Harrisburg Polyclinic Hospital

Prior to the advent of the Civil War, medicine was practiced in Harrisburg and Dauphin County, Pennsylvania by informally trained doctors who would travel among communities and farms to attend to the sick. Many had questionable qualifications and means of treating diseases. The establishment of the hospital at Camp Curtin, in what would become uptown Harrisburg, during the Civil War as well as several other temporary wartime “hospitals” throughout the city, served soldiers wounded in the field and those who contracted diseases while being mustered out into battle. Since the Camp was the largest deployment facility in both the North and the South through which over three-hundred-thousand troops passed, the provision of such elevated levels of care by doctors and citizens of Harrisburg positioned the city to create a permanent city general hospital. 

Just following the War, efforts were launched to seek an appropriation from the Pennsylvania General Assembly for the establishment of the hospital on the grounds of the County Almshouse (traditionally known as the “County Home” and later Dauphin Manor just east of the city on Paxton Street). While improvements were made to what had become squalid conditions at this facility, a hospital did not materialize. 

Meanwhile, questionable medical practices among certain local doctors generated an outcry within the profession to establish standards within a membership structure. Accordingly, the Dauphin County Medical Society was founded in 1866 in Harrisburg, only nineteen years after the founding of the American Medical Association and eighteen years after the Pennsylvania Medical Society, to help further enhance the quality of the practice of medicine in the community and to work to help establish educational and licensing standards which would evolve legislatively during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Seven years later, in 1873, a pressing need for a general hospital was fulfilled through the establishment of the Harrisburg Hospital in an old schoolhouse on Mulberry Street near South Front Street in Harrisburg. The Harrisburg Hospital would grow into areas contiguous to this location over the years to become a major medical facility, although no historic buildings remain. It was not until 1875 that the Pennsylvania legislature enacted the first medical doctor licensing statute. 

In order to meet the clear demand for an additional general hospital facility to serve the needs of an expanding city and metropolitan area, the Harrisburg Polyclinic Hospital was chartered in 1909 by a group of local doctors and businessmen. It was recognized that other Pennsylvania cities of equal or smaller size, including Johnstown, Wilkes-Barre, and Lancaster, at the time has least two charitable/general hospitals and that there was a growing trend away from attending to the sick at home. Cities typically had smaller urbanized townhouse dwellings for the industrial worker than their earlier agrarian-based counterparts, which limited space for in-home care. Also, women, in addition to men, were becoming absorbed into the workforce which limited the ability for home care giving. Due to the increasing number of urban indigent and a growth in the public support of charitable institutions, hospital care was becoming a community function, rather than a luxury for only those who could pay for their care. 

Although Harrisburg Polyclinic was founded in 1909, it was the result of World War I that precipitated the development of group medical practices leading to the better organization of pre-existing hospitals. Consistent with the development of group practices, the use of the word “poly”, meaning “many”, indicated the establishment of multiple clinics and departments which originally included, 1) Internal Medicine, 2) Ear, Nose, and Throat, 3) Neurology, 4) Obstetrics, 5) Surgery and Gynecology, 6) Genitourinary Disease, and 7) Anesthesiology. These departments reflected the medical developments of the period. For example, by 1900 in the United States successful operations using local anesthesia to remove cataracts were done rather than as previously by merely pushing the lens out of the way.  

Harrisburg Polyclinic Hospital, National Register of Historic Places. Accessed January 5th 2021. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/71995813.

Polyclinic Medical Center, Wikipedia. Accessed January 22nd 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyclinic_Medical_Center.