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A choultry that became a hospital
Facade of the Stanley Hospital
INVITED TO write a brief history on modern medicare in the city for a souvenir, it was an opportunity to recall modern medicine's proud record in Madras. But that's when it suddenly struck me that the record didn't encompass the Indians of the city till nearly 175 years after the first hospital was opened in Madras.
The first hospital in India practising allopathic medicine might have been established in Goa in the early 16th Century, but it is in the hospital that Governor Edward Winter established in a rented house in Fort St. George in 1664 that there are the roots of India's vast healthcare system of today. It was from the Fort Hospital that, over several moves, the Madras General Hospital developed over the next 100 years, eventually putting down roots at its present location when a new building built for it opened its doors on October 15, 1772. But established as it was for the Europeans of Madras alone, it did not become truly general, and open to Indians as well, till 1842. In fact, it was 1859 before Indians not in government service had access to it. That rather dims that "proud record", for hospital facilities for Indians lagged years behind. And when they got them, it was more by chance than intent. More interestingly, they got them first in another hospital, Madras's second one.
When Madras was stricken by one of its worst-ever famines in 1781, the city's first formal charity was set up by the Government and St. Mary's Church. A Famine Relief Committee was established in 1782 and the Committee rented a house for poor feeding just beyond the north wall of George Town — in present day Royapuram that was all fields, vegetable gardens and fruit groves then. The house continued as a refuge for the poor and the sick even after conditions improved in 1784. It is around that time, it appears to have got its name. Monegar Choultry, perhaps by then being locally administered by the village headman (manugakkaran). Better known as `Kanji Thottam', it is here that East India Company Surgeon John Underwood established the city's first facility in 1799, for Indians who were sick and called it the `Native Infirmary".
The Infirmary was probably run as a charity, an assumption made from the fact that the records state the government took it over from the Famine Relief Committee in 1808. The next year, a `Native Hospital' that had existed in Purasawalkam for a couple of years was moved and merged with the Infirmary and the resulting institution was called the Monegar Choultry Hospital. The hospital was named the Royapuram Hospital in 1910 and over the next few years, its old buildings were replaced with the buildings that still survive.
Even before Royapuram found a place in the Hospital's name, the Auxiliary Royapuram Medical School was established in it in 1877 to augment the efforts of the Madras Medical School founded in 1835 and upgraded as Madras Medical College in 1850. The Royapuram school was renamed Stanley Medical School in 1933, and when it merged with Lady Willingdon Medical School for Women (founded in 1923) and became a college in 1938, both college and hospital recalled the name of the erstwhile Governor, George Stanley.
It's a name that has survived, with many an Old Stanleyan battling in the recent past for its retention.
S.MUTHIAH
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