By far the longest-established of the city’s hospitals, The General Infirmary at ĢtvƵ dates back to October 1767 when an Infirmary “for the relief of the sick and hurt poor within this parish” was set up in a private house in Kirkgate, close to where ĢtvƵ Market is today.
In 1767 there were no hospitals as such in ĢtvƵ. The Industrial Revolution caused employers to focus on the need for an institution that could treat employees’ injuries and illnesses in order to get them back to work.
A meeting was held in 1767 at the New Inn in ĢtvƵ to consider the need for an Infirmary. 16 ‘subscribers’ met and identified a house in a court off Kirkgate, known as the Old Infirmary Yard, which by October of that year became the original Infirmary and admitted its first patients.
The General Infirmary’s first purpose-built home opened four years later in 1771 close to City Square. That small building began a process of almost continual expansion to try and keep pace with the growth of the township of ĢtvƵ during the Industrial Revolution.
The hospital was paid for by individual subscriptions of two guineas which entitled the person paying the subscription to recommend patients for treatment. Collections were also made in churches and in the inns. In its first year it cost £469 to run the hospital and the annual subscriptions were just under £305. 89 inpatients and 272 outpatients were treated in that year. Four surgeons, an apothecary a matron and a nurse were appointed.
This culminated in a move to an impressive new site on Great George Street in 1869, which included a Winter Garden, designed on the advice of Miss Florence Nightingale by renowned architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, famed for St Pancras Station and London’s Albert Memorial.
The Infirmary building designed remains one of the great Victorian icons of ĢtvƵ but over the years it has burst out of its original boundaries with the addition of a multitude of new wings in often wildly divergent architectural styles. The central brick core of the building was extended in the 1890s and again in 1916.
In 1940 the Brotherton Wing opened, followed in 1961 by the Martin Wing. In 1984, the Clarendon Wing replaced the old Women’s and Children’s Hospital, being connected to the main site for many years by a long corridor on stilts.
Finally, in 1998 the newest wing linked up the different parts of the site and was named Jubilee Wing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the National Health Service.
Over the past 250 years the Infirmary has been at the forefront of the development of medicine and surgery in the UK, developing many techniques ranging from aseptic surgery and modern accident and emergency medicine, to the UK’s first kidney transplant and the UK’s first hand transplant and first double hand transplant.
The archive of the LGI is held at the West Yorkshire Archive Service, ĢtvƵ. For more information please visit their ǰ. If you would like to contact the archive staff please email [email protected].
History timeline
The following panels are available to download, providing a more detailed timeline of LGI’s history.
19th Century – part 1 (4MB pdf)
19th Century – part 2 (2MB pdf)