Founding of Pennsylvania Hospital

Thomas Bond (1712 to 1784), a Philadelphia physician who had finished his medical training in Europe, mainly in Paris, had seen the voluntary hospital movement there. His plan for a hospital in Philadelphia drew interest but no money until his friend Benjamin Franklin endorsed it. Franklin later credited the idea to Bond, who, in the words of the University of Pennsylvania's archives, conceived it not as a poorhouse but as a place only for treating the sick, the injured and the insane.

Their petition went to the Pennsylvania Assembly on 23 January 1751. It said that the number of lunatics had grown with the population, that some wandered at large to the terror of their neighbors, and that the only place to confine them was the House of Correction, which was unfit for the purpose. It pointed out that more than two thirds of the mad people treated at Bethlehem Hospital in London were said to have been cured. It also spoke for poor people far from medical help, suffering from the stone, from cancer or from cataracts.

The Assembly's act, under which the hospital was chartered on 11 May 1751, set up a matching grant. Once the contributors had raised a capital stock of £2,000, whose yearly income would give the sick poor diet, attendance, advice and medicines free of charge, the Speaker was to order £2,000 from the provincial treasury for building and furnishing the hospital. Franklin himself made the largest private gift. The hospital began in a rented house on Market Street.

Land at Eighth and Pine Streets was bought in 1755, and the first part of the Pine Building opened in 1756 with men's and women's wards for physical and mental illness. A west wing for mental illness followed in 1796, and in 1804 a center building with a surgical amphitheater, the oldest surviving one in the United States. In 1766 Bond began there the first course of clinical lectures in the country, for the first students of the new medical school of what became the University of Pennsylvania.