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:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)