In 1937 Spalding sold its Isolation Hospital for £35. It had been built in 1896 at the cost of £340 with a contingency fund of £60 that was exceeded by £10 due to an improved roadway.
Its history shows a changing attitude to health care. It was built to accommodate just eight patients. In 1897 the local authority advertised for “a man and his wife without children not exceeding 50 years as caretaker.”
The reality is that if you caught a contagious disease you would be confined to this hospital but not necessarily looked after by anyone with medical training, but rather the caretaker and his wife!
The medical officer for the town Dr J.R. Munro worked to overturn this attitude, “The old idea that an Isolation Hospital is a place where patients suffering from an infectious disease can do the least harm to the community is out of date – it ought primarily to be a hospital where patients can be treated so that at the earliest moment they can resume their work with their health unimpaired. Secondarily, its function ought to be to restrict the number of cases so that as high a standard of health as possible may be maintained by the community.”
With this in mind he was fundamental in getting isolation facilities extended by a further 12 places being allocated in the nearby town of Bourne for Spalding residents to use. The hospital in Spalding was run by Donella Macleod, a nurse from Stornaway that offered her services to the town in 1914 when refugees and injured from the war were shipped to Spalding. Sadly her husband was killed by a car during black out conditions in 1918, she continued her service looking after the Isolation Hospital and its patients until its closure in 1936 when she retired with ill health, she died in 1961.
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