Of former glory of innovative hospital in city
Zhu Yanggao became the new director and did much work to boost the hospital’s reputation, such as the well-received “mobile hospital” project. The director renovated a truck into a medical vehicle and sent service to people in the countryside.
“The scale of the hospital was very large with more than 200 medical staffs when I joined as an intern doctor in 1947,” said Tang Xiaojun, former deputy director of the hospital, in an earlier interview. “In terms of equipment and technology, the then Paulun Hospital (today’s Changzheng Hospital) was the best in Shanghai. But the General Hospital provided the best conditions and services. Except for the third and fourth-class wards, each ward area had at least two nuns and a nurse on service. The wards were equipped with private bathroom facilities. It was essentially a noble hospital,” Tang says.
After 1949, the hospital was taken over by the Shanghai government. Its Chinese name, Gongji Hospital, was changed to Shanghai First People’s Hospital on January 1, 1953. After relocation and expansion, the hospital moved to the present site on Wujin Road and grew to be a modern comprehensive hospital. Having won many national awards including “China’s top 100 hospitals,” it became the First People’s Hospital affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2002. On April 20, the hospital held a ceremony to welcome its 161 medical workers home who had been sent to aid hospitals in Wuhan in treating COVID-19 patients during the past months.
Today, most historical buildings in the old hospital compound have been demolished, except for the redbrick building in the hotel garden. But the hospital still kept its old English name, Shanghai General Hospital and the founding year, 1864, is seen everywhere, from above the elevators to its logo gracing a big stone fronting the hospital.
This spring, Shanghai General Hospital completed the compiling work of its newest hospital annals, which is a large book of 875 pages. And this river-side hospital is also like a big, heavy book.
Shanghai General Hospital was another health care hospice at the forefront of medicine and it provided hospitals that followed a blueprint for future medical care.