Glasgow’s Fever Hospitals

In the crowded tenements of Victorian Glasgow, infectious diseases spread with terrifying speed. Typhus, smallpox, scarlet fever, measles and diphtheria swept through the closes, and cholera returned again and again. One of the city’s most important responses was to build fever hospitals, where people with infectious diseases could be isolated and nursed away from their families and neighbours. For more than a century Belvidere in the East End and Ruchill in the north of the city were among the busiest hospitals in Scotland.

The first fever hospital

Glasgow’s first municipal fever hospital opened in 1865 on Kennedy Street in Townhead, during an epidemic of typhus. It was meant to be temporary and had room for 136 patients. In 1869 another typhus epidemic forced the hospital, by then known as the Parliamentary Road hospital, to expand to 250 beds, and the following year an outbreak of relapsing fever showed that even this was not enough.

These hospitals were part of a broader movement. Glasgow appointed its first medical officer of health in 1863, and under officers such as James Burn Russell the city began to collect statistics, inspect housing and isolate the sick, as described on our public health reforms page.

Belvidere

In 1870 the city bought the 33-acre Belvidere estate, south of London Road near Parkhead and beside the Clyde, for £17,000, to create a hospital for fevers and smallpox. Because the need was so urgent, the first patients were housed in temporary wooden pavilions, the first of which opened on 19 December 1870. A permanent smallpox hospital with 150 beds opened on 5 December 1877.

Belvidere dealt with the full range of infectious diseases. In 1902 alone it admitted 1,730 smallpox patients, the highest number in a single year in Glasgow’s history, during an epidemic that killed hundreds. In 1900 it also treated patients during an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city, the last cases of which were recorded in 1911. After plague broke out, every nurse who worked at Belvidere received a gold medal.

Ruchill

When Glasgow’s boundaries were extended in 1891 to take in Maryhill and Ruchill, the city bought land there for a new park and for a second fever hospital. Ruchill Hospital was designed by the city engineer, Alexander McDonald, who also designed the People’s Palace, in red brick and sandstone. Work began in 1895, and the hospital was opened by Princess Christian on 13 June 1900, at a cost of about £250,000.

Ruchill was built on the pavilion plan, with sixteen separate ward blocks so that patients with different diseases could be kept apart, and it had 440 beds at first and about 1,000 by 1948. Its centrepiece was a tall water tower, needed because of the height of the site, which became a landmark across the north of the city.

The fever nurses

Working in a fever hospital was dangerous. Between 1894 and 1909, 29 nurses and other staff at Belvidere died, 17 of them from enteric fever caught from their patients. Belvidere’s matron, Amelia Sinclair, who ran its nursing from 1875 until 1906, was credited with improving the education and wellbeing of fever nurses. In 1912 a national training and certification scheme for fever nurses was introduced, recognising fever nursing as a skilled specialism.

New diseases, new roles

Vaccination, antibiotics and better housing gradually reduced the old epidemics, and the fever hospitals adapted. Belvidere opened a respiratory unit in 1954, a polio unit in 1957 and a maternity unit in 1962, and later became a hospital for older people. Ruchill hosted research into respiratory infections, and the city’s mass X-ray campaign against tuberculosis in 1957 helped to reduce the number of patients needing beds.

In the 1980s Ruchill took on a new and urgent role as the main Glasgow hospital for people with HIV. It opened HIV counselling clinics in 1986 and in 1987 Scotland’s first needle exchange, part of a public health response that helped to limit the spread of the virus among people who injected drugs.

Closure and what remains

Ruchill closed in 1998, when its services moved to the new Brownlee Centre at Gartnavel, and Belvidere closed in 1999. Most of the buildings at both sites were demolished, and new housing has been built on them. At Belvidere almost nothing remains. At Ruchill the red brick water tower, listed at Category A, survives as a reminder of the hospitals that once protected the city from its deadliest diseases. The city’s experience of later pandemics is told on our Spanish flu and Covid pages.

Timeline