Valley Forge General Hospital

Valley Forge General Hospital is a former military hospital in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. The hospital was near both Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Valley Forge. It was the only United States Army General Hospital named for a place.

The hospital was built in 1942, and opened on Washington's Birthday in 1943 to care for the wounded of World War II. It became the largest military hospital in the United States. Eventually, the hospital had well over 3,000 patients and over 100 separate buildings. One feature of the hospital was its design of primarily two story buildings, interconnected by corridors. There were very long ramps leading from one floor to the other, to facilitate movement of wheelchairs and gurneys. The architecture was designed by Matthew Bookler.

By early 1944, Valley Forge General Hospital had been identified as one of two general hospitals—the other being Letterman General Hospital at the Presidio of San Francisco—which specialized in the treatment of patients who had suffered blinding eye injuries. The Army's goal was to get newly identified cases of blindness to one of those hospitals as soon as possible, and if the patient could not be moved, to send a representative from the hospital to the patient's location to begin coordinating care as soon as possible. In addition to physical treatment, the centers also focused on "social rehabilitation," helping the patients to adjust to their new condition before handing them over to the Veterans' Administration for further care—holding them past the point of "maximum medical benefit," in other words, in order to complete their social training.

By 1945, three dentists were assigned to Valley Forge after the Surgeon General discovered that their independent work had developed a new type of artificial eye which was described as "superior in every way to the current glass eyes." After perfecting their production techniques and teaching the staff at Valley Forge how to fabricate the eyes, the three dentists, Captain Stanley F. Erpf, Major Milton S. Wirtz, and Major Victor H. Dietz, were all transferred to other hospitals where they could further expand the number of people using their new techniques. They were also each awarded the Legion of Merit for their work, and published their procedure in the Bulletin of the U.S. Army Medical Department, further spreading knowledge of the procedure.

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