Defining Moments in Australian History: The ‘Rum Hospital’ opens
In May 1810 Lachlan Macquarie, the Governor of New South Wales, called for tenders for the design and construction of a new general hospital. He chose the design of a double-storey colonnaded structure with a large central building and two wings. This new general hospital would replace the prefabricated wooden building brought to Australia by the Second Fleet in 1790.
With no government funds to build it, he contracted three entrepreneurs – D’Arcy Wentworth, Garnham Blaxcell and Alexander Riley – for its construction, and granted them a short-term monopoly on the colony’s rum imports as payment. And so it became known as the ‘Rum Hospital’.
Governor Macquarie laid the foundation stone for the new hospital on Macquarie Street on 30 October 1811, but shoddy construction – including structural faults in the roof, foundations and beams – delayed its opening until 1816. Shortly after the hospital opened, its two wings were appropriated for other government purposes.
Despite the hospital’s impressive presence, free settlers saw it as a place of last resort, suitable only for convicts, people without money or family support, and accident victims who needed emergency care. Everyone else wanted to be treated by medical practitioners in their own homes, where they could be nursed by family or servants.
Unlike Britain, NSW didn’t have workhouses to accommodate orphans, the poor or the mentally ill. As the population grew, the perilous situation of the colony’s poor – many of whom were ex-convicts with no family in Australia – prompted some wealthy colonists in 1813 to establish the colony’s first charity, the Benevolent Society, to house people in need. However, the growing number of poor people suffering from sickness and disease proved to be beyond the charity’s capacity.
The Rum Hospital was supposed to admit paupers, but in reality many were not eligible for free government treatment. In 1826 a group of leading citizens established the Sydney Dispensary, a charity that provided medical treatment to the poor in their own homes. The dispensary gave medical assistance to more than 14,000 people between 1835 and 1845.
By the early 1840s the dispensary’s committee decided Sydney needed a permanent place to treat the sick and poor as inpatients. An infirmary was established in the south wing of the Rum Hospital in 1843. Two years later, the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary was recognised in law and began advertising for surgeons and physicians. In 1844 the Rules and Regulations of the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary explained: “The objects of this charity, are sick and hurt poor [people]…but all persons who may meet with dangerous accidents requiring instant medical or surgical aid, or who labour under contagious fever, shall be admitted, with or without recommendation, at all times.”
The Sydney Infirmary moved into the Rum Hospital’s large central building in 1848 and began overseeing the hospital’s outpatient services.
Conditions in the hospital were chaotic, overcrowded and dirty. Wards were infested with bed bugs, lice and rats. The infirmary’s squalid conditions in 1866 prompted Henry Parkes, then the Colonial Secretary, to write to British nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale. He requested that she send trained nurses to help improve conditions.
Five probationary nurses under the supervision of Lucy Osburn, a qualified nurse in the Nightingale system, arrived in Sydney in March 1868. Within a year, Osburn had trained 16 nurses. However, her attempts to improve sanitary conditions and introduce hygienic practices were met with fierce resistance from existing managers.
By 1871 the infirmary had 230 beds servicing a population of more than 136,000 people. Overcrowding meant many sick people were turned away.
The 1873 Royal Commission into Public Charities condemned conditions at the Sydney Infirmary and vindicated Osburn’s endeavours to make improvements. The Macquarie-era building was condemned in newspapers for being “infected with hospitalism”. At the time it was widely believed germs could become embedded in hospital buildings, causing patients to suffer infections such as erysipelas and pyaemia.
The government demolished the central building of the old Rum Hospital in 1879 to make way for the construction of a new hospital. In November 1881 the Sydney Hospital Act was given royal assent, and in 1894 the new hospital opened with 315 beds.
Today it’s known as the Sydney Hospital and Sydney Eye Hospital, and it’s the oldest working hospital in Australia. Its crest includes a sea eagle perched on a rum barrel in tribute to the unorthodox funding arrangement that helped build Australia’s first public hospital.
‘The Rum Hospital opens’ forms part of the National Museum of Australia’s Defining Moments in Australian History project.
