Blockley Almshouse
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The Blockley Almshouse, also known as Philadelphia General Hospital was a charity hospital and poorhouse located in Philadelphia Pennsylvania.
[edit] History
Built by the city in the former Blockley Township on land purchased from the Andrew Hamilton estate in 1832, “Old Blockley” replaced the 1731 Almshouse adjacent to Pennsylvania Hospital at 10th and Pine Streets.
Blockley was designed to house a variety of Philadelphia’s indigent population and consisted of quadrangle of four sizable buildings including a poorhouse, a hospital, an orphanage and an insane asylum. Its design is attributed to architects Samuel Sloan and William Strickland
Operated by a city committee known as the Guardians of the Poor, Blockley’s early reputation for care was dismal. Its geographical isolation from city medical institutions limited clinical care until the University of Pennsylvania, with its medical school, moved to a new site just north of the Almshouse grounds in 1871.
As the latter 19th Century saw advancements in both medicine and psychiatry, Blockley’s mission gradually embraced that of a more conventional public hospital. Renamed Philadelphia General Hospital (PGH), a nursing school was opened at the site 1885 under the direction of Alice Fisher, replacing ad hoc patient nurses with a system of skilled nursing. In 1903, operations of the hospital were turned over to the newly created Bureau of Hospitals in the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. In 1906, the insane were removed to the new hospital at Byberry, later known as the Philadelphia State Hospital.
In the next few decades, the original almshouse buildings were gradually replaced with modern facilities. By the 1950’s the site contained the city’s public hospital, as well as a nursing home and a home for the indigent.
In 1952, the new City Home Rule Charter placed the control of Philadelphia General Hospital with a Board of Trustees. Under contracts signed in 1959, care at PGH was carried out by the medical schools of Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania who subcontracted work to Jefferson Medical College, Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann Medical School.
By the early 1970s, public support including Medicaid allowed private hospitals to expand treatment for the poor. Facing both financial difficulties as well as a stock of aging buildings, the board of PGH closed the hospital entirely in 1977.
The site is occupied today by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Children’s Seashore House and The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and represents a major center of medical research and care in Philadelphia.
In 2001, more than 1,000 bodies associated with the Almshouse were recovered from an adjacent construction site and reburied in the nearby Woodlands Cemetery.
[edit] References
O’Donnell, Donna Gentile. Provider of Last Resort: The Story of the Closure of the Philadelphia General Hospital. Camino Books, Philadelphia, 1995.
Bliss, Arthur Ames "Blockley days: Memories and Impressions of a Resident Physician 1883-1884". Publisher: 94 p.Printed for private circulation 1916
