CultureNOW - Bulfinch Building at Massachusetts General Hospital: Peter Vanderwarker

Bulfinch Building at Massachusetts General Hospital

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"We see two kinds of hospital buildings in these photos. One is a humane, dignified work of architecture. The other, rising behind the first, is a pair of meaningless boxes.

The good building is the Bulfinch Pavilion, built in 1821 as the original Massachusetts General Hospital. The bad building is an MGH addition of 1968, comprising the Bigelow and Jackson towers of the Gray Building.

The original architect was Charles Bulfinch, designer of the State House and son of a physician. With its flat, smooth, sharply cut walls and unfluted Ionic columns, the pavilion is an exercise in the understated Federal style. To cut costs, the finish work on the Chelmsford granite was performed by inmates at the Charlestown State Prison – an earlier building also designed by Bulfinch and also made of Chelmsford granite.

When Bulfinch moved to Washington as Architect of the Capitol, he appointed a young architect named Alexander Parris to finish the hospital. Parris, in 1826, designed Boston’s Quincy Market, a work obviously influenced by this one.

Today, the Bulfinch Pavilion is best known as the site of the first important use of ether in surgery. That event took place in 1846 in the operating theater beneath the skylit dome at the center of the hospital Dr.
John Collins Warren removed a tumor from the jaw of Gilbert Abbott. Ever since, the room has been known as the Ether Dome. There’s also an Ether Monument in Boston’s Public Garden, a Victorian extravaganza atop which a Good Samaritan comforts a Stricken Youth. Mount Auburn Cemetery contains a monument to Dr. William T. G. Morton, the Needham dentist who administered the ‘stupefying
gas.’

MGH, like other hospitals, in recent decades regarded itself as a no-nonsense combination: a factory for processing patients and a dormitory for warehousing them. But research now shows that good environments help heal people. Hospitals are responding by aspiring, once again, to create architecture."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - The Bulfinch Pavilion," Boston Globe, 1996

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Location

55 Fruit Street
Boston, MA 02114
United States

Nearby Items

Nursing Sundial sculpture at MGH		771 feet
The Ether Dome		777 feet
Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital		835 feet
Lunder Building		973 feet
Liberty Hotel (Charles Street Jail)		0.3 miles
Cambridge Street		0.3 miles
Charles River Park		0.3 miles