Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General or MGH) is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, Harvard University located in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. Massachusetts General Hospital houses the world's largest hospital-based research program, the Mass General Research Institute, with an annual research budget of more than $1.2 billion in 2021. It is the third-oldest general hospital in the United States with a patient capacity of 999 beds. Along with Brigham and Women's Hospital, Mass General is a founding member of Mass General Brigham, formerly known as Partners HealthCare, the largest healthcare provider in Massachusetts. It is currently ranked as the eighth-best hospital in the United States by U.S. News & World Report. History Founded in 1811, the original hospital was designed by the famous American architect Charles Bulfinch. It is the third-oldest general hospital in the United States; only Pennsylvania Hospital (1751) and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital's predecessor New York Hospital (1771) are older. John Warren, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at Harvard Medical School, spearheaded the move of the medical school to Boston. Warren's son, John Collins Warren, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh Medical School, along with James Jackson, led the efforts to start the Massachusetts General Hospital, which was initially proposed in 1810 by Rev. John Bartlett, the Chaplain of the Almshouse in Boston. Because all those who had sufficient money were cared for at home, Massachusetts General Hospital, like most hospitals that were founded in the 19th century, was intended to care for the poor. A 30-year-old sailor was the first patient admitted to the hospital on September 3, 1821. During the mid-to-late 19th century, Harvard Medical School was located adjacent to Massachusetts General Hospital. Walter J. Dodd established the radiology department at the hospital. From just after the discovery of x-rays in 1895, until his early death in 1916 from metastatic cancer caused by multiple radiation cancers he oversaw the radiology department. He also underwent over 50 surgical procedures at the hospital to treat his radiation injuries, from skin grafts to amputations. The first American hospital social workers were based in the hospital.<ref>Beder, J. (2006). Hospital Social Work: The interface of medicine and caring... Routledge: New York</ref> The hospital's work with developing specialized computer software systems for medical use in the 1960s led to the development of the MUMPS programming language, which stands for "Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System," an important programming language and database system heavily used in medical applications such as patient records and billing. A major patient database system called File Manager, which was developed by the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans' Affairs), was created using this language. Early use of anesthesia It was in the Ether Dome of MGH in , that a local dentist, William Thomas Green Morton, was invited to perform a public demonstration of the administration of inhaled ether to produce insensibility to pain during surgery. Several years prior, Dr. Crawford Long of Danielsville, Georgia had given ether for surgery,