Spike Island (Southampton)

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Spike Island, Southampton, Hampshire, England, was the site of Netley's Royal Victoria Military Hospital, completed in 1863 (demolished). The monstrously large hospital has been evoked in Philip Hoare, Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital, 2001, which interweaves personal recollections with the chilling dark history of this vast hospital, whose design was criticized by Florence Nightingale, Postmen used to ride bicycles along the quarter-mile corridors to deliver mail, where convalescing American GIs later drove their jeeps. Spike Island was witness to early psychiatric experimentation, and tragic World War I shell-shock victims: the British war poet Wilfred Owen was a patient at Netley after the Battle of the Somme. Even Sherlock Holmes's companion, Dr. Watson, revealed, in the opening lines of 'A Study in Scarlet', that he had attended a Netley course for army surgeons. This is not to be confused with The Spike Islander public house in Sholing