The Western Infirmary was the University of Glasgow’s hospital from birth. When the university moved to Gilmorehill in 1870 — the story of the previous chapter’s pages — it left behind the Royal Infirmary that had trained its doctors for eighty years; the answer, opened in 1874 on the slope below the new Gilbert Scott buildings, was a teaching infirmary of its own for the booming West End.
Its wards promptly joined the front rank of British medicine. William Macewen, Lister’s greatest successor, worked here as Regius Professor from 1892, consolidating aseptic surgery and his pioneering operations on brain and bone; and in 1896 the Western’s George Beatson performed one of medicine’s great imaginative leaps — treating advanced breast cancer by removing the ovaries, on his hunch that the body’s own secretions could drive tumours. It worked, in the first patients, astonishingly; Beatson had discovered hormonal cancer therapy decades before hormones were named, and the west of Scotland’s cancer centre — the Beatson — carries his name today.
For its century and a bit, the Western was the West End’s own: byres of wards absorbing everything from Partick’s shipyard injuries to Byres Road’s appendixes, its nurses’ home and medical school woven into student Glasgow, its A&E the after-hours annex of a dozen university clubs. Generations of Glasgow doctors did their growing up on its rotations.
The NHS’s great consolidation ended it. As services concentrated on the vast new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital campus at Govan, the Western received its long farewell and closed in 2015, after 141 years; the university, its original parent, took the site back. The buildings have since given way to the campus’s westward expansion — teaching, research and innovation quarters rising where the wards stood, which is, at least, a keeping of the founding bargain: Gilmorehill and its hospital began together, and the hill inherited the ground.
The Western’s memorial is dispersed but mighty: in the Beatson’s name over cancer care, in Macewen’s surgery, and in the affection of a West End that still, out of habit, gives directions by a hospital that isn’t there.