The origin of the New York Hospital can be traced to the commencement address of Dr. Samuel Bard, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh Medical School, Professor of the “Practice of Medicine”, delivered to the first two medical doctors to graduate from King’s College, now Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, in 1769 titled “A discourse upon the duties of a physician, with some sentiments on the usefulness and necessity of a public hospital.” Apparently city leaders also listening to this address were impressed enough to pledge one thousand pounds sterling. Dr. Peter Middleton reported on the progress with furthering this idea in another address to King’s College on November 3, 1769, stating “the necessity and usefulness of a public infirmary has so warmly and pathetically set forth in a discourse delivered by Dr. Samuel Bard… that his Excellency, Sir Henry Moore immediately set on foot a subscription for that purpose to which himself and most of the gentlemen present liberally contributed.” Soon thereafter, the new Governor of the Colony, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore through the interposition of Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden ” started a fund for the establishment of such a hospital. On June 13, 1771, King George III of England granted a royal charter to establish "The Society of the New York Hospital in the City of New York in America" and a Board of Governors for the "reception of such patients as require medical treatment, chirurgical management and maniacs." The first regular meeting of the Governors after its organization was held on July 24, 1771 at Bolton’s Tavern, the same location where General Washington would bid farewell to his officers on December 4, 1783. Attending the first meeting were John Watts, President, as well as Philip Livingston and Gerardus William Beekman. The Governors purchased in 1771,on elevated ground surrounded at the time on three sides by marshes. The location was several miles from the central part of New York; apparently the expansion of the city and the drainage of the marshes, which harbored malaria, was anticipated. A building was begun in 1773 but was destroyed by fire before its completion. The American Revolutionary War delayed the work of reconstruction but apparently a partial structure on Broadway and Duane Street served as a barracks for Hessian and British soldiers, as a laboratory for teaching anatomy to medical students, and as a military hospital. Although initially ignored by the wider community, grave-robbing incidences in the 1780s became the subject of public outrage when the medical students carrying out these acts in order to dissect them for anatomical practice turned from stealing from the New York African Burial Ground to the nearby Trinity Churchyard. The raid on the university, attack on the student perpetrators, and the riot that followed have come to be called The Doctor's Riot of 1788. The hospital was not opened until January 3, 1791. The small two-storied H-shaped building was located along the west side of Broadway between present day Worth and Duane streets, set back from the street frontage about 90 feet to allow for landscaping and expansion The hospital’s first patients were suffering from smallpox, syphilis and acute bipolar disorder. In 1798, the Governors announced that the Hospital was primarily for the purpose of medical treatment, secondly for surgical treatment and thirdly for treatment of “maniacs” .
1800s expansion
After some years of experience with the mentally ill and the particular challenges of their treatment, the Board of Governors decided to construct an additional building which would specialize in their care. After receiving financial assistance from the Legislature of New York State, they erected "a substantial and spacious stone edifice on the grounds of the hospital in the city, within the same enclosure, and but a few rods distant from the original building. It was finished and opened on the 15 July 1808. On the same day, 19 patients were removed to it from wards in other buildings and forty-eight were admitted. The new department was called the Lunatic Asylum. In June, 1821, patients were transferred to the new Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane." In 1821, the hospital opened the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum on Broadway and West 116th Street in Morningside Heights. Due to real estate pressures, it moved to White Plains, New York in 1891, where it eventually became the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, now known as "New York-Presbyterian/Westchester". The Morningside Heights site became part of Columbia University. New York Hospital outgrew its original building by the 1870s, and moved to a new building between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and West 15th and 16th Streets, which opened in 1877. The original facility was maintained as a 'house of relief', which moved to Hudson Street in 1884.
