This postcard from 1915 colourfully depicts the beginnings of Collingwood’s General and Marine Hospital nearly twenty years after its establishment in 1889.
The total cost of construction and furnishing the hospital was $5,053. The daily charge for patients was 40 cents per day. Private wards ranged from $3 to $6 per week.
By 1903, additional hospital beds were needed and an expansion was completed in 1905. At this time, the Nurses’ Alumnae Association was formed by graduates of the hospital’s registered nurses training school. The first class of registered nurses graduated in 1900 and the program continued for 56 years.
The original hospital and the 1905 addition are captured in the postcard above. In 1929 the McCarthy Wing was added and included private and semi-private rooms. The funds for this addition were donated by Leighton McCarthy in memory of his uncle, Dalton McCarthy, a Canadian lawyer and parliamentarian. A dredge active in Collingwood Harbour through the C.S. Boone Dredging Company was also named in McCarthy’s honour and is visible in harbor photographs from the early 1900s.
The name of our local hospital is quite significant in that it continues to relay the institution’s original intent to accept members of the general public and those “marine” patients sailing in and out of Collingwood’s harbour.
Remember This is a weekly series of historic photographs submitted by the Collingwood Museum to CollingwoodToday.ca. These photographs were originally collected and documented by the Huron Institute in an historical catalogue entitled Huron Institute Paper and Records: Volume III. Much of Collingwood’s early history has been preserved due to the dedication and foresight of the early museum’s founders, namely its secretary-curator David Williams, upon its establishment in 1904.
