History
The hospital was founded as the 'North London Hospital' in 1834, eight years after UCL (then known as the London University), in order to provide clinical training for the "medical classes" of the university, after a refusal by the governors of the Middlesex Hospital to allow students access to that hospital's wards. It soon became known as University College Hospital.
In 1835 Robert Liston became the first professor of clinical surgery at UCH, and the first major operation under ether in Europe was conducted at the hospital by Liston on 21 December 1846. UCH was split from UCL in 1905, and a new hospital building designed by Alfred Waterhouse, known as the Cruciform Building, was opened in 1906. UCH merged with the National Dental Hospital in 1914, and the Royal Ear Hospital in 1920. In 1994 UCH became part of the University College London Hospitals NHS Trust. The hospital site at the Cruciform Building was closed in 1995 and the building purchased by UCL, for use as the home for the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research and pre-clinical teaching facilities for the UCL Medical School.
A major new £422 million, 75,822 m² hospital was opened in 2005, constructed by a partnership between AMEC, Balfour Beatty and Interserve under the Private Finance Initiative. In November 2008, the £70 million University College Hospital Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Wing was opened, allowing the hospital to offer all women's health services in one place (with the exception of some breast and gynaecology services).
Read more about this topic: University College Hospital
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)