Pennsylvania Hospital

Pennsylvania Hospital was the first — the nation's first chartered hospital, founded in 1751 when Dr. Thomas Bond wanted a place to care for Philadelphia's sick poor and 'lunaticks,' and Benjamin Franklin figured out how to pay for it. Franklin's scheme to the Assembly was elegant: the hospital's supporters would raise £2,000 privately if the Assembly matched it — the matching-funds model he ran knowing the pledges were already in hand. The charter passed May 11, 1751; the Pine Building at Eighth and Pine opened in 1756 on what was then the city's rural edge.

The hospital made the American firsts — the first surgical amphitheater, where students watched operations under the skylight; the first medical library; the earliest institutional care for mental illness, with the 'lunaticks' in the basement cells the era thought humane. The building's center ward and wings organized hospital architecture in America; the medicinal herb garden outside served the pharmacy before pharmacies.

It has been a hospital continuously for 270 years — through the Revolution (British and American wounded), the yellow fever epidemics, the Civil War, and into the Penn Medicine system — the Pine Building preserved inside the modern complex as the National Historic Landmark the whole enterprise grew around.

Pennsylvania Hospital is the archive's first file — Franklin and Bond's 1751 hospital for the sick poor, home of America's first surgical amphitheater and medical library, still operating on the same ground after 270 years.