As celebrations continue for America’s 250th birthday this year, the country’s oldest hospital will become Philadelphia’s newest museum.
Pennsylvania Hospital was founded 25 years before the birth of the nation, and it continues to be on the cutting edge of medicine.
“We’re the first chartered hospital in the nation,” Stacey Peeples, the lead archivist and museum curator at the Pennsylvania Hospital Museum, said. “We have great fortune to turn 275 the same year that the country is turning 250 years old.”
Like so many firsts created by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, he founded Pennsylvania Hospital with Dr. Thomas Bond, who saw a special need.
“The mission of the hospital from the very beginning, laid out in 1751, is that we were to take care of the sick, poor and also the mentally ill,” Peeples said. “Before that, if you were sick or injured, you had to rely on hiring a physician.”
Behind the scaffolding in The Pine Building at Pennsylvania Hospital, eight rooms are being restored for the museum that will open as part of America’s 250th birthday, including the pharmacy.
The museum will also display historic medical artifacts like rare books from 1762, a preserved tumor from 1805, and surgical equipment, like scalpels and a tonsil guillotine.
Medicine has come a long way. In two and a half centuries, the Pennsylvania Hospital Museum will showcase the remarkable evolution from the early days to many of the modern breakthroughs.
The new Pennsylvania Hospital Museum will not impact any hospital functions. It will open to the public on May 8.
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