Floating Hospital

The Floating Hospital
The Emma Abbott, the first floating hospital vessel, in an 1876 painting
Geography
Location	New York, NY, United States
Links
Website	www.thefloatinghospital.org
Lists	Hospitals in the United States
Other links	Hospitals in New York

The Floating Hospital is a non-profit organization that provides healthcare services to medically underserved communities in New York City, both from its headquarters in Long Island City, Queens and from satellite offices in Brooklyn and The Bronx. Though today it is a land-based organization, the organization operated a succession of vessels which frequently cruised New York Harbor and nearby waterways , giving indigent children and their caregivers a respite from overcrowded tenements. While they were aboard, the Floating Hospital's staff of pediatricians, dentists, nurses, and social workers would provide healthcare services to children and health and nutrition education to their caregivers.

Despite its name, the organization does not operate a hospital in the usual sense. It has functioned as an outpatient facility from its earliest days, though it was affiliated with an acute care hospital prior to World War II. Presently, it is not affiliated with any other organization. The Floating Hospital for Children in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1894, was inspired by the Floating Hospital in New York but was always a separate organization. It became a land-based acute care hospital in the 1930s and later merged with Tufts Medical Center.

The Floating Hospital traces its origins to October 1866 as a series of charitable excursions first conducted by steamboat tycoon John Starin for the benefit of newsboys, war veterans, and the needy. In the summer of 1872, George F. Williams, a managing editor of the New York Times, witnessed a policeman forcing a group of newsboys in City Hall Park off the grass and onto the concrete walkways, which burned their feet. When Williams returned to his office the next day, he wrote an appeal to the Times' readership for money to charter a boat trip for the city's newsboys and bootblacks, so that they could be turned loose on grassy shores of nearby waterways.