King's Cross Hospital

King's Cross Hospital
Geography
Location Dundee, Scotland
Coordinates 56°28′34″N 2°59′08″W / 56.476205°N 2.985647°W / 56.476205; -2.985647Coordinates: 56°28′34″N 2°59′08″W / 56.476205°N 2.985647°W / 56.476205; -2.985647
Organisation
Care system NHS
Funding Public hospital
Network NHS Tayside
History
Founded November 1889

King's Cross Hospital, often shortened to King's Cross is a hospital in Dundee, Scotland.

History

King's Cross opened in November 1889 at a site in Clepington Road, Dundee. It was the city's first permanent fever hospital and was built by Dundee Town Council to treat patients suffering from infectious diseases, including typhus, diphtheria and smallpox. Until the late 1860s, such patients had usually been admitted to Dundee Royal Infirmary, although a temporary fever hospital had been set up in a converted building in Lower Union Street during the 1832 cholera outbreak.[1][2]

As the need for isolation of patients with infectious diseases became more widely recognised, some temporary wooden pavilions were built on the outskirts of Lochee and also on the site of what is now King's Cross for smallpox and typhus patients. Kings Cross, which initially had just two wards, took over their function. By 1913 King's Cross had seven wards supplemented by several a variety of ancillary buildings. These included King's Cross Hospital (West), built in 1893 as accommodation for cases of smallpox, with a small unit for cholera patients. These facilities were used intermittently until 1927 when the Hospital had do deal with an outbreak of variola minor, which was severe enough to require an additional ward to be constructed.[1]

At the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, King's Cross came under the management of the new Eastern Regional Hospital Board. This board decided to centralise the management of infectious disease at King's Cross, resulting in the closure the former fever hospitals at Perth, Forfar and Arbroath. Since the 1990s most of the hospital's services have been transferred to Ninewells Hospital. King's Cross now serves as the administrative headquarters of NHS Tayside. The hospital is also the site of NHS Tayside's Kings Cross Health and Community Care Centre, which offers several outpatient services including audiology, physiotherapy, dentistry and x-ray and is also the base for Dundee's "Out of Hours GP Service".[1][3]

The King's Cross Hospital archives are held by Archive Services at the University of Dundee as part of the NHS Tayside Archives.[1] The same institution also holds the papers of Dr William Maxwell Jamieson OBE who worked at the hospital from 1939 until 1979 and became its Physician Superintendent in 1948. These papers include several records relating to the hospital and its history.[4]

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 3 4 "THB 22 King's Cross Hospital". Archive Services Online Catalogue. University of Dundee. Retrieved 27 May 2014.
  2. ↑ McKean, Charles, and Whatley, Patricia, with Baxter, Kenneth (2008). Lost Dundee: Dundee's Lost Architectural Heritage. Edinburgh: Birlinn. pp. 94–95. ISBN 978-1-84158-562-8.
  3. ↑ "Kings Cross Health and Community Care Centre". NHS Tayside. NHS Tayside. Retrieved 3 January 2016.
  4. ↑ "MS 111 Dr William Maxwell Jamieson". Archive Services Online Catalogue. University of Dundee. Retrieved 4 February 2014.
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