Now, in a film created by the University of Cambridge, Dr Sarah Baylis looks at the lost history of the First Eastern, examining what life was like in this 'small city on the Backs', its impact on Cambridge and how it was possible that a building of such significance should have been so widely forgotten. It underlines the military hospital's central role in Cambridge as a site of profound individual and collective experience.
While the building of the hospital was underway on a former cricket field belonging to King's and Clare Colleges, patients being repatriated from Europe were housed in the Leys School and Trinity College. The completed hospital, a series of pre-fabricated wooden huts, had up to 1,700 beds, operating theatres and ancillary buildings, a Post Office, shop, cinema and other recreational facilities. The First Eastern's open air wards and its curative use of direct sunlight and saline baths in the treatment of war wounds attracted a great deal of public attention. Auxiliary hospitals – for convalescents and patients with venereal disease – were also built in the city and surrounding villages.
Watch the film and read the full story
Image: A ward in the First Eastern Hospital
Credit: Cambridgeshire Collection at the Cambridge Central Library
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
_____________________________________________
From the Front to the Backs: Story of the First Eastern Hospital
2 July 2014
One hundred years since the start of the First World War, few Cambridge residents are likely to be aware that the University Library stands on the site of a former military hospital. The First Eastern General, set up within days of the outbreak of the war, treated tens of thousands of returning casualties between 1914 and 1919.