The new Royal London Hospital
The annual Open Day at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel takes place this Wednesday (19 September). It’s a big occasion, with the official unveiling of the construction site of the brand new hospital. It’s the biggest redevelopment in the hospital’s long history and is due to complete in 2015.
It’s a significant date too, because it marks 250 years since the hospital officially opened in Whitechapel - on 20 September 1757. The genesis of the infirmary had been 17 years before, when seven men met at Cheapside’s Feathers Tavern, one night in 1740. They all agreed that the City and east London needed a hospital and, under the leadership of 22-year-old surgeon John Harrison, the seven rented a house in Moorfields. It was to be the first of many temporary homes - by 1741 the ‘London Infirmary’ was in Prescott Street near the Minories.
Things were very different in medicine 250 years ago. Harrison and his cohort were members of the Barber-Surgeons’ company. It was a curiosity dating from the Middle Ages that physicians didn’t practice surgery - that was left to barbers, presumably because they had the sharpest knives. One shudders to imagine the level of care dispensed, but just a few years after this the surgeons finally went their own way. And in an age when we live in fear of MRSA, it’s salutary to look back to the early years of the London. With no running water, body parts and excrement taken out to be dumped on the streets each night, and a regular round of delousers fighting a losing battle to keep the wards clean, your chances of coming out healthier than you went in were slim. Anyone who was released (they were classified either ‘cured’ or, more likely, ‘relieved’) was ordered to return to their parish church and give thanks to God. Faith was perhaps as efficacious as the medicine in those days.
But the tireless governors pressed on and, by 1753, had raised the cash to build a superb new infirmary in the healthy green fields of Whitechapel. With running water and flushing toilets it was the best in London when it opened to a fanfare in 1757. The finest surgeons came to work here and, under Sir William Blizard, it became London’s first teaching hospital.
The medical school opened in 1785, with a dissecting room, a chemical lab and the museum. In 1854 a new school was opened, and in 1876 Queen Victoria opened a new wing, making the London the biggest hospital in England, with 790 beds. Over the next century, a succession of chairmen added to the hospital - the towering figure being Sydney Holland, from 1896 to 1931, who raised enormous amounts of money for the London and saw the main core of the hospital rebuilt.
The buildings were damaged in World War II but the hospital has continued to grow, with new blocks, the famous helicopter pad and, of course, the amalgamation of the London with other hospitals, including St Clement’s Bow and the Mile End Hospitals in the 1960s. It was renamed the Royal London in 1990, and the Queen paid a visit to mark 250 years since those barber surgeons set up their hospital in a tavern. More recently, the London became part of the Barts and the London NHS Trust.
Amidst all the new, reminders of the old remain. The famed museum, set within the crypt of a Victorian church, paints a fascinating picture of how medicine was done in the old East End, with antique surgical instruments, nursing uniforms, books, documents, displays on Joseph Merrick (the ‘Elephant Man’ who live in the hospital, and on former London nurse Edith Cavell. The forensic department has information on the Christie, Crippen and Whitechapel Murders.
The 2005 redevelopment plan will see £1.2bn spent to provide London’s premier emergency and trauma care, Europe’s largest renal care and one of the country’s biggest paediatric departments. A cancer and cardiac centre of excellence will be built too. Within a few years, the hospital will be transformed beyond recognition. Harrison and his pals could never have dreamed of what their ‘London Infirmary’ would become.