St Vincent's Hospital 150 years
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
9 Sep 2007
Not many people remember Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine, but in the 1920s and 1930s they gave St Vincent’s hospital in Darlinghurst plenty of business.
Tilly Devine ran Sydney’s prostitutes. She was no lady, but she could obviously turn on the charm. When a young police recruit in Darlinghurst first met her he wondered whether she was one of the nuns at the hospital.
Kate Leigh’s business was sly-grog. Turf wars between her gang and Tilly Devine’s men brought many with unexplained gunshot and knife wounds into St Vincent’s casualty department most weekends. In 1927, 22 razor attack victims were treated in one month alone.
At one stage Leigh and Devine were both in St Vincent’s and in the same ward, keeping knives and pistols under their pillows. But the Sisters of Charity who ran the hospital were more than able to sort them out.
St Vincent’s is a Sydney institution, and this year it celebrates the 150th anniversary of its founding.
The hospital was established by Mother Baptist de Lacy, who was one of the first of the Sisters of Charity to arrive in New South Wales in 1838. The hospital’s mission was to care for the poor who were sick without any charge.
Then as now no distinction based on religion was made when admitting patients, and the hospital was supported by donations of cash and kind from Catholics, Protestants and Jews.
One consequence was that Protestant bibles were distributed to the wards in the early days. Their removal caused a minor scandal. Mother de Lacy was sacked, causing the hospital’s only doctor to resign in protest.
A great deal of the hospital’s work came from diseases such as smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, and polio. These were common diseases before immunisation, a reminder of the blessings of modern medicine.
The Sisters of Charity are one of the great orders of religious women in the Catholic Church, and the hospital was headed for most of its history by some great women.
Mother Gertrude Healy served for two periods as Rectress, including during the influenza epidemic after World War One, which saw 27,000 patients admitted and another 70,000 treated as outpatients.
She was a great builder, and like her successors Mother Cuthbert Tyler, Mother Clement Stapleton, and Mother Stephanie Hayden, oversaw an expansion of the hospital’s operations into new areas.
I was a patient in St Vincent’s during my recent hip-replacement and was privileged to celebrate its sesqui-centenary Mass – without a walking stick – at the end of last month.
Pope Pius XII presented the hospital with a jewelled chalice for its centenary in 1957, and Pope Benedict sent a beautiful message of congratulations for the half-way mark to its second century.
St Vincent’s research, care, and witness to the healing mission of Jesus continue to make it one of Australia’s leading hospitals.
