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:
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The custard is setting; meanwhile
I not only have my own history to worry about
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)