Ottawa Civic Hospital
In light of recent events, it seems appropriate to turn my attention to the health care system available in Ottawa. Pictured here is the Ottawa Civic Hospital (not the one I was in), one of eight hospitals servicing the close to one million residents in the area.
Mayor Robert Fisher saw that, along with the Spanish flu and Typhus epidemics of 1918-19, there came a dire need for one –singular–large hospital to provide many essential services. This was a completely different train of thought regarding health care at the time. Ottawa had already three independent hospital facilities when Fisher proposed, via the Civic Hospital Act of 1919, that these three hospitals be purchased and shut-down to make way for one municipal-run hospital be built on the outskirts of the city (in anticipation of population growth). Once dubbed as "Fisher's Folly", this bright idea came known as "Fisher's Foresight", when the Ottawa Civic Hospital opened its doors in 1924 with 550 beds and a School of Nursing.
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