History
Prior to the Second World War, the 16 hectare Yaralla Estate on which the hospital is built belonged to philanthropist Thomas Walker and subsequently his daughter Dame Eadith Walker. A small hospital had already been established on the site, known as the Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital. Following the death of Dame Eadith in 1937, the property was bequeathed to the Crown for development as a public hospital.
The current hospital was commissioned in 1939 as a general hospital for the Australian Army. When completed in 1942, the 2000 bed Yaralla Military Hospital (113 Australian General Hospital) was the largest hospital in the Southern Hemisphere. The main hospital building (currently known as the Multi Building) was one of the tallest buildings in Sydney when completed and its design won architects Stephenson & Turner the Sulman Award in 1946. Following the war, the hospital became a repatriation hospital for returned servicemen under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth government, with a change in name to Repatriation General Hospital, Concord (RGHC). In 1963 RGHC became a teaching hospital of the University of Sydney.
Recognising the growing community need, the hospital began providing care for general community patients in 1974, including the opening of an emergency department in 1977. In 1993, the hospital was transferred to the Central Sydney Area Health Service of the New South Wales Department of Health as a public hospital and renamed to the current Concord Repatriation General Hospital.
Read more about this topic: Concord Repatriation General Hospital
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)