Parramatta's General Hospital

The General Hospital

[media]The General Hospital is the name given to Parramatta's first two hospitals for convicts. The hospitals were located on Marsden Street overlooking the Parramatta River in an area once called the Hospital Precinct, now known as the Parramatta Justice Precinct. The Tent Hospital was the General Hospital's original incarnation, until November 1792 when it was replaced by a clay brick building. The extremely poor conditions of this second hospital precipitated the construction of The Colonial Hospital which operated on the same site from 1818 and was the last hospital dedicated to convict healthcare in Parramatta.

Pre-contact Aboriginal occupation

Between 10,000 and 22,000 years before European settlement [1] Parramatta was the traditional hunting and fishing grounds of the Darug-speaking Burramatta people. Located on the bank of the Parramatta River, the land of the Parramatta Hospital site would have been used by the Burramatta at least sporadically for fishing and camping purposes. [2]

The tent hospital, 1789–1792

The Tent Hospital, which is believed to have stood to the north of where Jeffery House is now situated, [3] was Parramatta's first hospital, and the third in the colony of New South Wales. It was not literally a tent but was referred to as such because its 'two long sheds' were 'built in the form of a tent, and thatched.' [4] Its construction was hastily completed to cope with the high morbidity rate of convicts who typically worked long hours of hard labour with little or no food and lived in close, unsanitary conditions with almost none of life's necessities. [5]

Even though the Tent Hospital could accommodate 200 people, this quickly proved inadequate as, in addition to injuries caused by corporal punishment in the form of floggings as well as violence between convicts, the convicts' poor diet [6] and living conditions caused a large percentage to fall gravely ill with dysentery and fever, and even to die on the spot where they laboured. Simultaneously, the convict population was rapidly increasing with the arrival of new transport ships and without any progress being made toward the prevention and management of disease. [7] According to Captain Watkin Tench in November 1790, the Tent Hospital was 'most wretched...totally destitute of every conveniency.' [8]

The first surgeon of this hospital was Thomas Arndell who arrived with the First Fleet on the Friendship as an assistant to surgeon John White. Arndell was therefore responsible for the care of First Fleet convicts during the passage from England. John Irving – a surgeon convicted to transportation on the First Fleet's Scarborough [9] and the first convict to be emancipated – was assistant surgeon to Arndell at the Tent Hospital. Prior to Irving's Parramatta appointment, he had been employed in a surgical capacity possibly on the Lady Penrhyn during the passage to Botany Bay, at the hospital in Sydney, and as an assistant surgeon to Dennis Considen on HMS Sirius during its journey to Norfolk Island. Arndell retired in October 1794. [10]

A brick hospital, 1792–1818

[media]By December 1791 the population of Parramatta exceeded that of Sydney, [11] prompting the construction of what was intended to be a more permanent and commodious hospital befitting its role as the main hospital of the colony.

Foundations for this second hospital, made of locally sourced clay bricks, [12] were laid 100 metres from the riverbank behind the original Tent Hospital in April 1792. The 'brick hospital, consisting of two wards, was finished' by November 1792 and that same month, wrote David Collins, 'the sick were immediately removed to it.' [13]

A plan of the site dating from around 1792, and a drawing by visiting Spanish artist Fernando Brambila dated 1793, indicates there were numerous buildings that comprised the second hospital – as many as nine, including guards and surgeons' houses, which were plastered and whitewashed. [14] The main building was also plastered and whitewashed and measured 80 feet long and 20 feet broad. [15] Based on the 1792 plan, the hospital's two brick wards appear to have been placed a considerable distance apart, potentially indicating that they were used to treat male and female convicts separately. [16] In an attempt to ensure convict patients could 'benefit from air and exercise' during their hospital stay, without 'any improper communication with the other convicts, a space was to be inclosed [sic] and paled in round the hospital.' [17]

Such descriptions give the impression that the second hospital was a vast improvement from the 'wretched' Tent Hospital that Tench had seen in 1790, but the conditions of the brick hospital proved to be extremely poor. Though a stronger building material had been used in the construction of the hospital, limestone was unavailable and this meant the height of buildings was limited to 12 feet (3.7 metres). [18] Another negative consequence of the lack of limestone was serious dilapidation of the structure, which was evident to David Collins who noted as early as 1798 that all the Government buildings of Parramatta 'were so far decayed as to be scarcely able to support their own weight.' [19] Governor Lachlan Macquarie, too, thought it probable that the hospital walls would fall down in 1809 and that any attempts to repair them would prove futile. [20]

The convicts assigned to work in the hospital as overseers, wardsmen, gardeners, woodchoppers, and nurses also had negative consequences for patients. [21] Typically, those assigned to do unpaid work in the hospital were ill-suited to hard labour due to their age and/or their own health issues, while the women who served as nurses did so as a form of punishment for misconduct. The result was 'neglect of duty' and frequent theft in a hospital that was already suffering from a lack of medical supplies. [22]

In a letter to Earl Bathurst in 1818, Reverend Samuel Marsden described the hospital as being 'open night and day for every infamous character to enter; there are no locks or bolts to any of the doors' and the hospital also lacked a room for the deceased. The dead, wrote Marsden, '…lie in the room with the living patients.' There was no lighting, and patients experienced distress over a lack of 'common necessaries...sugar, rice, tea and wine.' Marsden concluded with his characteristic outrage, 'I do not believe that there was ever such a place for want, debaucheries and for every vice as the general hospital at Parramatta.' Assistant Surgeon Major West added that the roof leaked, windows were broken, the wood was rotten, the rationed meat was putrid and, in the absence of a mortuary, the dead bodies had begun to be placed in the passage between the two wards. [23]

Indeed, the hospital's reported disorderly manner of dealing with the deceased in this period is both confirmed and contradicted by the discovery during archaeological excavations carried out on site in 2006 of a shallow circular grave 'immediately north of the southern boundary wall and immediately east of the 1790s storage cellar,' [24] dating from the second hospital era, specifically the late 1790s to early 1800s. The random nature of this single grave containing the remains of two babies on unconsecrated ground is in keeping with contemporary reports about the casual treatment of dead bodies. Conversely, the babies were 'lying side-by-side' with their heads oriented towards the east and the rising sun; a characteristically Christian burial practice. The existence of a somewhat Christian burial on unconsecrated ground for babies who may not have lived long enough to be baptised suggests that at least some care was taken. [25]

Under Governor King, the convict hospitals strictly existed to treat prisoners and convicts assigned to settlers, people of the civil department and other government employees such as the military, all at the governor's cost. The lives of free settlers were, thus, put in jeopardy, and at least one was lost as a result of these stipulations because surgeons either had to treat free settlers without receiving any fee or refuse to provide medical assistance. [26]

At the request of Governor Macquarie, John Watts designed Parramatta's third hospital for convicts, known as 'The Colonial Hospital,' which opened in 1818 on the site of the first two hospitals.

Heritage Courtyard

Parramatta's [media]original hospitals are commemorated in the form of the Heritage Courtyard at 160 Marsden Street. Archaeological remains, artefacts, photographs, maps, sketches and primary source quotations are displayed along with historical information about the people and buildings that were associated with the Parramatta Hospital site, including the 1821 dwelling house, Brislington, which exists today.

References

Anonymous. 'Early News from a New Colony: British Museum Papers'. Historical Records of New South Wales, Series 1, Vol. II, APPENDIX E. Available online: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1300291h.html. Viewed 7 January 2015.

Casey and Lowe Pty Ltd. Reports relating to the Excavation of the former Parramatta Hospital Site. Marickville: Casey and Lowe Pty Ltd, March 2006. Available online: http://www.caseyandlowe.com.au/reptpjp.htm, viewed 8 January 2015

David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1. London: T Cadell Jnr, and W Davies, 1798. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12565/12565-h/12565-h.htm. Viewed 7 January 2015

Cumberland Area Health Service (NSW). Caring for Convicts and the Community: A History of Parramatta Hospital. Westmead: Cumberland Area Health Service, 1988.

Terry Kass, Carol Liston and John McClymont. Eds. Parramatta: A Past Revealed. Parramatta: Parramatta City Council, 1996.

Notes