Glasgow's Lost Hospitals
In 2015 the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital opened in the south-west of Glasgow. The city’s new “super hospital” is home to a wide range of services relocated from hospitals across the city. Four hospitals – the Southern General Hospital, the Western Infirmary, the Victoria Infirmary, and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children at Yorkhill – were closed and merged into this new campus. In the space of just a few months these hospitals switched from being busy centres of teaching and clinical care to forming part of the history and heritage of healthcare in Glasgow. In this exhibition, we celebrate the legacy of these recently closed hospitals, and the contributions made to them by our Fellows and Members.
This exhibition also looks back at a few much older hospitals. In the days before the NHS, Fellows of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow were instrumental in the establishment and administration of several hospitals and other health services around the city. The items on display here help to tell the story of these lost hospitals of Glasgow. Fellows such as Robert Cleghorn, a former President of the Faculty and physician to the Town’s Hospital, William Mackenzie, a renowned ophthalmologist and founder of the Glasgow Eye Infirmary, and Sir Alexander Macgregor, Medical Officer of Health, played important roles in the running of hospitals and the provision of healthcare in Glasgow before the foundation of the NHS. The places where they worked are long gone, but we can revisit them through the College collections.