Discover

'St Thomas' Hospital' is a large NHS hospital in Lambeth, London. It is administratively a part of 'Guy’s & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust'. It has provided health care freely or under charitable auspices since the 12th century and was originally located in Southwark.

Contents

History

The modern hospital

Trivia

See also

Footnotes

Bibliography

External links

History

The hospital was described as ancient in 1215 and was named after Thomas Becket — which suggests it may have been founded after 1173 when Becket was canonised. However, it is possible it was only renamed in 1173 and that it was founded when St Mary Overie Priory was refounded in 1100 in Southwark.
Originally it was run by a mixed order of Augustinian monks and nuns, dedicated to Thomas Becket. It provided shelter and treatment for the poor, sick, and homeless. In the fifteenth century, Richard Whittington endowed a laying-in ward for unmarried mothers. The monastery was dissolved in the Reformation, but reopened in 1551 and rededicated to Thomas the Apostle. It was reopened by Edward VI and has remained open ever since. ^[1]. The hospital was also the site of the first printed English Bible in 1537.
At the end of the 17th century, the hospital and church were largely rebuilt by Sir Robert Clayton, president of the hospital and a former Lord Mayor of London. He employed Thomas Cartwright as architect.
Sir Thomas Guy, a governor of St Thomas', founded Guy's Hospital in 1721 as a place to treat 'incurables' discharged from St Thomas'.
The hospital was home for many years to St Thomas' Hospital Medical School. Originally a single medical school sited across St Thomas' and Guy's Hospital, Guy's Hospital established its own separate medical school in 1825 follow a dispute over the successor to the Surgeon Astley Cooper.^[2]
The medical school subsequently remerged in 1982 with that at Guy's to form the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals. Additions included the Royal Dental Hospital of London School of Dental Surgery joining with Guy's Dental School on 1 August 1983 and 'St John's Institute of Dermatology' on 1 August 1985.
Following discussion held between 1990 and 1992 with King's College London and the King's College London Act 1997, the institution merged in 1998 with King's College School of Medicine and Dentistry to form as The Guy's, Kings & Thomas' Schools of Medicine (GKT School of Medicine), of Dentistry and of Biomedical Sciences.
This was renamed in 2005 as 'King's College London School of Medicine and Dentistry at Guy's, King's and St Thomas' Hospitals'.
The 'Nightingale Training School and Home for Nurses' opened at St Thomas' Hospital on July 9 1860.(It is now called the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery and is part of King's College London.)
St Thomas' Hospital is one of London's most famous hospitals - associated with names such as Astley Cooper and William Cheselden and Florence Nightingale and Linda Richards and Agnes Elizabeth Jones, and appearing in the 2002 movie ''28 Days Later''.
There are only a few surviving pieces of the old Hospital in St Thomas Street in Southwark — including the Old Operating Theatre, which is now a Museum.
The hospital left Southwark in 1862 when the site was compulsorily purchased to make way for construction of the Charing Cross Railway. The hospital was temporarily housed at Royal Surrey Gardens in Kennington until the new Lambeth site was completed in 1871.

The modern hospital

The modern St Thomas' Hospital is located at a site historically known as Stangate in the London Borough of Lambeth. It is directly across the river Thames from the Palace of Westminster on a plot of land largely reclaimed from the river during construction of the Albert Embankment in the late 1860s.
The new buildings were designed by Henry Currey and the foundation stone was laid by Queen Victoria in 1868. This was one of the first new hospitals to adopt the "pavilion principle" - popularised by Florence Nightingale in her Notes on Hospitals - by having six separate ward buildings at right angles to the river frontage set 125 feet apart and linked by low corridors. The intention was primarily to improve ventilation and to separate and segregate patients with infectious diseases. There was a seventh pavilion at the north end of the site next to Westminster Bridge Road for the "Treasurer's House" (hospital offices) and a nurses home. Between the middle ward pavilions was the entrance hall from Lambeth Palace Road and chapel. The medical school was at the southern end of the site.
The formal layout to the Albert Embankment was also designed to complement the Parliamentary buildings opposite.
The hospital was designed to accommodate 588 beds, although the hospital charity's fundraising was not sufficient to open all the wards until 1896
The northern part of the hospital site was severely damaged during World War II destroying three ward blocks. Limited reconstruction began in the 1950s. Complete rebuilding to a more ambitious plan to designs by Yorke Rosenberg and Mardall was agreed on in the 1960s requiring the realignment of Lambeth Palace Road further away from the river to enlarge the hospital campus. The new entrance to the hospital has a spacious garden with Naum Gabo's fountain sculpture ''Revolving Torsion'' at its centre. There was a widespread public reaction against the appearance of the white-tiled thirteen storey main block upon its completion in 1975 - most notably from MPs who could see it from the river terrace of the Palace of Westminster. The southern part of the redevelopment, which would have included a second tall block, was never constructed. The three remaining Victorian ward pavilion blocks were refurbished in the 1980s
With the closure of the Dreadnought Seamen's Hospital at the Greenwich Hospital in 1986, services for seamen and their families was provided by the 'Dreadnought Unit' at St Thomas' Hospital. It allows eligible Merchant seafarers access to priority medical treatment, except cardiac surgery, and is funded by central government with money separate from other NHS trust funds. It originally consisted of two 28-bed wards, but nowadays Dreadnought patients are treated according to clinical need and so are placed in the ward most suitable for their medical condition.
The St John's Institute of Dermatology department at the hospital has specialist skin pharmacy and specialist operating theatres.^[3]
Following the merger of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals into one Trust, Accident and Emergency Services were consolidated at St Thomas' in 1990
Children's hospital departments are provided by Evelina Children's Hospital. This moved from Guy's Hospital into a new building designed by Michael Hopkins on south eastern part of the St Thomas's site in 2005. The design of the new hospital, which is focused on a four storey conservatory has won several architectural awards for the way it has been designed to provide a friendly environment for children, many of whom may be long term patients.

Trivia

★ St Thomas' is the nearest hospital to the Palace of Westminster. Any commoner who dies at the Palace of Westminster is recorded as having died at St. Thomas'.

★ The erroneous omission of the possessive "s" from "Thomas's" is fairly recent. The hospital trust claims that is grammatically correct, as "there are two men called St Thomas linked to the hospital’s history: Thomas à Becket and Thomas the Apostle." ^[4] Despite the modern omission, the name is invariably pronounced with three syllables. Within the South Wing of the hospital there are a number of late Victorian brass plaques headed "St Thomas's Hospital".

See also

★ Florence Nightingale Museum

★ Lambeth Palace Road, to the rear of the hospital

Footnotes

1. St Thomas’s Hospital - A Concise History
2. St Thomas's Hospital Medical School Records
3. St John's Institute of Dermatology
4. GSST People Magazine February 2004

Bibliography

''Una and Her Paupers'' Florence Nightingale & Anon, Diggory Press ISBN 978-1905363223

External links

★ Guy's and St Thomas' Knowledge and Information Centre

★ Guy's & St Thomas' Charitable Foundation

★ Old Operating Theatre Museum

★ Excerpts from Sir Harold Ridley's biography with some history of the modern hospital

★ Dreadnought Unit information provided by the Seamen's Hospital Society's funded Seafarers' Benefits Advice Line

★ The Dreadnought Seamen's hospital history by PortCities

★ King's College London

★ Aerial photo by Google maps

★ Survey of London entry (1951)