Bruntsfield Hospital

Bruntsfield Hospital was an Edinburgh hospital which started in 1878 as a women's dispensary (out-patient clinic) opened by the city's first female doctor, Sophia Jex-Blake. It soon added some beds for in-patients, and moved from a busy, central area to the more peaceful Bruntsfield before the turn of the century. Its name from 1885, Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children, continued in formal use into the 1930s, but before 1920 it started to be known as the Bruntsfield Hospital. For a few years, another of Scotland's pioneering female doctors, Elsie Inglis, was a consultant there. In 1948 the hospital was absorbed into the National Health Service (NHS); it closed in 1989.