Columbia Hospital for Women

Columbia Hospital for Women (1920s)

Columbia Hospital for Women

Location: 2425 L Street, NW, Washington, DC USA

Opened: March 1866; opened at L Street site in 1870

Closed: May 2002

From the U.S. National Library of Medicine site:

Columbia Hospital for Women, which closed in May 2002, was one of the oldest hospitals in Washington, DC and had occupied this site since 1870. Shortly after the Civil War, the Secretary of War E. N. Stanton authorized funds to establish a 50-bed hospital, stipulating that 20 of these beds be reserved for the wives and widows of U.S. soldiers. This was in response to a desperate need for a health-care facility for women who were arriving in the city in search of missing relatives. In March 1866, the hospital opened in the Hill Mansion at Thomas Circle (Massachusetts Avenue and 14th Street) under the name of Columbia Hospital for Women and Lying-in Asylum, and later moved to the Maynard Mansion at Pennsylvania Avenue and 25th Street, its current site. The original mansion was razed during a major renovation in 1914 and replaced by the present main hospital building. The Columbia became a private, non-profit hospital when President Eisenhower signed legislation transferring it to its board of directors in 1953. Columbia Hospital was a pioneer in the implementation of a number of innovative techniques in obstetrics and gynecology, and since its founding in 1866, more than 250,000 babies were delivered at Columbia.

The Columbia Hospital facility has been turned into an upscale condominum complex and is now known as The Columbia Residences of Washington, DC.

South London Hospital for Women and Children

Main Entrance - South London Hospital for
 Women and Children

South London Hospital for Women and Children

Location: 103 South Side, Clapham Commons, SW4 9DR, London, England, United Kingdom

Opened: 1913

Closed: 1984

This piece on the South London Hospital for Women and Children is from another one of those cool accidental finds, Lost Hospitals of London:

The perceived need for a general hospital for women in south London, staffed totally by women, was met when the South London Hospital for Women was founded by Miss Eleanor Davies-Colley (1874-1934) and Miss Maud Chadburn in 1912.  The new hospital would also train women doctors to become specialists (most hospitals at this time refused to employ them).

The two women, both surgeons at the New Hospital for Women, had begun raising funds in 1911.  The New Hospital for Women, which had been established for the same purposes, was having to turn away patients as it was unable to cope with the demand.

Two large houses - Holland House and Kingston House - on the south side of Clapham Common had been purchased following a public appeal.  An anonymous donation of £53,000 towards the building costs and a further £40,000 for the endowment of the Hospital enabled it to open within a year of its foundation.  The Out-Patients Department opened first, in 1913, at 88 and 90 Newington Causeway, while Holland House was demolished and building of the new hospital began.  In 1914 in-patients were temporarily accommodated in a nearby nursing home.

In 1916 the 80-bedded South London Hospital for Women was opened by Queen Mary.

The Hospital was said to be an 'Adamless Eden' as, apart from the engineer and the gardener, all the staff were women, including the porters.  A state-of-the art building, each ward had a balcony and an unusually large bathroom, which had wide doors so that a patient could be helped to enter supported by two nurses. The lavatory walls were covered with white marble, as this was believed to be non-absorbent.  An electric lift could take patients on their beds up to the flat roof for open-air treatment.  The infectious wards could only be entered from the flat roof. The nurses quarters contained a dining room, sitting room, silent room and visitors' room.  Each nurse had her own bedroom.  Their bathrooms contained facilities for shampooing hair and hot rails over which it could be dried.  The ward maids and servants had their own comfortably fitted cubicles in the basement.

In 1920 another building - Preston House - on the south side of the Hospital site was purchased.  This was equipped to provide an extra 40 surgical beds and was opened by the Duchess of York in 1924.  Kingston House, on the north side of the Hospital, was demolished in 1927 and a new North Wing built.  This included a new Out-Patients Department.

The North Wing opened in 1930 and building works continued throughout the 1930s.  The name of the Hospital was changed slightly and it became the South London Hospital for Women and Children (although boys up to the age of six had always been admitted).  The outbreak of WW2 in 1939 postponed the opening of the new South Wing and Nurses' Home.

During WW2 the Hospital admitted war casualties, after a Special Act of Parliament enabled it to treat male patients.  Although the buildings did not suffer serious damage, like other hospitals at this time its normal work was disrupted due to shortage of staff.  A 20-bed maternity unit had been due to open in 1944, but because of the danger of V1 flying bombs, it was evacuated to Scarborough.  The maternity home opened a few months later in Nightingale Lane (and was officially opened only in 1948 as the Queen Elizabeth Maternity Home).

A house in Chistlehurst was loaned to the Hospital; it had 35 beds for patients receiving medical treatment or convalescing following surgery.

In 1948 the Hospital joined the NHS, become part of the Lambeth Group of Hospitals.  It also opened a country annex at Woodhurst, a house at Peas Pottage near Crawley (this closed in 1970).

In 1964, following an NHS reorganisation, the Hospital passed to the newly formed South West London Group Hospital Management Committee.

In 1974 it then became part of the Wandsworth and East Merton Health District.

In 1982, after yet another NHS reoganisation, the Wandsworth Health Authority assumed responsibility for the Hospital.  The Health Authority decided it was 'uneconomic' and, despite strong public opposition, a petition signed by 60,000 people and occupation of the building for nine months by protesters, the Hospital closed in 1984.

The South London Hospital for Women and Children, once described as the 'best run hospital in England' maintained its female-only staffing policy to the end.

Present status (February 2008)

The supermarket chain, Tesco, bought the site in 1994 and planned to demolish the Hospital and to erect a 2,499 sq. metre supermarket with 112 apartments above (including an 11-storey tower) and parking for 257 cars.

Demolition was contested on the grounds of the builidng's architectural importance. Thus, the plans were changed and original facade of the Hospital retained; the rest of the building was demolished in 2004.

More on the 1984 protest and occupation can be found here.

New York Medical College and Hospital for Women



New York Medical College and Hospital for Women (1863-1919)

New York Medical College and Hospital for Women

Location: 724 Broadway, New York, New York USA

Opened: 1863

Closed: 1918

The New York Medical College and Hospital for Women was founded by Dr. Clemence S. Lozier, a woman physician in practice in New York City at the time. A visionary leader, Dr. Lozier gave weekly health talks in her own parlor, and from these beginnings came the idea for a medical college for women. Until then, there was no place in New York City where a woman could study medicine.
According to Sylvain Cazalet's history of the New York Medical College for Women, Dr. Lozier's leadership was crucial to the college's early success:

During the next years, twenty-five in all, when Dr. Lozier was President and Dean, she saw the College and Hospital rise from its small beginning of seven students to a list of two hundred and nineteen graduate medical women, settled in practice from Maine to California. Prejudice had been partly overcome. No longer did men students hiss and jeer as visiting women students came to amphitheaters for clinical instruction.

The school continued to expand under the leadership of other women physicians over the next few decades. However, it was not until 1918 that women were accepted into the city's hospitals and that the women graduate physicians of the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women entered Bellevue, Cumberland Street, and Willard Parker Hospitals as interns. With that decision, the Board decided to close the school and transfer the existing students to the New York Homeopathic Medical College.

Unfortunately, like many anxious liberal efforts to eliminate women's institutions in an effort to look "fair," that optimism proved premature. For the most part, women medical students continued to face restrictive quotas and other forms of admission discrimination well into the 1970s.