History
Prior to independence from Belgium, the country had one of the best-regarded hospital systems on the continent - albeit one that was limited almost entirely to the white population. Doctors at the hospital recall a time when patients were transferred from South Africa to Kinshasa for a higher level of care.
After national independence (1960), most of the hospital's Belgian physicians and surgeons returned home. After the violence attending independence had quieted, American missionary physician and surgeon Dr. William Close (1924 – 2009) became administrator of the hospital and recruited physicians from around the world. The maternity ward was upgraded and soon averaged 120 deliveries a day, second only to a hospital in Tokyo. Close also oversaw the building and management of a 700-ton hospital ship that treated people up and down the Congo River. Eventually, however, Close grew disillusioned by the growing corruption and disintegration and returned home in 1977. After the ousting of Mobutu (1997), the hospital's eight operating suites were again rebuilt with Close's assistance.
But the level of medical care remains bleak. Recent media reports indicate that the hospital often runs dangerously low on medical supplies, and doctors are forced to wait for patients, or their families, to bring money or even medical supplies, like bandages, before they can provide treatment.
Read more about this topic: Kinshasa General Hospital
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)