German bombs and threats of closure, the London Chest remains one of the East End’s most important monuments.