The Rio Tinto Company maintains in the capital, in San Andrés Street, a hospital established for the workmen who suffer injury in the course of their labours, and open besides to the English sick who come down from the mines and to the seamen who put in at the port of Huelva. The building was raised in 1884 at the Company’s sole charge, at a cost of £1,500; its foundation is recorded as the 25th of March, 1885.
It stands on rising ground at the northern limit of the town, girt about by low, undulating, vine-clad hills, some two hundred feet above the Odiel. The plan was the work of the Company’s own surgeon, Dr W. Alexander Mackay, who designed the house himself.
The want of such an establishment had been laid bare by the deplorable state of the Spanish Provincial Hospital, of which Dr Mackay, reporting to the Board of the Rio Tinto Company in 1883, wrote: “Its walls are lined with the germs of erysipelas and hospital gangrene. Medical and surgical cases are crowded together, so that it is not possible to pass between two beds without touching both. The amount of cubic feet of air per bed is one-third of the minimum allowed in modern hospitals. Small windows, placed near the roof, and clammy walls, complete the picture of a mediæval prison.”
The new hospital was conceived in deliberate answer to that picture. The administrative block was set between the medical and surgical wards, a corridor joining the centre to either side and opening, through a wide window, upon the garden. Green wooden persianas temper the summer glare; the ward windows reach so near the floor that a patient lying abed may look out upon his more fortunate fellow at work in the vineyards. Each patient is allowed fifteen hundred cubic feet of air, freely renewed; the wards stand a metre off the ground, and the offices — wash-house, mortuary and the dry-earth closets — are set well apart in a retired corner of the garden.
On the ground floor are twenty-five beds, reserved exclusively for the injured; there is a room for convalescents and a ward given over to surgery. An upper storey was afterwards added over the central block, at a further cost of £700, fitted for the medical patients, the two lower wards being thenceforth kept for surgical cases. Between two hundred and two hundred and fifty patients are received each year, and the hospital is graced with a fine garden.
It is right to record that, when cholera visited Andalucía in the autumn of 1885, the Company — at the instance of Dr J. S. Mackay, chief medical officer at Río Tinto and the surgeon’s elder brother — placed the hospital and its whole staff at the disposal of the Ayuntamiento of Huelva, and cases were received there in every stage of the disease. The mortality of fifty per cent. that prevailed throughout the peninsula was not abated in Huelva.
The patients are under the care of Miss Blackadder, a trained English nurse who has been matron since the house was built.
Staff of the establishment —
- Medical Director: Don José García López
- Surgeon and attendant of the sick: Dr Alexander Mackay
- Medical Assistant: Don Pedro Seras
- Practitioner: Don Antonio Bartolesi
The attentive care of the sick is carried out by the matron, Miss Blackadder, with two nurses, two maids for the general cleaning, a cook, and two errand-boys.
[A Huelva Gazette article based on original documents and sources of the epoch.]