The Minute Book of St. George’s Hospital’s Board of Governor’s records that the hospital admitted its first patients to the Hyde Park Corner site on 1st January, 1734. Sixty-four patients were treated in the first month and the Minute Book also details the complaints as including: “dropsy, albugo, scorbutic eruptions, flux, contusion”, etc.

The microfilm of the St. George’s archive offers a conveniently-formatted opportunity to follow the records of a major hospital from its inauguration as an independent institution reliant on the generosity of benefactors right through a century and a half of its development into a leading London medical centre. The prevalence and occurrence of diseases throughout the 18th and 19th centuries as well as the progress of medicine against them can be monitored. In addition the microfilm makes available for study the lives, conditions and salaries of staff, together with the day-to-day administration of a hospital in the years before the National Health Service.

40 reels
Reference: SGH