Bruntsfield Hospital

Bruntsfield Hospital was an Edinburgh hospital which started in 1878 as a women's dispensary ( clinic) opened by the city's first female doctor, Sophia Jex-Blake. It soon added some beds for in-patients, and moved from a busy, central area to the more peaceful Bruntsfield before the turn of the century. Its name from 1885, Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children, continued in formal use into the 1930s, but before 1920 it started to be known as the Bruntsfield Hospital. For a few years, another of Scotland's pioneering female doctors, Elsie Inglis, was a consultant there. In 1948 the hospital was absorbed into the National Health Service (NHS); it closed in 1989.

In 1878 Jex-Blake opened the Edinburgh Provident Dispensary for Women and Children to offer advice and medicines to working-class patients, either subscribers or non-paying "charity" patients. At first she treated out-patients only, although from 1883 a few patients who needed rest were accommodated in her newly-bought Regency house, Bruntsfield Lodge, to which she also moved her private practice.

The dispensary became the Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children in 1885, the year when it opened a small ward for in-patients near the original premises. The annual report that year said that "the Provident system was being more and more used to the evident advantage of both patients and doctor".

When Jex-Blake retired and moved away in 1899, she left funds for trustees to buy or build a new hospital. In fact her own house was bought and fitted out by the hospital committee: a committee led by well-connected women active in various social reform projects, Flora Stevenson and Sarah Mair among them. The following year things were ready for patients to be transferred to the improved hospital.

In 1899 there was discussion about joining forces with Elsie Inglis and her Medical Women's Club, but Inglis set up a separate small charitable nursing home for maternity patients. In 1904 they moved to bigger premises which they called The Hospice, adding a dispensary, and maintaining links with the establishment at Bruntsfield, where Inglis was appointed senior consultant in 1905. Her partner in private practice was Jessie Macgregor, an ex-student of the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women who worked for some years at the Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children.

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