The Royal Hospital Haslar: from lind to the 21st century.

In 1753, the year his Treatise of the Scurvy was published (1,2), James Lind was invited to become the Chief Physician of the Royal Hospital Haslar, then only partially built. However, he declined the offer and George Cuthbert took the post. A few years later the invitation to Lind was repeated. On this occasion Lind accepted, and took up the appointment in 1758. In a letter sent that year to Sir Alexander Dick, a friend who was President of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh, Lind referred to Haslar hospital as ‘an immense pile of building & ... will certainly be the largest hospital in Europe when finished...’ (3). The year after his appointment, reflecting his observations on the treatment of scurvy, Lind is reputed to have advised Sir Edward Hawke, who was commanding the Fleet blockading the French port of Brest, of the importance of fresh vegetables and fruit (3,4). Lind published three more books while at Haslar An essay on the most effectual means of preserving the health of seamen, in the Royal Navy (5,6); Two papers on fevers and infection (7,8); An essay on diseases incidental to Europeans in hot climates (9,10). He remained Chief Physician for 25 years, and was succeeded by his son John in 1783. James Lind died in 1794 (11), and two years later, when the First Lord of the Admiralty visited Haslar and asked to see a case of scurvy, not one could be found (3,12). Haslar’s story begins in 1745, when John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, in partner¬ship with the Admiralty, submitted plans to King George II for a hospital. Haslar was to be one of three proposed hospitals to provide care for sailors of the Royal Fleet. The hospital was designed by Theodore Jacobsen, FRS, and reflected his design of the Foundling Hospital in London. It was constructed with bricks made of local clay mixed with Portland Stone, under the direction of James Home, a surveyor, and John Turner, a Master Carpenter from Portsmouth Dockyard. Although no record of a formal open¬ing can be traced, the hospital is believed to have been opened on the 12 October 1753. By 1753, with the hospital only partially built, the situation concerning the care of sick and wounded sailors in the Portsmouth and Gosport area had become desperate. Having heard of the new building, desperate patients were already living in the build¬ers’ accommodation (huts) in the grounds of Haslar. The Admiralty directed the first hundred patients to be admitted into the first stage of the hospital. History