BRIGHAM HOSPITAL IN USE

The Peter Bent Brigham Hospital which faces the corner of Francis street and Huntington avenue and is across Van Dyke street from the Harvard Medical School is now in partial operation, having treated 65 patients last week. None of the sixteen buildings are entirely finished, but the work is being rapidly pushed to completion.

In structure the hospital is not beautiful. The aim has been to produce practical modern hospital buildings reserving the extra money which might have gone toward making architectural triumphs for a larger endowment of the institution. The buildings are of brick and concrete and most of them two stories high, the central structure having three stories and a dignified facade with six concrete pillars. Parallel to Van Dyke street runs a two-story tunnel, topped by an open facade and from this branch out on either side the wards and out-buildings. The greatest pains have been taken in planning the details of the hospital and it is believed that from the standpoint of efficiency the plant is not excelled in this country or in Europe.

While the hospital is not run by the Medical School, a system of co-operation in the study and practice of medicine and surgery has been devised, the higher places on the staff of the hospital and school being filled by agreement between the trustees of the hospital and the administrative officers of the school. For instance, Dr. H. A. Christian, permanent physician-in-chief of the Brigham Hospital, is also Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic in the Medical School, and this same plan has been carried out in many cases.

The new buildings were erected on part of the twenty-seven acre site originally purchased by the Medical School, and but eleven of which it now uses, the rest being reserved for hospitals, a fact due to the intimate connection between those institutions and the School. Among them are the Good Samaritan Hospital, the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital, and the Childrens' Hospital and Infants' Hospital now building. There have also been built upon the tract the Dental School and the Laboratory for Research in Nutrition of the Carnegie Institute.