Cogan Edwards Llp

Madras miscellany: A hospital by its beginnings

The Portuguese may have brought Western medicare to India in the 16th Century on the Malabar and Konkan Coasts, but today's vast — yet totally inadequate — hospital system in India had its beginnings in Fort St. George. With a major new medicare facility being promised just across the Cooum from those beginnings, it would be but meet to recall what Agent Edward Winter got started in 1664.

Taking note of the frequency with which his soldiers — a motley, aging group retired out of the army and recruited from the taverns of London — fell ill in the Madras clime and how their illnesses worsened because of improper supervision, particularly of their prescribed diet, Winter sought the Courts of Directors' sanction to set up a hospital in Fort St. George where the sick soldiers could be lodged and special orderlies would ensure they followed the doctor's — usually a visiting ship's ‘surgeon' — instructions. Winter being the man he was, waited not for permission and rented the house a founder of Madras, Andrew Cogan, owned and got the first British hospital in India started. Bombay and Calcutta were still a few years away.

With the consecration of St. Mary's in the Fort in 1680 the next step was taken with Streynsham Master and his successor, Gyfford, teaming together with the Vestry to raise funding for a better hospital. The 838 pagodas collected were spent on building a two-storeyed hospital near the Church by 1688. This hospital, still only for the residents of the Fort, was administered by the Church and Vestry. Elihu Yale who became Governor in 1688 felt from the first that this facility was inadequate for the Fort and, sanctioning 2,500 pagodas, built a handsome Tuscan-style building on James Street, by the barracks at the northern end of the Fort (about where that tasteless tower block was built some years ago as additional accommodation for the Secretariat). Here the hospital remained for the next sixty years or so, moving out of the Fort only after the French occupation ended in 1749 and then becoming a hospital in search of space before it put down roots where the General Hospital now is just west of the fort. To its south is where the new public hospital facility is to be developed in the shell of a building raised for a totally different purpose.

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