Pennsylvania Hospital still stands today, more than 250 years after its founding by Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond. Image © 2002 www.clipart.com.

Pennsylvania Hospital was founded in 1751 in Philadelphia and is still in business today. It was the first general hospital in America.

Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond started the hospital "to care for the sick-poor and insane who were wandering the streets of Philadelphia." Because of the large numbers of immigrants pouring into Philadelphia at the time, the city was "a melting pot for diseases." Civic leaders founded the hospital to help solve that problem.

Bond, a Quaker, conceived the idea of the hospital after having studied medicine in Europe. He eventually went to his good friend Franklin when Philadelphians asked what Franklin thought of it. Franklin threw his full support behind the effort. The hospital initially faced opposition from rural members of the Pennsylvania Assembly. They feared that it would serve only those in the city. Franklin came up with a clever solution. He told the assembly that if he could raise 2,000 pounds privately, then the Assembly could match those funds. The Assembly agreed, thinking Franklin couldn't possibly succeed. He did.

The hospital admitted its first patients in 1756. The predominantly Quaker board of managers for the hospital set up admission rules that tried to distinguish between the poor who would work but couldn't, and those who could but wouldn't. The Quakers wanted to protect the hospital from treating people they considered malingerers.

Of course, early hospitals like Pennsylvania Hospital were a far cry from today's versions when it came to medical treatment. At the time, folk medicine still ruled, just as it did when Meriwether Lewis visited Philadelphia in 1803. The doctors in the early hospitals favored unusual approaches. For instance, Dr. Benjamin Rush, the foremost medical mind of the day, believed in aggressive bleeding to rid the body of illness. Yes, medicine still had a ways to go.

< previous | next >