Niagara Falls General Hospital

When the City of Niagara Falls was incorporated in 1904, coming together from the towns of Clifton and Drummondville, it had no dedicated hospital. The hospitals in St. Catharines, Hamilton, and across the border could be accessed by citizens of Niagara Falls, but in the case of an emergency they were not close enough. Automobiles weren't common yet, and neither were reliable paved roads between such spread-out towns. Ambulances were drawn by horse and carriage and, as they didn't have a hospital to go to, functioned mostly to take patients to the train for transport elsewhere. House calls were the order of the day.

This invariably led to a sparse patchwork of available medical care. Niagara Falls quickly became a town of workplace accidents due to the construction and operation of two different hydro power plants, and yet there was very little in the way of reliable medical treatment. Often individual doctors had to do their best with tents, makeshift first aid rooms, or home visits with treatment taking place on kitchen tables using hot water for sterilization.

Niagara Falls General Hospital came into being in 1907, after a few failed attempts at fundraising (Fig. 1, the Niagara Falls General Hospital building c. 1909) (Fig 2, the Niagara Falls General Hospital building again c.1920s). A Hospital Board was formed, opting for five acres of farmland on Jepson Street for a new construction, rather than choosing from a selection of old houses that were offered as cheap alternatives.

What finally provided most of the funding used for furnishings and equipment was a large summer fundraiser styled as a "Fair of Nations" which was held behind the old River Road skating rink in 1906, as well as several more fundraisers in later years to keep up funding (Fig 3, photo of an International Carnival in 1911 featuring an ‘aid the hospital’ tent). A two-storey brick building, the hospital had a staff of nine doctors to start, with 20 beds for patients. This went up to 134 beds and then 174 after multiple upgrades were made over its 47-year tenure. The site had no parking lot, since vehicles were not common at the time of its building, but it did have a horse hitching post not only for visitors but for ambulances as well.

The hospital had a staff of nurses gathered from graduates of other nearby hospitals. Nurse training was not yet centralized at the collegiate level in 1907. Usually individual hospitals had their own 6-month training programs, with lectures given by doctors on subjects such as anatomy, physiology, and obstetrics. After sourcing nurses from other institutions Niagara General joined this trend by 1912 and constructed a nurses’ residence just around the corner on Third Avenue (Fig. 4, the first Nurses’ residence). Nurses would live here during their training, using a connecting tunnel walkway to walk to work, and usually worked 12-hour days, 6 days a week for a salary of $5.00 per day, plus a single free meal.

As Ontario's government-run healthcare plan didn't begin until 1966, doctors in 1907 charged patients for their services. Though there was a payment system set up by the Ontario Medical Association to ensure consistency, there was also much more flexibility in payment than we might see today. Bartering and trade wasn't uncommon, with people arranging to pay doctors with services like haircuts or even with livestock; chickens, ducks, and entire cows were sometimes offered as payment, and during the Great Depression doctors all over the country became accustomed to lowering their prices or not collecting their full fee so as to continue to offer services to those in need.